Jakarta. In August of 1944, Professor Achmad Mochtar
was director of the Nobel Prize-winning Eijkman Institute in Jakarta and vice
rector of the prestigious school of medicine next door. These titles of respect
and authority, however, did not protect Mochtar from the brutality of the
Japanese occupation. On July 3, 1945, the Japanese army took Mochtar to their execution ground
at Ancol, North Jakarta, and beheaded him. Historians refer to this killing and
the events leading to it as the “Mochtar affair.”
The defining event of that affair occurred
at a transit camp for slave laborers, or romusha, at Klender, just outside of
Jakarta, in early August 1944. Within a week of receiving routine vaccination
against cholera, typhus and dysentery, 900 romusha all developed the contorted
posture, clenched fingers and toes, and the sardonic smile of acute tetanus.
Within a couple of days of onset of symptoms, all of the injected romusha
suffered the agonizing death of strangulation by tetanus.
Post-mortem tissue samples taken from 90
of the victims were analyzed in Mochtar’s bacteriology laboratory at the
Eijkman Institute. Mochtar’s report confirmed the romusha had died of tetanus
poisoning – the vaccine administered to them contained the purified toxin but
the not the bacterium responsible for tetanus, Clostridium tetani. The vaccine
came from the former Pasteur Institute at Bandung. The Japanese army had seized
that facility in 1942 and its medical men (very probably members of the
notorious Unit 731) operated it.
Romusha
Mochtar’s dutiful and honest report of the
event at Klender posed a very serious political problem for the Japanese. The
romusha camp at Klender was a physical piece of the propaganda that drove the
supposedly voluntary romusha labor program. Nationalist leaders promoted
enlisting as a patriotic duty in support of the freedom and independence of
Indonesia. At transit camps like the one at Klender, cohorts of romusha
conscripts had been treated humanely, housed decently, fed well, and provided
expert medical care by Indonesian doctors. History reveals this treatment as a
cruel ruse: once the romusha sailed over the horizon for distant worksites,
their Japanese keepers provided only ceaseless work, grossly inadequate
rations, no medical care whatsoever, and summary execution for insubordination,
incapacity for work, theft or attempted escape. Most would not survive.
No one knows how many perished, but at
least four million young men on Java were taken away and somewhere between 50
percent and 80 percent were unaccounted for and presumed dead. The Japanese
managed the romusha like human livestock, where the flock sees only a caring
herder at places like Klender. The butchery could only occur out of sight of
the flock to avoid grasp of their own fate. The 900 romusha corpses at Klender
thus presented the Japanese with a very serious threat to the illusion of
beneficence for the romusha and Indonesians – the flock had glimpsed the
abattoir.
Conspiracy and torture
The Japanese investigated the event at
Klender for two months before making arrests. In early October 1944, they
arrested and imprisoned almost the entire Indonesian scientific staff of the
Eijkman Institute, along with three Indonesian doctors from the municipal
health service who had administered the vaccines. The Japanese asserted that
Mochtar and his staff had sabotaged the vaccines used at Klender. The Kenpeitai
– Japan’s equivalent of the Nazi SS or Gestapo – took them away to the prison
next to the National Museum on what is today Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat. The
building still stands today.
During the rest of October, all of
November, and much of December, the prisoners repeatedly suffered brutal and
sadistic torture at the hands of their Kenpeitai captors. On Dec. 9, the
Japanese killed one of the doctors under particularly savage torture and
paraded his mutilated remains before the other prisoners. That doctor’s corpse
was completely emaciated and bald (as a consequence of infection by mites in
the filthy prison), and his face had been beaten beyond recognition. The
doctor’s entire body bore the marks of many dozens of cigarette burns, and the
flesh of his legs had been splayed open from buttocks to ankles. His family
receiving the corpse had to clean away the maggots that had taken up residence
in the wounds. The Japanese worked to have the Eijkman scientists confess to
placing purified tetanus toxin in the vaccines used at Klender. Until that
first death, they had not succeeded.
Sacrifice
A few days later, we know from witness
testimony, Mochtar managed to communicate to his fellow prisoners that they
would soon be freed. He also expressed that he would not survive. Within a few
weeks all the Eijkman staff except Mochtar had been released and were not
further molested. The health service doctors were transferred to other prisons,
and one of them later died at Cipinang prison of the wounds inflicted on him by
the Kenpeitai. Mochtar had bartered his signature on a confession of murdering
the 900 romusha in exchange for the liberty of his colleagues and subordinates.
The Japanese would wait six months before
finally executing Mochtar for this alleged crime. They would likely have spared
Mochtar if they had perceived a future in Indonesia as its colonial masters –
as was their aim with victory in the Pacific War. But by early July 1945 it had
become crystal clear that they had no such prospects; as the Americans closed
in on Tokyo, the Japanese executed Mochtar to protect themselves from war
tribunal justice for the massacre at Klender. Mochtar’s confession and his
inability to retract it indeed allowed those who actually killed the romusha to
escape justice. They got off scot free at the cost of Mochtar’s honor, dignity,
legacy and life.
