By Kyle Sajoyan

The conclusion of the Second World War brought the international community together to pursue justice following the bloodiest cataclysm in human history. The prosecution of Japanese war criminals during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East helped lay the blueprint for how crimes against humanity and other atrocities were defined and dealt with. Despite the Tokyo War Crimes Trials’ clear definitions of the permissible and illegal conduct of nations, the Netherlands perpetrated one of the most brutal and overlooked wars of the decolonization era. The Indonesian War of Independence began at the closure of the global catastrophe that raged for the past six years. The Dutch unlearned the lessons of the previous conflict, systematically trying to subjugate a people who no longer desired to live under the imperial yoke of the Netherlands. The Dutch forces in the East Indies (Indonesia) unleashed a wave of untold destruction and suffering upon their colonial subjects, typified by the “counterinsurgency” campaign of Captain Raymond Pierre Westerling in 1947. Westerling’s rampage in South Sulawesi represented the clearest and most blatant hypocrisy of the post-World War Two era as the Netherlands abandoned their promises to safeguard a humane world to retain their empire.

            The end of the Second World War brought a renewed definition of just humanitarian treatment. Out of the ashes of the worldwide calamity, the victorious nations embarked on a crusade of justice against those who instigated a war of atrocity and barbarism. The prosecution of Japanese criminals remained a focal point for the clear delineation of how nations and peoples were to properly interact with one another. On January 19, 1946, Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur issued the Charter for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE).[1] Under the charter, the Tribunal recognized crimes against humanity as the “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population.”[2] The significance of the definition is crucial in understanding the hypocrisy of Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies. As a willing participant in the IMTFE, the Netherlands had ample knowledge for introspection of their own brutal imperialism in the Far East.[3] The conduct of the Japanese in Indonesia provides more than a clear picture of the inhumanity of colonialism.

            The impetus for Japanese rule in Indonesia was the collapse of American and British rule in Southeast Asia. In the 114 days from December 7, 1941, to April 1, 1942, the “colonial military citadel” of Malaya, Borneo, and the Philippines fell to the Imperial Army.[4] With the American and British empires disintegrating, the Dutch stood little chance against the Japanese onslaught. The invasion of Indonesia began on January 11 with naval and parachute forces landing on Tarakan Island in Borneo and Menado in Sulawesi.[5] By March 9, the entire archipelago was overrun in an East Asian blitzkrieg, the Japanese force of 55,000 men defeating the entire Dutch Army of 93,000.[6] With the Dutch East Indies now under the new rule of the Rising Sun, a new era of horror was about to begin.

            The brutality of the Japanese occupation in Indonesia remains one of the indelible scars of colonialism and imperialism. The Imperial forces committed an extensive pantheon of war crimes from 1942-1945. One such atrocity is the deliberate enslavement of up to ten million Indonesian romusha or forced laborers.[7] Over 300,000 romusha would be worked to death over the course of the occupation.[8] In addition, between 3-4 million Indonesians died from conditions created by the Japanese, famine and pestilence being the two biggest killers.[9] However, the relevancy between the Japanese and Dutch attempts at subjugation lies in the massacres committed by Imperial forces during the occupation. The Japanese formulated their colonial policy based on a racialist view of Southeast Asia. The Japanese dubbed themselves the heralds of a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” to liberate the Far East from the yoke of the west.[10] In reality, the empire was inundated with a violent, racist superiority complex, hellbent on exploiting and enslaving the Far East.

            Even before their brutal occupation of Indonesia, the Japanese clearly demonstrated how they would treat non-combatants. On February 24, 1942, the entire Dutch population of Balikpapan, Borneo were horrifically slain when the retreating Dutch Army burned several oil fields needed by the Japanese war effort.[11] Between 80 to 100 men, women, and children were taken to the coast and shot in the ocean, some having their limbs sliced off with samurai swords.[12] The Balikpapan Massacre represented the ideological extremes Japan went to when waging an aggressive imperialist war. The “white man” of the west had long deprived Japan of her birthright as an empire.[13] However, the virulent racism the Japanese held against white Europeans went in tandem with their view of the “liberated” Indonesians as a group to be exploited and destroyed. As historian Theodore Friend noted, “Japanese militant enthusiasm fed on racial feeling to strengthen it for defeat of Americans and Dutch, and for subjugation of Filipinos and Indonesians.”[14] The violent massacre of the civilian population of Balikpapan also demonstrated Japan’s response to real or suspected acts of resistance.

