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On August 17, 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender, Soekarno and Mohammed Hatta proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia, thus formally putting an end to over three centuries of Dutch colonial rule. However, elements of the structure sustaining the colonial system had survived the Japanese occupation, and some of these were also needed for the construction of independent Indonesia. Most of the 80,000 Dutch civilians who had survived the Japanese concentration camps, remained in those camps, now protected by the same men who had put them there in the first place. Many of the 17,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago, especially the bigger ones, gangs of local youngsters, armed with bamboo sticks and knives, roamed the streets. Law and order suddenly became scarce commodities.
All of this looks like a blueprint for an awful lot of trouble and bloodshed. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what resulted. This was especially the case in three of the five main islands: Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi. In Java, as the concentration camps were closed and the Dutch inmates sent home to the cities where they had been living before 1942, over 20,000 of them were massacred by armed youth gangs. Scattered units of the KNIL, the Dutch colonial army, were powerless against the wave of violence engulfing the main islands, powered by pent-up anger and hatred. Other groups that were attacked by the youth gangs included the Chinese (tens of thousands of whom were atrociously massacred) and people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent, the so-called “Indos”.
What to do?
Enter Captain Raymond Westerling, one of the most controversial Dutch historical figures of the twentieth century. Nicknamed “The Turk” (born in 1919 in Istanbul as the son of a Dutch merchant and a Greek mother), Captain Westerling played a key role in the efforts to restore Dutch rule in Indonesia after the end of World War II. After traveling from Istanbul to England during the war to be trained as a commando, he came to Indonesia, enrolling as an officer in the colonial army. At the end of 1946, Westerling was ordered to the city of Makassar in Southern Sulawesi with a blank check from Supreme Command to restore order as soon as possible so as to set an example for the rest of the archipelago. His unit of dedicated, highly trained commandos counted a mere 120 soldiers, many of them Dutch volunteers, but also native Indonesians and a black from Surinam.
The breakdown of law and order in Southern Sulawesi was so serious, that local farmers did not dare work their fields for fear of getting killed by groups of young Indonesian “revolutionaries.” Instead of helping to secure Indonesia’s independence these gangs of youths were merely terrorizing all of society.
During their three-month stay in the region, Westerling’s unit of highly-trained, disciplined soldiers, bound by an unflinching loyalty to their commander, succeeded in restoring law and order. They would operate according to a fixed scenario: arriving in a village in the early morning hours, they would drive the inhabitants out of their houses, and separate the men from the women and children, who were moved out of sight and earshot. The men were ordered to squat together and wait. In the meantime, Westerling had gotten his folding chair and little folding table and sat down, facing the men of the village. Two pistols were put on the table as Westerling began to read aloud a series of names from a list that had been prepared by his unit’s small intelligence section.
The village men were told to get up when their name was called out. Then they were ordered to approach Westerling’s table. The man then was asked if the name was his all right? When the answer was “yes,” Westerling took a pistol and shot the man dead. In this way, dozens of men were killed day after day in dozens of villages. The total number of victims of this drastic way to restore order has not been officially established and there are only estimates. The best would be “a couple of thousand.”
Was it effective?
It certainly was, and normal life in Southern Sulawesi became possible again surprisingly fast. The Westerling Method also bore fruit elsewhere in the archipelago, when people realized they could be subjected to it as well. Therefore, although the Westerling Method produced thousands of victims, in all likelihood, it prevented many more deaths elsewhere because it served as a grim warning.
However, some serious misgivings about the side effects of the Southern Sulawesi operation had surfaced, leading to conflicts inside the military command structure and the political establishment in the Netherlands. As usual in such instances, Westerling was becoming a liability and there was no one around who could come up with a satisfactory solution. Part of it was due to the innate Dutch tendency to find a compromise for just about any problem, and that approach was apparently not applicable in this case.
In 1949 the Dutch government formally recognized the independence of Indonesia, which should have been the end of the affair. However, this decision did not sit well with many officers of the Dutch army. General Simon Spoor, the popular Commander-in-Chief of the 170,000 Dutch troops deployed in the archipelago, reportedly contemplated a coup d’état in Indonesia. General Spoor asked Westerling, a confidante of his, what his reaction would be. In Westerling’s own words, given to a journalist in 1980: “At one point the general asked me how the army would react if he would seize power in Indonesia. This surprised me a bit, but I said: the entire army will have your back, save for a few generals, but you know who they are. In any case, you can count on me.”
Nothing came of it, because as the coup was being prepared, General Spoor was poisoned, reportedly dying from a heart attack. Along with all the other Dutch volunteers and conscripts, Westerling went home, leaving Indonesia to Soekarno.
In 1952, when he was thirty-three years old, Westerling published Mijn Mémoires (English version: Challenge to Terror), followed thirty years later by Westerling, de Eenling (Westerling, the lone wolf). Others wrote about him too, most notably the French historian Dominique Venner, who as a veteran of the French Colonial war in Algeria, was in a unique position to understand and appreciate what Westerling had accomplished: Westerling: guérilla story (1977). In 1999, Jaap de Moor published the first scholarly study focused on Westerling, his dissertation Westerling’s Oorlog (Westerling’s War). The book contains much detailed criticism and paints an overall negative image. It was contested and corrected twenty years later by Bauke Geersing, a former career officer and law professor, published Kapitein Raymond Westerling en de Zuid-Celebes-Affaire (1946-1947). Mythe en Werkelijkheid (Captain Raymond Westerling and the South Sulawesi Affair (1946-1947). Myth and Reality, 2019).
It would only be natural for some movie director or producer to consider making a movie about Westerling, especially about his exploits in Indonesia. Although there are some TV-documentaries and specials focusing on this topic, it was only in 2020/21 that, finally, a movie was made about Westerling in Southern Sulawesi. Since most people no longer read books but prefer movies instead, this was inherently a significant contribution to the public debate.
The film called De Oost (the East), was directed by Jim Taihuttu (of Moluccan descent) and financed by contributions from the Netherlands, Belgium, Indonesia, France and the US. The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, KITLV (associated with no less than Leiden University), was hired as a consultant to oversee historical, cultural and anthropological content, so the question is: “what could possibly go wrong?”
As a matter of fact, quite a bit. To begin with, Indonesian place names are wrongly pronounced, the soldiers are being commanded not in the proper form and terms, and when they sleep, the men apparently do not need mosquito nets! The film is replete with dozens more of such instances, resulting from ignorance and laziness. While woefully sloppy on technical details, probably due to full-spectrum ignorance, the movie purports to be critical of colonialism in general and the Westerling Method in particular. The makers of the movie have miserably failed to bring that message across, providing no more than just a very superficial sketch of the historical framework and the complex issues involved. The movie’s Westerling (portrayed here as a guy with a small Hitler mustache) is more a caricature than a character and the overall anti-colonialist message is never truly evident. It is a miracle the movie received two stars from a leading review site.
No wonder that Westerling’s daughter Palmyra was deeply offended by the movie and so were the Moluccan and Indo communities in the Netherlands. Veterans were appalled as well. This was no impediment to widespread efforts by the producers and state and legacy media to make the movie into a kind of cinematographic monument for wokeness and political correctness, retrospectively projected.
Nevertheless, anyone looking into the matter with an open mind, trying to take the historical context into consideration, cannot but conclude that it does not do justice to Captain Westerling to follow the blind prejudice on which the movie The East is built.
Westerling was a historical figure with unique characteristics, almost a Dutch equivalent of Léon Degrelle, the greatest Belgian of the Twentieth Century.
They share the distinction of being vilified officially, yet in spite of that almost palpably present, precisely because of the persistent efforts to erase them from history.
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