The Stakes of Democracy in South-East Asia (RLE Modern East and South East Asia) by H. J. van Mook

Author:H. J. van Mook [Mook, H. J. van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138901599
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Nationalist Revolt

THE PROSPERITY sphere lay in shivers. The once busy ports were silted up and full of wreckage. The roads were deserted and often reduced to strings of potholes. Railroads had stopped or were irregularly run with ramshackle and dirty rolling stock. Production had fallen very low; most estates and factories were closed; famine and near-famine were widespread, even in countries that used to have a considerable surplus of foodstuffs. Trade was dead but for the vicious doings of the black marketeers. Whole cities were destroyed by Allied bombing or Japanese destructiveness; others were in a dreary state of disrepair, with the weeds and the wild grass covering the gardens, the squares, and the sides of the streets. An atmosphere of sullen resentment, sometimes bordering on despair, hung over these once lively and happy regions. Only in the rural villages the unceasing industry of the peasant kept up a semblance of the old prosperity; but even there many were hungry in the lean season and everybody went in rags. The monetary system had ceased to function almost everywhere.

The Japanese had left little of the former well-appointed and delicately balanced economic machinery in working order. And we must not forget that only through the continuous and smooth operation of this machinery had the Southeast Asiatic countries been capable of providing their crowded millions with the essentials of life and of equipping themselves with the modern conveniences of lighting, transport, and communications. An average yearly export of 6 to 7 U.S. dollars per head, or $25 to $35 per family, meant much in a region where the average yearly income per family did not rise above $100 and often remained below that level.1 A constant care for and improvement of production for the home market and of the apparatus of distribution perhaps meant still more. Unless all this could be restored to a reasonable degree, the general decline would inevitably continue and the gloomy prospect of decay, distress, and dearth could not be relieved.

It will most probably be impossible for many years to estimate the cost in lives and misery of these years of occupation and postwar turbulence. For the present it seems out of the question to organize a census of even very modest reliability. The abundance of nature and the retiring disposition of the people cover many sores that would be glaringly conspicuous in the West. But in certain cases we get a glimpse of the terrible truth and find that, for instance, the population of the island of Madura (northeast of Java) has diminished by a third of its original 2.5 million. Only occasionally has the deterioration taken the aspect of a catastrophe, with people found dying along the streets, on the roads, and in the fields. Generally it is less spectacular: a shortening of life, an increase of infant mortality, a spread of epidemics and deficiency diseases, a progressive lowering of vitality—but all together an amount of human suffering that hardly bears summing up.2

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