            The IMTFE found no evidence that the Dutch non-combatants were remotely responsible for the destruction of the oil fields carried out by the armed forces.[15] However, the Imperial Army viewed collective punishment as a reasonable tool to keep order. Such weapons were utilized to horrific effect during the occupation. The story of Imperial Navy administrator Nogi Harumichi provides insight into the draconian and baseless manner that the Japanese ruled Indonesia with. Harumichi served as an interpreter for the Imperial Naval Police, Tokkeitai, in Sulawesi where he witnessed several violations of human rights.[16] In response to suspected discontent and spies on the island, the Japanese administration embarked on a widescale terror campaign against the native population. Harumichi notes the arrest of mixed-race persons and the intelligentsia despite having no evidence of “an organized independence movement acting against us.”[17] In addition, Indonesians caught listening to foreign radio were immediately executed for “spreading groundless rumors and undercutting morale.”[18] The attempts to quell the imagined saboteurs reached increasingly gruesome levels of brutality as the war turned against the invaders.

            Violence defined Japanese rule over Indonesia in 1943 and 1944. To eliminate fabricated enemy spy networks, the Kempeitai, the Army military police equivalent to the Tokkeitai, launched vicious pacification campaigns across Indonesia. These operations, dubbed kikosako or “severe measures” were euphemisms for the deliberate execution by decapitation of non-combatants without trial.[19] From November to December 1943, at least 4,468 people were arrested in Java and Sumatra as provocateurs, of which at least 350 were murdered.[20] However, the most infamous kikosako in Indonesia began a month before on the island of Borneo. The Japanese utilized a fabrication of another espionage plot to justify their cruel practices. The Tokkeitai gave false intelligence to the naval governor of Borneo, Vice Admiral Michiaki Kamada, of “anti-Japanese” networks that had infiltrated the island.[21] In particular, the Tokkeitai reached the conclusion that the military base of Pontianak was a target of a terrorist poison attack.[22] The Tokkeitai’s cruelty and barbarism was on full display in what happened next.

            The Japanese had cast a wide net in their brutal mass murder operation at Pontianak. The intelligentsia, doctors, middle-class business owners, nobility, and random civilians kidnapped off the streets were among those arrested without due process.[23] “Spy trials,” a euphemism for the kangaroo courts often used by the Tokkeitai, were immediately done away with to arrest and kill as many civilians as possible.[24] In the first kikosako, at least 1,500 people were executed, most being beheaded.[25] A second murder operation was ordered in September 1944, resulting in the deaths of at least 350 people.[26] The horror of the Pontianak Massacres was only exacerbated by the ludicrous levels that the Japanese were willing to reach to fabricate so-called “anti-Japanese sentiments.”

            The Indonesian population at Pontianak posed no tangible threat to the Japanese war effort despite the accusations to the contrary. A former Tokkeitai officer even confessed that “the Japanese rigged the whole story of poisoning. It was laughable […] we knew it was fake. The plotters were just not the types to want to revolt.”[27] The objective of the Pontianak murders became a perpetual cycle of death and destruction as the Japanese fabricated evidence to justify their crimes. Historian J. Kevin Baird postulates that officers in post-war trials often viewed their actions as a viable “service to the empire” by conflating the size of the perceived rebellion with the general population.[28] Simply put, the more people murdered, the less likely the population was to resist. These “counterinsurgency” operations helped define the principle of crimes against humanity during the IMTFE. Despite the horrors of the Second World War, the lessons of Japanese rule were ignored as the Dutch embarked on their own war of aggression to reclaim their colonial empire.

            The Dutch attempts to reconquer their colonial subjects began as swiftly as the war ended. On August 17, 1945, Indonesian nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta announced the independence of the archipelago from all foreign rule.[29] The efforts to consolidate the independence movement culminated in the Battle of Surabaya where Indonesian fighters rebelled against the temporary occupation of British troops in Java.[30] Seeing their colonial empire slip away, the Dutch government announced in December 1945 the deployment of “war volunteers” to the East Indies.[31] Among the first arrivals was Captain Raymond Pierre Westerling, a commando soon to garner infamy for his role in the conflict.

