“Red or Green Merdeka” is the comparative historiographical framework developed by the Dutch historian Henri J. H. Alers in his 1956 study Om een rode of groene Merdeka: Tien jaren binnenlandse politiek Indonesië, 1943–1953, in which he treats the Indonesian revolution as unfolding along two parallel and structurally analogous tracks — a “red,” urban, and ultimately communist-inflected track centred on Java and Sukarno, and a “green,” rural, and Islamic track whose clearest and most fully realised instance, in Alers’s account, is Atjeh under Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh.
The core comparison
Alers argues that both the “red” nationalist-communist movement on Java and the “green” Islamic movement in Atjeh drew their revolutionary energy from the same underlying social antagonism — the feudal or traditional-authority class against its self-styled representatives of the people — but that Atjeh’s Islamic character gave its revolution both a narrower geographical scope and, paradoxically, a sharper, less-diluted expression than its Javanese counterpart. He writes that Sukarno and Daoed Beureuh, “each over the heads of the Japanese administrators,” called forth a fanatical psychosis directed against the established feudal order; Sukarno’s was necessarily “red” because it embraced the whole of Java and could draw on no other available idiom, while Daoed Beureuh’s was necessarily “green,” both because it was confined to Atjeh and because the Japanese occupiers openly courted Islam as a political instrument, unlike anything they risked tolerating from Sukarno’s broader synthesis.
Alers’s key claim about Atjeh: no “city,” no “red”
Central to Alers’s argument is his observation that the antagonism between Ulama and Uleëbalang in Atjeh — unlike the equivalent tension elsewhere in Indonesia — never expresses itself in the vocabulary of “freedom” (vrijheid), because Atjeh, in his reading, still barely knows the city as a “liberating instrument.” Where the factor of urbanisation enters a society’s revolutionary politics, Alers argues, the “red”–“green” distinction as such first becomes meaningful; without it, the contest remains one purely between Petrus and Nero, Marx and Nietzsche — that is, a contest of authority rather than of ideology in the modern sense.
The comparative chronology
Alers sets out an explicit side-by-side chronology of Java and Atjeh to argue that, phase for phase, Atjeh’s political development ran on a faster clock than Java’s:
| Java (urban-red) | Atjeh (rural-green) |
|---|---|
| End of the [[Java War | Java War]], 1830 |
| Political penetration of the moderate [[Moehammadijah | Muhammadiyah]] movement, 1908 |
| Beginning of the organised anti-authority “red” political current, marked by the P.K.I.–S.I. schism, 1921 | Beginning of the organised anti-authority “green” religious-political current, marked by the founding of the [[Poesa |
| Beginning of the social revolution under “red” directives, 17 August 1945 | Beginning of the social revolution under “green” directives, December 1945 |
Application to the events of 1953
Alers extends the same framework to the 1953 rebellion, describing the Republic’s simultaneous confrontation with insurgencies in West Java, South Celebes, and Atjeh as a “threefold Islamic uprising,” and noting the irony that Colonel Simbolon — tasked with reconquering “green” Atjeh for the Republic — had himself declared for “green” during the 17 October 1952 controversy on Java. He also frames the political struggle between Poesa, “red” central-government unitarism, and the surviving Uleëbalang class’s Badan Keinsjafan Rakjat as replaying, within Atjeh alone, the same three-cornered contest of republican, feudal-federalist, and central-unifying forces that Alers traces across Indonesia as a whole.
See Also
- Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh
- Soekarno
- Poesa
- Ulama–Uleëbalang social revolution in Atjeh (1945–1946)
- Atjèh’s accession to the Negara Islam Indonesia (1953)
- Aceh War
- 1945
- 1953
Source
Om een rode of groene Merdeka: Tien jaren binnenlandse politiek Indonesië, 1943–1953, by Henri J. H. Alers (Eindhoven: Uitgeverij Vulkaan, 1956), title and “Over de titel,” pp. 7, 18; Chapter II §9 “Atjeh,” pp. 84–92; Chapter VII §35 “De Negara Islam Indonesia in Atjeh,” pp. 265–274.