The Proclamation of Indonesian Independence

On 17 August 1945, two days after the surrender of Japan ended its wartime occupation of the Dutch East Indies and in the brief vacuum before the Dutch could return, the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, reading a short declaration before a modest house in Jakarta and raising a simple red-and-white flag. The proclamation opened a four-year national revolution and war against the Dutch, who fought to reclaim their colony until international pressure and Indonesian resistance forced them to recognise Indonesian sovereignty in 1949. The new republic, stretching across thousands of islands, became the most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world. Its independence was not founded as an Islamic state but on an inclusive nationalist basis, the Pancasila, yet the great Muslim organisations of the archipelago, with their tens of millions of members, were central to the national movement and to the life of the new country, and Indonesia's emergence was a landmark of the post-war decolonisation that brought independence to much of the Muslim world. This scene depicts the founding moment, the reading of the proclamation and the raising of the homemade flag before the house in Jakarta in 1945, the becak and bicycles of the tropical city around it.