            Westerling’s actions during the war exemplify the hypocrisy of the Dutch pacification campaign in Indonesia. Nicknamed “the Turk” due to his birth in Istanbul, Raymond Pierre Westerling landed in Indonesia as one of the first commandos on the archipelago.[32]  His mission, along with the first troop transferees in 1946, was to restore “peace and order” in the region.[33] Captain Westerling immediately began his counterinsurgency campaign with unperturbed violence. Sent to the island of Sumatra, the captain tasked himself with the capture of a suspected “terrorist” leader in the area.[34] Westerling’s methods were equal parts brutal and illegal. His memoirs, titled Challenges to Terror, clearly outlined his process for apprehending the ringleader. After locating the man’s village, Westerling drugged and kidnapped the suspect, who was forced to confess to the crimes of “murder, arson, and rape.”[35] Westerling summarily decapitated the man after he tried in vain to escape, placing his head on a stake as a warning against further resistance.[36] The extrajudicial killings did not cease as Westerling and the Dutch armed forces ushered in a new reign of terror upon the people of Indonesia.

            Following the decapitation of the suspected terrorist, Westerling continued his pacification of Sumatra. Through indiscriminate violence, targeted assassinations, and village raids, Westerling’s forces had full control of North Sumatra by September 1946.[37] However, the Captain’s violent rampage across Indonesia was far from over. Unrest in South Sulawesi, often referred to as the Celebes, forced Dutch administrators to send Westerling and his unit, the Depot Speciale Troepen (DST), to restore order.[38] Like Westerling’s first mission in Sumatra, the South Sulawesi Campaign began with a murder. In the city of Makassar, the commando publicly executed a suspected guerilla leader in cold blood, stating, “[T]he shot in the Society Club ended it [terrorism in Makassar] overnight.”[39] Two definite accounts of murder were already under the captain’s belt, with thousands more to come as the counterinsurgency spread to the whole island.

            Westerling and the DST turned South Sulawesi into a graveyard for the native inhabitants. On December 11, 1946, a state of siege was declared on the island, the DST’s 120-man-strong cadre having free reign over the land.[40] Following the murder in Makassar, Westerling extended the counterinsurgency to all the villages and districts on South Sulawesi. The captain was methodical in his criminal approach to dealing with suspected resistance. The DST entered village after village under the cover of darkness, assembling the entire male population in an open space.[41] Westerling’s interrogation techniques were ludicrously arbitrary and draconian with something as trivial as eye contact determining whether a person would live or die.[42] If none of the villagers came forth with information on suspected insurgents, the Turk picked and shot men accused as spies at random.[43] Westerling described his gaze as a “gift” which helped root out terrorists in an uncooperative village.[44] In reality, the Westerling method employed no legal jurisprudence in making accurate conclusions, instead relying on unfounded pseudo-psychology and brute force.

            Westerling and the DST even resorted to ad hoc executions of common criminals from local jails, murdering them to cleanse the area.[45] Like the Pontianak Massacre perpetrated by the Japanese three years prior, Westerling’s actions were seen as a necessary initiative to control and pacify the region. The Dutch government went so far as to praise Westerling and his men, believing that South Sulawesi would have been lost without his methods.[46] The Turk’s reign of violence went unabated for less than three months,[47] but the scale of the destruction and carnage inflicted upon South Sulawesi within those three short months is difficult to fathom. Westerling provides a figure of 600 “terrorists” killed from December 15, 1946, to February 15, 1947;[48] however, modern scholars contend that Westerling’s figures were a dramatic understatement of the violence. At least 3,000 natives were killed in the South Sulawesi counterinsurgency of 1946-1947.[49] Most were the subject of the brutal draconian methods that Westerling created to instill order through force. Westerling’s rampage in South Sulawesi represented the broader culpability of the Dutch armed forces in perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity.

