military and civilian casualties. Indonesian independence, unilaterally asserted by the nationalist leader Sukarno on November 17th 1945, was finally conceded by the Dutch authorities (and a tearful Queen Juliana) at a conference in The Hague, in December 1949. A steady stream of Europeans (actually many of them were born in the Indies and had never seen the Netherlands) made their way ‘home’. By the end of 1957, when President Sukarno closed Indonesia to Dutch businessmen, Dutch ‘repatriates’ numbered many tens of thousands.