Unraveling the deceit
The old Eijkman Institute declined after
the trauma of the Mochtar affair and the new war against the Dutch for
Indonesian independence (1945-1949). It was formally closed in 1965 as an
unwanted relic of colonialism. It would stay closed for the three decades that
followed, until Suharto’s minister for research and technology, B.J. Habibie,
inspired by Prof. Sangkot Marzuki (then at Monash University in Melbourne),
restored the Eijkman Institute name and historic building as a modern
laboratory of molecular biology. This was done and the Eijkman Institute for
Molecular Biology opened in 1995. Sangkot returned to his motherland and became
its director.
Sangkot told me the story of Mochtar not
long after I joined him there in 2006. Two years later, I assigned one of my
research students to write an essay on the history of the Eijkman Institute as
a means to improve her written English. She glossed over the war years and
complained that no available resource expressed anything of that period.
Knowing Mochtar’s story and scratching a bit below the surface, some facts
began to emerge. An obsession to more fully understand what happened developed,
and within a year a full-scale excavation of the history was underway. Sangkot
joined me in assembling the pieces of this puzzle into a rational, coherent,
and evidence-based explanation for what actually occurred at the romusha
transit camp at Klender.
Evidence and testimony
Many of the survivors of the Mochtar
affair left us chilling memoirs of their barbaric treatment in that prison. Dr.
Ali Hanafiah published “Drama Kedoktoran Terbesar” (“Biggest Drama in
Medicine”) in 1976. Hanafiah was not only Mochtar’s colleague at the Eijkman
Institute but also his brother-in-law: Hanafiah’s older sister, Siti Hasnah,
was Mochtar’s wife. Hanafiah’s surviving children, Taty and Asikin, provided
rich details about life with the Mochtars in the happy period before the
occupation. The head of the municipal health service in 1944, Dr. Marzoeki, put
his experiences to paper soon after being released on Aug. 18, 1945. His
daughter, Latifah Kodijat-Marzoeki put those recollections in her privately
published memoir, “My Parents.” Finally, there was Mochtar’s young laboratory
technician, Nani Kusumasudjana, 23 years old in 1944 and still alive today. The
Kenpeitai arrested her and she resided in that hellish prison for a month
during October and November 1944. Her verbal testimony and unpublished memoir
(penned in 1987) between 2010 and 2014 shed a great deal of light on the
Mochtar affair.
A seemingly insignificant reference to an
Australian newspaper article (“Tetanus Test on Natives,” Daily Telegraph,
March 22, 1951) appeared in Hanafiah’s published memoir. The very brief
article, just a snippet, mentioned the war tribunal of a Japanese navy doctor
for the deaths of 15 condemned Indonesian prisoners in a tetanus experiment in
Surabaya in February 1945. The tribunal took place under Australian military
authority in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, and the Australian National
Archive provided us with the full 400-page transcript and documentation of that
trial. This effectively revealed to us what had occurred at Klender in August
1944.
The Experiment at Surabaya
The Japanese navy men in Surabaya in 1945
explained at their murder trial in 1951 that they had tried to manufacture a
vaccine for tetanus. The doctors at Surabaya were responsible for the health
and military readiness of more than 100,000 Japanese troops scattered among
Indonesia’s outer islands. Those troops anticipated Allied amphibious assaults
of scale and had been ordered to resist by all means available. Tetanus is a
deadly threat to wounded soldiers, so the military doctors made their vaccine
and put it into 17 Indonesians condemned to execution for the murder of a
Japanese officer in Lombok and being held at a prison in Surabaya. The
prisoners remained healthy after two vaccinations, but the doctors required
certainty that their vaccine actually prevented tetanus. So they purified the
tetanus toxin and injected it into the prisoners. They did not expect their
human guinea pigs to die – they expected the vaccine would protect them.
Despite heroic efforts to save the prisoners, only two survived. (They were
returned to prison and promptly executed.)
According to the Japanese navy men, the
imminent threat of Allied invasion and heavy combat compelled them to make the
vaccine and immediately develop proof that it actually worked. Injecting the
vaccinated prisoners with toxin, they explained, was the only way to prove that
quickly. The navy men also detailed their legal anxiety in doing so, knowing
that such an experiment was criminal. Nonetheless, the Japanese military
lawyers reluctantly granted the medical men access to the prisoners, accepting
the military strategic urgency of their endeavors and their assurances that no
harm would come to the prisoners. The navy medical men also described their
futile efforts to solve the problem by obtaining tetanus prevention products
from the Japanese army vaccine production facility in Bandung: the army had no
such products to offer. In light of the event in Klender six months earlier,
that fact was damning of the army medical men at the former Pasteur Institute.
The experiment at Klender
Despite offering very large stocks of
other vaccines to the navy men from Surabaya, the army men in Bandung had
nothing for tetanus prevention. It is inconceivable that the Japanese at the
former Pasteur Institute, who had vastly greater expertise and facilities for
vaccine manufacture, would have been doing nothing to solve their own urgent
tetanus prevention problem for the army troops ordered to defend Java. The
Japanese in Bandung were empty-handed when the navy men from Surabaya requested
tetanus prevention products. Why? It certainly was not inadequate expertise,
poor facilities or a lack of commitment to that crucial task. A failed
experiment in Klender, like the one in Surabaya, and the calamitous political
consequences of it, is the most rational explanation for the army men having
nothing to offer. They would not have been able to correct the failed vaccine
in Klender with more human guinea pig experiments.