            The infamy of Westerling’s terror campaign is indicative of the grander issues facing the Dutch throughout the whole war. The first Dutch volunteers to arrive in Indonesia came in late March 1946.[50] According to historian Peter Romijn, the strategy for winning the conflict was two-fold. The soldiers of the KNIL (colonial army) had to balance violence against the independence fighters while denying the nationalists access to the native population.[51] The complicated nature of asymmetric warfare only exacerbated Dutch frustration as force became the only actionable solution.[52] The use of extreme violence found itself ingratiated within the Dutch colonial forces before Westerling’s South Sulawesi operation. The Pesing incident remains a particularly troublesome case of one of the earliest recorded war crimes perpetrated by the Dutch.

            On April 15, 1946, KNIL units captured the village of Pesing from at least 250 Indonesian fighters.[53] While the Dutch commanding officer, Lieutenant General Simon H. Spoor, lauded the KNIL for its conduct, a whistleblower from the colonial forces confirmed a far grimmer outcome of the battle.[54] Captured Indonesian fighters were reportedly shot by the KNIL, a crime that drew parallels to the Japanese Kempetai during the occupation.[55] British reports also corroborate that the Dutch simply “put the enemy to the sword” without trial or jury.[56] The Pesing Massacre represented one tragedy in the general downward spiral of Dutch forces in Indonesia. The very framing of the conflict helped instigate and exacerbate the terror, inculcating the entire army in the crimes of the Dutch regime.

            The Dutch constantly refrained from referring to the Indonesian War of Independence as a war. Dutch politician Eelco van Kleffens went as far as to refer to all military operations as “police measures of a strictly limited character.”[57] The term “police measures” reflected the legal gerrymandering employed by the Dutch to prevent legitimizing the sovereignty of the independence movement, therefore making them beholden to international law.[58] Thus, when the KNIL launched the first major offensive of the war, the Dutch government gave it the deceptive moniker “police action.”[59] On July 21, 1947, Operation Product commenced.[60] The police action saw the capture of most of Java and parts of Sumatra.[61] When Product ceased on August 5, 1947, the police action created a massive refugee crisis with more than 6 million displaced persons fleeing the chaos.[62] Volunteer nurse Roswitha Djajadiningrat described how the refugees were “chased by the Dutch who put them through hell every day to find out where their husbands and men were.”[63] The KNIL waged a systematic war of terror against the population in the aftermath of Operation Product.

            In the village of Sindaraja, North Sumatra, Dutch soldiers murdered prisoners of war on the false pretense they were trying to escape.[64] On West Java, the population of Rawagedeh was massacred to “cleanse” the area of rebels, resulting in the deaths of between 150-430 people.[65] In addition to deliberate mass murder, the Dutch arrested and detained suspected insurgents and innocent bystanders en masse. Due to the conflict being a “police action,” the Dutch administration refused to refer to captured enemy guerillas as prisoners of war.[66] Thus, prisoners were often subject to brutal acts of torture. Accounts of frequent beatings, electrocution, waterboarding, and exposure to the elements were all laden throughout the official Dutch records of the war.[67] The torture program demonstrated its arbitrary ruthlessness through the lack of substantial evidence for reasonable detainment of suspects.

The intelligence services responsible for the arrests of civilians were disjointed, lacking any sort of uniformity as to who should be forcibly held.[68] Like the Japanese officers who fabricated the cases belli for the Pontianak Massacre, Dutch enforcers often relied on the snap decision of on the ground personnel when making arrests.[69] Sergeant M.W. Sytsema commented on the subjective nature of law enforcement, writing, “All [prisoners] were delivered to me without any further explanation, making a fruitful investigation very difficult […] These people have been picked up at random, without any reason.”[70] By the conclusion of the Second Police Action launched in December 1948, at least 60,000 people passed through the arbitrary system as prisoners.[71] The brutality of the executions, detainment, and torture of native Indonesians serves as a blatant hypocrisy of international law and the narrative the Dutch created for themselves during and after the war.

