I recently created a small digital exhibit on the role of UNC President Dr. Frank Porter Graham on the UN Committee of Good Offices for Indonesia, leading up to the Renville Agreements of January 1948. Dr. Frank (as he was known) was an unusual choice to join the committee as the US representative, since he had no diplomatic experience per se. He had served in several mediator roles and on national committees for the US government, but this role with the United Nations was a big change. In many ways, his work with the UN on Indonesia was later overshadowed by his much longer service on a UN committee for India and Pakistan, which was less successful in achieving a concrete diplomatic outcome.
In the course of creating the exhibit, I went through Dr. Frank’s papers from his time in Indonesia, held in the Special Collections of Wilson Library at UNC. There are a number of interesting resources in the collection that were not a good fit for my digital exhibit, but may be useful for other researchers. One particularly interesting piece was a notebook presented to the UN Committee from the local Chinese community around Batavia and West Java, documenting the persecution of ethnic Chinese during the Indonesian revolution–largely from the Indonesian side. The pages include copies of incident reports and names of victims, presenting a clear picture of an aggrieved community.
In other ways, Dr. Frank’s papers are a very limited source for understanding the Indonesian revolution. He certainly came to the topic with no background knowledge (one can see this from his scramble in October 1947 to get information on Indonesia and the conflict with the Dutch), and according to one well-sourced academic study Dr. Frank’s deputies were very underwhelmed with his work on the ground. Perhaps his advocacy for the Indonesian side when he was later appointed to the US Senate and the Dutch committed the “Second Police Action” (i.e., Agresi Belanda yang kedua) was just as important as his negotiating work when on Java.