ABSTRACT
By 1949, after more than three years of fighting, West Java had become crowded. When the Divisi Siliwangi of the Indonesian Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, tni) slowly returned to its ‘pockets’ at the end of its famed ‘Long March’ from the vicinity of Yogyakarta, they encountered no less than two authorities vying for the people’s attention. To begin with, the still-active Dutch army was propping up a quasi-autonomous statelet called the Pasundan State, which was an outpost of the Dutch 1946 federalization project. There was also Darul Islam (di), an armed Islamist movement, which had turned against the Republic, thereby ‘[betraying] the common struggle against the colonial army’ according to the Republic. The Darul Islam had made inroads in West Java after the tni had been forced to leave the province as part of the Renville Agreement signed in January 1948.
