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War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia: Unraveling the Persecution of Achmad Mochtar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

J. Kevin Baird
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On July 3, 1945 the Japanese occupation government of the East Indies executed by sword the prominent Professor Achmad Mochtar. Until his arrest by the Kenpeitai in October 1944 he directed the Eijkman Institute in Jakarta, a prestigious Nobel Prize-winning medical research laboratory. Mochtar was not only an internationally known scientist physician, but he was also closely connected to powerful Indonesian nationalist elites. The complex swirl of violent military and political currents, together with the complex technical elements of the events impelling Mochtar's execution, composes what the scholar of Indonesian history Theodore Friend referred to as “the Mochtar affair”. The defining event of this affair was the murder of 900 conscripted Javanese laborers (called romusha, a Japanese word meaning unskilled laborer but adopted in Indonesian language to mean slave laborer) at a transit camp on the outskirts of Jakarta in August 1944. They all died of acute tetanus within three days of receiving vaccinations against typhus, cholera and dysentery.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , e2
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2016

References

Notes

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2 See here.

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5 See here.

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8 See here.

9 See here.

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12 Shimer BG, ibid.

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18 Shimer BG, ibid.

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