Westerling and the larger Dutch suppression of Indonesia outlined one of the greatest humanitarian hypocrisies of the 20th century. The deliberate torture and execution of prisoners constitute the “inhumane acts” outlined in the IMTFE’s charter of January 1946.[72] The date of the charter’s creation gives indisputable evidence that the Dutch were aware of the illegality of their actions yet unshackled themselves from any responsibility through political euphemism. The Police Actions of 1947-1948 constituted “the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a declared or undeclared war of aggression,” despite the obfuscations of the Dutch government.[73] Westerling went so far as to call himself a “policeman repressing crime,” a further indictment on the Dutch framing of the war as one for the preservation of law and order.[74] In reality, the South Sulawesi Campaign and the Police Actions created a lawless dead zone where violence thrived at the expense of the native population.

Indonesia became a state of perpetual bloodshed created by the Dutch armed forces. In a study of 1,389 Dutch soldiers and over 100,000 pages of material, historians Gert Oostindie Ireen Hoogenboom, and Jonathan Verwey found 770 direct references of crimes committed by the colonial forces.[75] The majority of the crimes found were deliberate acts of murder against civilians and captives, followed by torture, arson, robbery, and sexual assault.[76] Despite the vast array of clear-cut atrocities committed by the military, the Dutch continued to shirk responsibility for their crimes during and immediately after the war. Once again, government officials turned to euphemisms and wordplay to further conceal the barbarity of their actions.

Lieutenant Governor-General Hubertus J. van Mook, echoing his contemporaries, referred to the atrocities committed by Westerling’s DST as “excesses,” implying that the South Sulawesi counterinsurgency was not systemically violent or criminal.[77] Mook’s apologist rhetoric for Westerling’s atrocities is not surprising considering he lauded the 1947 police action as a success and referred to the UN instigating a ceasefire in Indonesia as a “calamity.”[78] However, Mook was not a minority within the Dutch government, with his language being indicative of how lackluster the colonial authorities treated such atrocities.

In general, terms like “excesses” and “excessive violence” were utilized to perform the necessary verbal gymnastics to justify clear crimes against humanity.[79] Jan Pluvier writes how these terms helped frame the conflict within the public consciousness as “the norm of conduct for the warrior [that] occur only in a minority of cases.”[80] The framing of the war itself represented a deliberate act of misinformation domestically and internationally as a cover for Dutch war crimes. Photographs were a particularly pervasive tool to help mitigate any questions about the Dutch Army in Indonesia. KNIL soldiers made sure to take ample photos of Indonesian suffering at the hands of the revolutionaries while portraying themselves as their saviors.[81] Historian Susie Protschky refers to the oppressor-victim complex as “colonial humanitarianism [that sustained] the Dutch myth of the ‘police action’ in the absence of a formal declaration of war.”[82] When photographs inevitably leaked out of the gruesome atrocities committed by Dutch forces, government officials often resorted to simple censorship. War photographer Ben Huisman had his photos confiscated by the Army Contact Service (DLC), containing disturbing images of torture, abuse, execution, and destruction of property during the first police action.[83] In addition to photography, film was utilized as a medium to propagate the falsehoods of a just battle in Indonesia.

The movie Brengers van Recht en Veiligheid (Bringers of Justice and Security) showed a benevolent Dutch Army liberating the natives from the barbarism of the “terrorist” revolutionaries, the title being an unironic attempt at colonial humanitarianism.[84] The film ends with an Indonesian village being rebuilt, life resuming to normal due to Dutch intervention.[85] What movies like Brengers van Recht en Veiligheid did not show was the extrajudicial murder of random civilians, arbitrary arrests, and torture that defined the South Sulawesi Campaign and the whole war. The conduct of the Dutch was built on violence and ruthlessness. The mantra “kill before they kill you” was common as a justification for terror.[86] As one veteran of the war wrote, “[I]f we caught someone, we killed him. We had our orders from the Dutch commander about what to do if you see someone: shoot. That was it.”[87] No matter what forms of propaganda were used, the scale of the tragedy caused by the Dutch was impossible to cover up.

