A Javanese prince passed over twice for the throne led a five-year war
Diponegoro, eldest son of a Yogyakarta sultan, was twice denied the crown with Dutch backing. Many Javanese came to see him as the just ruler foretold in prophecy, and from 1825 he waged a five-year guerrilla war on colonial rule. Indonesia now honours him as a national hero.
Born in Yogyakarta on 11 November 1785, he grew up at a court that saw the Dutch East India Company dissolved, the British invade Java and Dutch rule return. When his father, Sultan Hamengkubuwono III, died in 1814, the Dutch supported his younger half-brother instead, despite the late sultan's wish. A devout Muslim, Diponegoro was also troubled by lax religious observance at court. When the new sultan died mysteriously in 1822 and an infant was crowned, he was passed over yet again.
Resentment was spreading well beyond the palace. Farmers faced tax rises and crop failures, and nobles lost the right to lease land. Famine and plague struck in 1821, Mount Merapi erupted in 1822, and prophecies circulated. Many believed Diponegoro was the Ratu Adil, the just king predicted in the Pralembang Jayabaya. Local officials heard rumours of a rising and did nothing.
The early fighting went badly for the Dutch, who lacked a coherent plan against ambushes and blocked food supplies. They responded with more troops under General De Kock, whose system of fortified camps, called benteng, pinned down key points while mobile columns hunted the rebels. The war also had a grim ethnic side: Diponegoro's forces attacked Java's Chinese minority, viewing them, like the Dutch, as foreign intruders.
By 1830 his army was close to defeat. He demanded a free state and the role of Muslim leader for all Java, and was invited to negotiate under a flag of truce at Magelang, where he was seized on 28 March. He called it betrayal; the Dutch called it surrender, and paintings by the Javanese artist Raden Saleh and the Dutch Nicolaas Pieneman portray the moment in opposite ways. Exiled first to Manado, he was moved in July 1833 to Fort Rotterdam in Makassar, where his wife Ratnaningsih joined him. He died there in January 1855.
Source: Diponegoro
