Exploring Kalimantan—30 years ago and FINDING Closure to Borneo’s Worst War Crime

My first journey half way around Borneo, the world’s 3rd largest island--Kuching in the South West to Kalimantan’s easternmost cape of Tanjung Mangkalihat, was motivated by curiosity. Travelling by Boeing and Twin Otter by Malaysian Airlines to Tawau followed by a Missionary Aviation Fellow Cessna skippered by trainee American pilot, we viewed the vast expanse of the Sulawesi Sea as we landed on a school soccer pitch.

To enhance the last leg of our hour-long journey to the remote East Kalimantan province of Talisayan, was enhanced with a birds-eye view of the world-famous chain of exotic Derawan islands After flying across the Sulawesi Sea, ahead of us was a six-hour motor-cycle journey along the coast to meet Borneo’s last “cave-dwellers”. Unlike the pre-war war years of oil-rich Tarakan, it was more or less a shantytown far less developed than Tawau.

Dutch Battery

But still Tarakan was “civilization” for me because it had a jungle nine-hole golf course—the only evidence it was formerly a rich Dutch enclave. Our arrival was timely because Tarakan, a small island of the North-East coast of Borneo, was celebrating Independence Day on August 17, 1993. But independence had come with a price after the wholesale massacres of at least 40,000 Indonesians of all classes, races and religions in Kalimantan Barat alone.

After the fall of Japan in August 1945, President Sukarno declared the five-pronged “Pancasila” Kalimantan and a new beginning. After checking into a second-grade hotel, it was time to do a little exploring in the once infamous Dutch Indonesian oil town where some of the worst war crimes. As a former crime reporter my first instinct was to check out the Tarakan war memorial where nationalist of the 1960s Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation, were buried in a common graveyard.

Unlike Malaysia, “Makam Pahlawan” heroes graves, both Muslim and Christian Indonesian soldiers were buried side by side. Exploring the Tarakan graveyard, little did I know it had borne the remains of the 28 long-lost Sarawak senior civil servants and their spouses in a dastardly war crime described by commander of the Dutch forces in Kalimantan Brigadier General W.J.V. Windeyer as “one of the worst atrocities so far disclosed in Borneo”.

The Tarakan cemetery was also the temporary burial ground for another 40 Dutch soldiers who were massacred together with the Sarawakians by the Japanese in 1942. I would soon learn about the cruel massacres—perpetrated by two officers and 70 marines, had never been brough to book!

Among the Sarawak victims were the grandparents of at least two prominent families—assistant constabulary commissioner Desmond Vernon Murphy and prominent Scotsman John Andrew McPherson who had served as a judge in the Supreme Court, secretary of Native affairs. Murphy to a Kuching Javanese and McPherson to the daughter of a prominent Iban leader in Kapit.

I was familiar with one of McPherson’s grand-daughters Rukayah Sukri who was a part-time Radio Sarawak singer like me in the late 1960s. Her younger sister MP Datuk Nancy Shukri, delved into politics and first even served as Minister Prime Minister department in Kuala Lumpur.