DUTCH PATIENCE
Sta,—In your issue of July 25th your able and usually well informed news commentator omits two important further reasons why the Dutch Government has lost its patience; namely, the facts that two years after the conclusion of the Pacific war, Dutch hostages, inclusive of women and children, are still held by the Republicans and their Japanese instructors, and that considerable quantities of valuable foodstuffs and other products, for which the whole world is crying, are being withheld from their legitimate owners. 1 am sure that any British Government would have lost its patience long before that if, for instance, British hostages were being kept in the innermost parts of Burma. After a personal visit of the Dutch Prime Minister to Java and other parts of Indonesia, the Dutch Government at last realised that the Republican Government was unwilling and unable to execute the Linggadjati agree- ment so that it was necessary to restore law and order by force. It also became clear that the Government so far had been ill advised by the leader of the commission of negotiators in being too lenient. All this was not new to people who knew the Inside of the story, like the former Governor General, but it was new to those who were guided by too much illusionism, and those who closed their eyes to reality on account of political reasons. The Government has informed the United Nations by way of courtesy, but, as it is not a matter of a dispute between two sovereign States but of dispute between parts of a Commonwealth in statu nascendi, the Security Council has no duty to perform in this respect.—
The Hague, Holland.
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