Was my father a war criminal? This was one of the questions that came to my mind after the presentation of the research on ‘structural extreme violence’ by the researchers from Niod, KITLV and NIMH. And was the term ‘structural extreme violence’ the correct formulation for what had happened in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia in the years 1945-1950? Can we Dutch people look with enough distance and talk about what happened in those years?
350 years of occupation, oppression and domination had taken place with brutal and horrific wars. And when Sukarno proclaimed independence on August 17, 1945, our reaction was predictable: this is not possible, the Indies are ours and we must pick up and organize the project of letting go ourselves. And so first eliminate the opposition.
Father
My father and his Twente family had no connection with the Indies. From 1936-1938 he had trained as a reserve officer and was posted to the artillery and coastal defense. In 1939 he was mobilized and stationed at Kornwerderzand, on the Afsluitdijk where the relatively modern guns had stopped the passage of the Germans on 11 May 1940. In 1942 he went into hiding in the Biesbosch but was betrayed and arrested on Christmas Eve 1942. He arrived in a Polish camp for POW officers, after which he followed the front to Hamburg after the liberation by the Russians. In June 1945 he arrived in the street in the village of Twente where the girl next door saw him, ran inside and shouted ‘Willem has come back again’. They would later marry.
In October 1945 my father was called up to train the boys in the Veluwe who had to go to the Indies. He did this until December 1946, before being shipped to North Sumatra, near Medan, on January 5, 1947 as commander of a battery of guns. On January 2, he was quickly married. With his artillery he carried out shelling from a distance. The coordinates were passed on, the shots were fired and then sightings were made with a small plane to see if the shots had hit their target. He himself sometimes made these observations. He never told what he saw then. In October 1947 he moved to Batavia where he got a job at the KNIL as a cartographer, his actual profession. My mother came over, in April 1950 they repatriated. My father was left with a desire to emigrate from these years. Eventually it became five years in Curacao, my primary school years.
South Sulawesi
At the end of my history studies around 1980, I specialized in South-East Asia and attended lectures on the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies. I had noticed that from time to time there was a fierce and polarized debate in the Dutch press about Captain Westerling. In the somewhat left-wing press he was called a war criminal, in the more right-wing press a hero. What exactly had happened in South Sulawesi? Why wasn’t that looked into? Then this polarization could also stop, I naively thought. I delved into the archives for nine months, interviewing government officials and a few soldiers, including Captain Westerling’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Vermeulen. He was a decorated resistance hero in the Second World War in the Netherlands and wanted to liberate the Indies from the Japanese. He summarily shot many hundreds of men in South Sulawesi. He told me that he was doing it for Queen Wilhelmina and the fatherland.
Raymond Westerling himself did not want to be interviewed by me. But when I received my manuscript for the book De Zuid-Celebesaffaire. Captain Westerling and the summary executions, he sent a ‘follower’ (he still had a fairly large group of supporters and gave lectures), who courteously came to tea on Saturday afternoon and said: ‘The captain is very curious about the contents of your book.’ Westerling called me not long afterwards and asked whether I had also been to South Sulawesi. When I said that wasn’t the case yet, he said: ‘You have to understand that the mentality in Indonesia is very different from here. When blood flows in Indonesia, a lot of blood flows. Then you can only maintain control with the toughest measures.’
My research was finished, I got permission from four ministries and Prime Minister Lubbers to publish, my book came out in 1984 and what happened? The left-wing press complimented me but thought I hadn’t gone far enough and that I should call Westerling a war criminal. The right-wing press thought the book was bad, because Westerling was a hero and I put it in the wrong light. Nothing had changed. The Netherlands could not yet handle the facts.
Political responsibility
Besides the horrors of summary operations (I soon had enough) I remained intrigued by the question of political accountability, which is still an issue. When Westerling had performed a first series of operations, an investigation was launched. The rapporteur described the operations as effective (restoring order and peace) but in fact legally as nothing more than murder. This report was read in Batavia a week later by the Attorney General, who shuddered but did not act quickly. It took weeks for the army commander to take action.
Meanwhile in South Sulawesi all regional commanders had adopted the ‘Westerner’ method. This led to several thousand casualties and operations that got horribly out of hand. Reports about these summary operations had also come through in the Netherlands, but no one intervened. Due to the delay in the transfer of information, the shifting of responsibility and no intervention, the situation in South Sulawesi got completely out of hand in a period of a month. The military operations became punitive expeditions.
In 1949 the Van Rij-Stam-Groeninx-van Zoelen committee investigated the operations in South Sulawesi. The Van Rij-Stam report was presented to the then government in 1954 and was not made public any further. A judicial investigation was started against three KNIL officers, but this was not continued after the transfer of sovereignty in 1949.
Thus ‘the South Sulawesi affair’ became a wonderful example of the escalation of violence and of looking away or at least reacting with delay to events that were getting further and further out of hand. With thousands of deaths as a result, arbitrarily, illegally.
After 1984, new generations of historians kept coming to visit because they had the same question that I started with in 1980: what exactly happened around these ‘excesses’ and why do we know so little about them? The same questions over and over and after their publications there was another period of silence and then new students and researchers came forward with these questions.
When Loe de Jong used the term war crimes in his description of the events in the Dutch East Indies, a storm of resistance rose and he took the term back. It seems that we Dutch are not able to face our past and to give a place to the different layers of facts and meaning. In the history program OVT, Frank van Vree, the research leader, said three days after the publication of the research that the term ‘structural excessive violence’ encompassed a much wider range of forms of violence than war crime, but that it would have been better and clearer if the word war crimes was immediately added: ‘structurally excessive violence, including war crime’. That also seems too limited to me.
Broader research
Multidisciplinary and multifocal research is needed to give real meaning to the independence of Indonesia and the attempted recolonization of the Dutch East Indies. Not only with Indonesian historians, but also with anthropologists and historians from other countries. And with other disciplines: psychologists who mindset and mentalities, mass communication specialists with an understanding of information transfer in a crisis situation. Maybe others too.
There was a wide range of behavior by the Dutch and KNIL soldiers during these years. Certainly many will have had little or nothing to do with situations that got out of hand. Certainly many will have found themselves in situations where they have committed organized and structural violence that went too far and thus became criminal. What dynamics made this get so out of hand? How was it that we could not and would not comprehend the meaning of the declaration of independence of Indonesia on August 17, 1945. How did the Netherlands deal with a completely unexpected and overwhelming event?
Was my father a war criminal? A respectable Catholic man from Twente from a well-behaved family that had suffered during the crisis and the war. Later a fine father, strict but fair, and…. silent. If he ordered the shelling of villages and killed innocent people, maybe he did. Or does this fall under the law of war? Where does crime begin? And who is ultimately responsible?
Willem IJzereef is a historian and business education expert. In 1984 he published the book: ‘De Zuid-Celebesaffaire. Captain Westerling and the summary executions.’