We know that the Indonesian doctors who
administered the vaccines in Klender had been ordered not to bring their own
vaccine stocks. Instead, those would be waiting for them at the transit camp.
They vaccinated those romusha using the ampoules from Bandung. We also know
those ampoules contained purified tetanus toxin, a fact that could not be
reconciled to any means but deliberate placement – a detailed technical study
of the process of tetanus vaccine production ruled out the possibility of an
industrial accident. These facts, taken with the actions of the Japanese
medical men in both Surabaya and Bandung all align with medical experimentation
as the cause of the romusha deaths.
Justice
The Japanese did not notify Mochtar’s
family of his execution. Certainty of his death dawned only slowly with his
failure to reappear after the defeat of the Japanese. Certainty of his
innocence would dawn even more slowly. Even as late as 1965, Sukarno denounced
Mochtar as guilty of mass murder. However, others like Mochtar’s friend
Mohammad Hatta not only repeatedly appealed to the Japanese to spare Mochtar,
he also consistently protested his innocence in the decades that followed.
The events comprising the Mochtar affair
summarized here exonerate Mochtar. He killed no one and he sacrificed himself
to save his fellow scientists. The Japanese deflected blame for the calamitous
consequences of their selfish actions, took his life and tossed his corpse onto
the pile of rotting bones and flesh of the hundreds of others they had murdered
at Ancol.
In June 2010, with the help of the Dutch
National War Archive in Amsterdam, we located the site where Mochtar had been
killed and buried. A memorial service was planned for the 65th anniversary of
his death a month later. That service, attended by his surviving family
members, friends and the scientists from the modern Eijkman Institute, honored
Achmad Mochtar’s life and his sacrifice. The revealed truth of what happened at
Klender restored Mochtar’s dignity, honor and legacy. The long silent injustice
of his murder by execution at last ended.
J. Kevin Baird is head of the
Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit at the Eijkman Institute of Molecular
Biology in Jakarta. He is co-author with Sangkot Marzuki of “War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia: A Case of
Murder by Medicine” (Potomac Books, 2015). (Photo courtesy of Taty
Hanafiah D. Uzar)
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Rōmusha (労務者 ?) is a Japanese language word for "laborer",
but has come to specifically denote forced laborers during the Japanese
occupation of Indonesia in World War II. The U.S. Library of Congress
estimates that in Java, between four to
10 million rōmusha were forced to work by the Japanese military,[1] many of whom toiled under harsh
conditions and either died or were stranded far from home. However, the term
was not closely defined by either the Japanese or the Allies and
the numbers stated sometimes encompasses both the kinrōhōshi
unpaid laborers, as well as native auxiliary forces, such as troops of the PETA and voluntary transmigrants
to other islands in Indonesia.[2]
The rōmusha were paid conscripted laborers,
mobilized in Sumatra and eastern Indonesia
as well as Java. Some ten percent were women.[2] Their tenures of service ranged from
one day to the time required to complete a specific project. The types of work
required were very diverse, ranging from light housekeeping work to heavy
construction. As a general rule, the rōmusha were mobilized within each regency
and were able to walk to work from home. However, for very large construction
projects, the rōmusha could be sent to other regencies. When their
specified period was up, they were returned home and replaced with new workers.[2] However, some were sent away from
Indonesia to other parts other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. There
included some 270,000 Javanese laborers,
of whom only 52,000 were repatriated to Java meaning that there was a death
rate of 80%.
The practice of unpaid Corvée labor had been common during colonial
period Netherlands East
Indies. Although the fact that rōmusha were paid was an
improvement, their wages failed to keep pace with inflation, and they were
often forced to work under hazardous conditions with inadequate food, shelter
or medical case. The general Japanese treatment of laborers was very bad. The rōmusha
were supplemented by true unpaid laborers, the kinrōhōshi, who performed
mostly menial labor. The kinrōhōshi were recruited for a shorter
duration than the rōmusha via tonarigumi neighborhood associations and were
theoretically voluntary, although considerable social coercion was applied to
"volunteer" as a show of loyalty to the Japanese cause. In 1944, the
number of kinrōhōshi in Java was around 200,000 people.[2] The brutality of the Romusha and other
forced labor systems was a key reason for the mass death rates among
Indonesians under the Japanese occupation. A later UN report stated that four
million people died in Indonesia as a result of the Japanese occupation.[3] About 2.4 million people died in Java
from famine during 1944–45.[4]
From 1944, PETA also made use of thousands of rōmusha
for the construction of military facilities, and in economic projects to help
make Java more self-supporting in face of Allied blockades.[2]
The Japanese military made very extensive use of such
forced labor during the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway during 1942–43 and the Pakan Baroe Railway on Sumatra in 1943–45.[5] The death rate among rōmusha,
from atrocities, starvation diet, and disease far outstripped the death rate
among Allied prisoners of war. About half the forced laborers engaged on the
railroad construction died.
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