Dutch military power ended after years of turmoil, leaving a trail of destruction and carnage reminiscent of the Second World War. After the final police action of December 1948, international opinion turned decisively against the Netherlands.[88] To force a resolution based on Indonesian independence, the United States ceased all Marshall aid to the Dutch East Indies while drafting plans to end all financial recovery efforts to the Netherlands proper.[89] These economic and diplomatic thumbscrews forced the Dutch to concede their empire in May 1949.[90] However, the end of the Indonesian War of Independence did little to assuage the suffering caused by the conflict. Between 100,000-150,000 Indonesians were killed during the war, compared to the relatively light Dutch death toll of 4,500.[91] While the conflict lasted from 1945-1949, most of the violence occurred within short intervals of each other; the First and Second Police Actions lasted for less than three weeks while Westerling’s South Sulawesi Campaign lasted less than three months.[92] The individuals responsible for these surges in violence were not extensively prosecuted for their crimes.

Raymond Pierre Westerling lived out his days in Amsterdam, collecting books and publishing his memoirs.[93] The calm façade of his post-war life fails to capture the cruelty and coldness he exuded in South Sulawesi which led to the deaths of thousands. As for the individuals who perpetrated the mass violence during the police actions, their fates reflected the culture of denial and ignorance fostered by the Dutch government. Apart from two inquiries and the punishment of a select group of lower ranking officers, all persons responsible for war crimes during the conflict were left unscathed.[94] In sharp contrast to the treatment of their own war criminals, the Dutch were far more active and diligent in the prosecution of Japanese war crimes on Indonesian soil. Of 1,050 Japanese individuals put on trial, 1,017 were convicted, either receiving the death penalty or time in prison.[95] As for the prosecution of Dutch war criminals, justice was far less forthcoming.

The KNIL actively blocked investigations into their illegal conduct in Indonesia. Following the Rawagedeh Massacre that killed as many as 430 people, the Dutch procurator general forbade any prosecution of the soldiers responsible, despite international condemnation.[96] Even when the issue of the atrocity was brought to national attention in 1969, the Dutch Prime Minister refrained from launching an official tribunal to try still living war criminals.[97] The refusal to pursue justice helped define a culture of silence that endured after the conflict. It was not until 1969 when veteran J.E. Hueting publicly disclosed the systematic nature of Dutch wartime atrocities that the Netherlands started to investigate, if half-heartedly, their crimes.[98] Still, it took decades after the infamous Hueting broadcast for the Dutch government to officially recognize and apologize for their conduct in Indonesia.

The ghosts of Rawagedeh haunted the Dutch as Indonesian activists revitalized their efforts for justice and recognition. On December 9, 2011, exactly sixty-four years after the massacre, the Dutch government officially apologized for the atrocity, compensating the victims’ families.[99] Nearly 64 years of silence, propaganda, and lies began to crumble as the nature of Dutch war crimes became known. Less than a year after the Rawagedeh case, Dutch newspaper de Volksrant published two photographs depicting executions of Indonesian civilians by the KNIL.[100] These photographs were followed by more publications in 2013 and 2015 showing similar crimes, a signal that the winds were blowing in the direction of recognition of Dutch atrocities.[101] However, the road to reconciliation and justice was and will continue to be an arduous one as the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the world cope with what happened during the turbulent years of 1945-1949.

The Indonesian War of Independence became one of the most brutal, overlooked conflicts in history. With Raymond Pierre Westerling as the poster child for Dutch violence, the colonial army systematically and brutally subjugated the Indonesian archipelago. The cruelty of Dutch war crimes was only exacerbated by the previous three years of occupation by the Japanese. The Imperial forces from 1942-1945 waged an indiscriminately barbaric war against the Indonesian people, killing millions through their policies of exploitation and enslavement. However, the massacres perpetrated by the Japanese typified the colonial war of 1945-1949 as the lines between Dutch and Japanese rule blurred. Despite their active participation in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Dutch unshackled themselves to their commitment to perpetuate a just and humane world. Instead, they continued to act as an oppressor for tens of millions of peoples far away from Dutch lands. Following the war, the Dutch government deliberately obfuscated the nature and scale of their conduct on the archipelago, opting for a culture of silence and denial. However, the sheer vastness of Dutch atrocities could no longer be contained, with the Netherlands finally recognizing and apologizing for some of their criminal actions. Despite the 64-year delayed apology, the road to reconciliation will continue for decades to come as the horrors of the Indonesian War of Independence become fully known.

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