Colonial News Across the Metropole and Indies: The Arrest and Trial of Perhimpunan Indonesia Students, 1927–1928

Abstract

This article examines how two Dutch-language newspapers situated on opposite sides of the colonial relationship represented the surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and acquittal of four Perhimpunan Indonesia students in 1927–1928. It compares Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, published in Semarang for a colonial readership, with the metropolitan Haagsche Courant of The Hague. Following the historical method used in the original research—heuristics, external and internal source criticism, interpretation, and historiography—the study analyzes thirteen newspaper editions together with Indonesian-language press reports, memoirs, and scholarly histories. Robert Entman’s four framing functions guide, but do not mechanically determine, the interpretation. The article argues that the two newspapers shared a colonial security horizon while translating it into distinct journalistic registers. The Semarang paper foregrounded the anticipated danger posed by educated nationalists returning to the Indies and advocated surveillance and restriction. The Hague paper more often mediated the case through communism, parliamentary interpellation, procedural legality, and the authority of the Dutch state. The March 1928 acquittal exposed a central contradiction: months of securitized reporting had produced a presumption of danger that the prosecution could not convert into legally sufficient proof. Indigenous newspapers subsequently recoded the case as repression, solidarity, and moral victory. The article’s contribution lies in treating press geography—metropole and colony—as an active element of framing and in distinguishing demonstrable circulation from unproven claims about direct effects on the national movement.