Progress

In the roof-garden ballroom of Batavia's elegantly seedy Hotel des Indes, 40 white-suited delegates and aides representing the Dutch, the Indonesians and the U.N. Commission for Indonesia met one evening last week to put the finishing touches on a Dutch-Indonesian agreement. After a quiet 45 minutes in the steamy 90DEG heat of the ballroom, the business was over. Jogjakarta, the Java capital which the Dutch had taken forcibly from the embryonic Indonesian Republic 6 1/2 months ago (TIME, Dec. 27), would be peacefully returned.

Equal Status. The agreement cleared away the last diplomatic obstacle in the way of a conference at The Hague, scheduled for Aug. 1. There Dutch and Indonesian delegates would try to set up the United States of Indonesia, a sovereign nation with a status equal to The Netherlands' own under the Dutch crown. The Indonesian Republic (Java) would have a large but not necessarily a dominant voice in the U.S.I. The Dutch hoped that more moderate elements in the other islands would balance Javanese extremists and thus form a basis for an orderly transfer of rule.

Two days after the Hotel des Indes meeting, Dutch infantrymen began their withdrawal from Jogjakarta. As the Dutch troops passed through the city, natives gawked silently. Earlier, 30,000 civilians, including many panicky Chinese, had evacuated to the north, fearful that the Republican take-over would be the signal for bloody fighting among the Republicans. Indonesia's Communists already had announced their plans to take the Jogjakarta airfield as soon as the Dutch withdrew.

Calm Intention. Many Republican leaders seemed calmly confident of their ability to maintain order and check Communism in Indonesia. At week's end, President Soekarno repeated that he had no intention of yielding to Communist pressure, but warned that the Communists in Indonesia would grow stronger every day that the Dutch put off granting real national independence.

Back in Batavia, however, another influential Indonesian leader, Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak in Borneo, was not so sure of his countrymen's ability to check the Communist tide in Asia. "Communism," he said, "is the greatest danger for us here." The Sultan urged U.S. aid to help the U.S.I, to its feet; he indicated that for such aid America might well be permitted to have troops and bases in Indonesia.

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