East Timor: Dutch war crime replayed

East Timor: Dutch war crime replayed

By Aboeprijadi Santoso

This is the first of two articles on the origins of war crimes
in Indonesia.

AMSTERDAM (JP): Fifty-five years after a Dutch officer,
Raymond Westerling, engaged in war crimes in the shadow of
Indonesia's decolonization, a number of Indonesian officers were
accused of similar crimes in what was essentially last year's
decolonization of East Timor.

Notwithstanding the historical differences, there were eerie
similarities in the military atrocities of both nations.

At the end of World War II, a revolution broke out in
Indonesia. When the Dutch -- following the Japanese capitulation
-- attempted to regain control, they found themselves fighting a
politically lost war. While world opinion fell on the side of
Indonesia, Holland found a hero in Raymond Westerling.

"Every morning," a Dutch writer recalled, reflecting on his
childhood in Hilversum, "we prayed at school for Westerling, the
brave rebellious captain who did everything to keep the Indies
(Indonesia), whilst the government in The Hague had already
acquiesced to Sukarno and his henchmen".

In reality, Westerling was an adventurous Ramboesque warlord,
a conclusion drawn from J.A. de Moor's somewhat apologetic study,
Westerling's Oorlog (Westerling's War), Indonesia 1945-1950
(1999).

A British trained sergeant, Westerling led the Dutch first
elite special forces. He fought bravely in Medan, Java and
Sulawesi, but was incapable of controlling his troops. He enjoyed
a special relationship with Commander Gen. S.H. Spoor and thus
had carte blanche ("a license to kill", in De Moor's words), to
act as brutally as he wished.

Most controversial was "his" war in South Sulawesi in the
early months of 1947. About 3,000 (not "40,000" as the myth has
it) local freedom fighters and villagers were killed as a result
of his counter-insurgency methods, called standrecht (summary
justice).

With intelligence information gathered through a network of
local spies, "the troops surrounded villages at dawn, rounding up
the male population ..., tracing (the) 'extremists' and killing
them on the spot in front of the population."

Once the locals were sufficiently terrified, calm was then
restored. "Gen. Spoor," according to De Moor, "defended (this new
method), and so the idea of standrecht proliferated".

The fierce resistance was a result of mobilization and
militaristic training during the Japanese occupation. The popular
support for the republican forces grew as nationalism and
anticolonialism rose in tandem with this legacy.

In December 1948, the Dutch army occupied Yogyakarta and
arrested Sukarno, but could not completely quash the local
guerrillas.

As Indonesia gained momentum internationally, the turning
point came at the political/diplomatic level rather than on the
battlefield. As the formal transfer of sovereignty began to
unexpectedly draw closer in December 1949, it was a great blow to
the Dutch officers who felt they had won many of the battles but
politically lost the war.

Not surprisingly, a few weeks later Westerling attempted a
coup. The adventure was welcomed in Holland, but it killed almost
100 people and did not succeed. A "criminal bluff", one historian
commented.

But the Dutch war was more than "Westerling's oorlog". Gen.
Spoor was caught in a real dilemma. While attempting to keep
order by employing a strategy of standrecht, he also expected his
elite forces to act quickly, effectively, and be disciplined.

Such conditions became over time a growing contradiction for a
foreign army operating in an often hostile environment. Even when
Westerling and his followers were removed in November 1948, his
successor was told that he had to combine professionalism -- or
military ethics -- with fighting power. But even so violent
excesses still occurred, De Moor admits.

In other words, military professionalism and discipline could
hardly be enforced in a colonial conscript army. The colonial war
was a hotbed of uncontrolled violence, victimizing sundry numbers
of unarmed civilians. This became a permanent risk as the army
tried to restore rust en orde (i.e. social tranquility and
political order) to Indonesia, a security concept that
contradicted the chaotic reality.

The Dutch state, facing war devastation at home, was
confronted with the fait accompli of revolutionary changes in
Indonesia. The colonial state was weak and depended on the
120,000 conscript army personnel to maintain its stranglehold on
the country.

As it lost the diplomatic battle, and with its politicians in
The Hague discredited and its army plunged into crisis, it
generated new risks and even bloodier violence. A declining
colonial state being ceaselessly attacked by angry
revolutionaries resulted in numberless atrocities and war crimes.

The Dutch postwar governments succeeded in evading the war
crime issue mainly due to pressures by Indies war veterans. It
was not until 1969 when an ex-soldier, J.E. Hueting, spoke of the
earthscourge method -- the burning of villages in Java -- and
other "regularly committed" crimes, that an official report
(Excessennota 1969) admitted to "systematic cruelties".

But these were referred to as war excesses instead of war
crimes. As a result, the issue has never been properly resolved.

The writer is a journalist based in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands.