Raymond Pierre Paul Westerling fought and won battles for a forgotten empire when European states, barring a few exceptions like Portugal and, until 1960, France, had given up on the entire enterprise of colonialism. His contributions to larger world history are therefore minuscule, but this strange man not only helped to change the course of two failed military campaigns, but, according to Dominique Venner, also outlined one of the primary ways to defeat an insurgency.
For this, Westerling is often pilloried as the embodiment of evil—a throwback to the bad, old days of swashbuckling adventurers promoting white supremacy at the point of the bayonet. There is certainly some truth to this, for Westerling achieved his successes through harsh methods. However, if one seriously looks at what has transpired in Indonesia since Westerling left the field of battle, his excesses may not seem quite so terrible.
A “Turk” is Born
Westerling’s origin story is one of the most unique in the entire history of the Dutch Empire. Westerling came into the world in the turbulent year of 1919. His birthplace, the city of Istanbul, was the seat of the dying Ottoman Empire. Following their defeat in World War I, the Ottoman Turks had their territory divided up between British, French, and Italian troops. To the south, in Mesopotamia, French and British mandates helped to create the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The British also won for themselves the crown jewel of the Near East—Jerusalem. Despite the common misconception, this breakup of Mesopotamia did not come about because of a secret negotiation in 1916 (commonly called the Sykes-Picot Treaty), but rather because of an international agreement at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923. Neither Sykes, nor Picot participated in the 1923 meeting, but the representatives of the new Turkish Republic certainly did, meaning that the heirs to the Ottoman Empire green lit the British and French mandates.
This shoots down the common narrative that today’s turmoil in the Middle East is solely the work of British and French colonialists. As a side note, the world only learned about Sykes-Picot thanks to the Bolshevik Revolution. In November 1917, after Bolsheviks broke into several government buildings, Pravda and Izvestia, published the agreement in full. For the Bolsheviks, the agreement became a major propaganda coup, for they used it to argue that World War I had been undertaken in order to benefit the European empires.
The Turkish heartland of Anatolia was almost diced into little chunks, too, with parts going to British, French, Italian, and Greek forces. The latter government’s involvement proved to be a particular sticking point, and the Greco-Turkish War saw initial Greek advances in Smyrna and northwestern Anatolia reduced to nothing by 1922. The Turks, led by the brilliant general Mustafa Kemal (later to be known as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks”), got their revenge on the Greeks by overseeing one of the largest population transfers in world history. The “Great Population Exchange” of 1923 resulted in the forcible movement of 1.3 million Greeks from Anatolia to Greece, while 800,000 Muslims living in Greece and Macedonia were sent to the new Turkish Republic. In cities like Smyrna, which had been a center of Greek civilization since the days of the Dark Age, population exchanges were less peaceful transfer and more genocidal violence. On September 13, 1922, Kemal’s soldiers set fire to the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city, killing at least 100,000 civilians, including the Archbishop of the city’s Greek Orthodox Church.
Into this world came Raymond Westerling. Given his birthplace, his future combat peers would label him as “The Turk.” The Westerling family lived in the Istanbul suburb of Pera and belonged to the city’s large Greek community. Young Raymond’s mother, Sophie Moutzatzou, instructed her son in several languages, including English, Greek, and French. The rest of Raymond’s education was at a boarding school run by French-speaking Jesuits. As for Raymond’s father, Paul Roe Westerling was a Dutch citizen, despite being a third generation resident of Istanbul. According to Westerling’s autobiography, Challenge to Terror, his cosmopolitan, multilingual household had use for every culture and language except for Dutch. Somehow, this upbringing did not keep Raymond from ultimately pledging his loyalty to the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Again, Westerling’s first entrance into official Dutch society came via an odd route. By 1941, the German Wehrmacht fully controlled the Netherlands. Westerling, then twenty-one, wanted to do his bit to liberate the country from the Nazis. So, he went to Great Britain, where the official Dutch government operated in exile in London. He enlisted in the Princess Irene Brigade, a unit of the British Army made up of mostly Dutch volunteers. Westerling proved to be an excellent fit in the military, so long as he and his mates were not confined to the drill square or barracks. Indeed, Westerling’s superior officers noted that the young foreigner was better suited for commando training than regular garrison duty. In 1942, Westerling went through Commando Basic Training in Achnacarry, Scotland, where he received instruction in unarmed combat, infiltration, reconnaissance, and other tools of the trade from the legendary William E. Fairbairn, the former Royal Marine who established the first SWAT team in Shanghai.
Rather than go to the front immediately, the British attached Westerling as an instructor in “silent killing” to the No. 2 Dutch Troop of the No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. Westerling would later receive advanced training in India and Ceylon, the latter of which was one of the premiere jungle fighting centers in the world. Westerling would never see combat during World War II. His skills and training would not have to wait long, however.
In June 1945, the Dutch government sent Westerling to the Dutch East Indies. Westerling left the No. 10 Commando and became a second lieutenant in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, or KNIL. The timing could not have better for a warrior like Westerling, for the once fearsome Japanese Army was about to unleash Indonesian insurgents on the Dutch Empire prior to leaving the East Indies in August.
The Dutch East Indies — The Pearl of East Asia
To fully appreciate how devastating the 1942 Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies really was, it is important to understand a little bit about Holland’s history with what would become Indonesia. The first Europeans to claim Indonesian territory were Portuguese, not Dutch. Following Vasco da Gama’s successful expedition to India in 1498, the Kingdom of Portugal hit upon the idea of bringing the lucrative East Asian trade between India, China, and the Spice Islands under Portuguese control. For this, Lisbon tasked the conquistador Alfonso de Albuquerque with the conquest of the Far East. According to Dutch historian Bernard H.M. Vlekke, the Portuguese sailors “began a holy war in Indonesia between Moors and Crusaders.”[1] Most of the first Portuguese fighting men to see Indonesia had previously fought against the Moors in Spain and North Africa, and as such, the Islamic sultanates of Indonesia made for easy enemies.
Contrary to popular belief, the conversion of the Javanese and other Indonesian people to Islam was not the result of interactions with Arab traders, but rather with Indian Muslims, most notably those from Gujarat. Indonesia had long been a favored destination for Indian traders, and before the coming of Islam, two Indian religions—Hinduism and Buddhism—dominated the East Indies. Today, Bali is the last Hindu-majority island in Indonesia.
Unfortunately for the Portuguese, their grip on power in the East Indies proved fleeting, for by the 1620s, the Dutch East India Company was the most powerful European entity in Southeast Asia.
In the East Indies, Dutch traders created a mercantilist monopoly on several islands, including Java. Here, representatives of the Dutch East India Company sold to Europe and Asia nutmeg, coffee, sugar, palm oil, and other natural resources high in demand. The inter-Asian trade proved most lucrative of all, with Dutch ships controlling most of the major sea routes in the South China Sea. The capital of this new commercial empire was Batavia, formerly the fort of Jacatra. In the sixteenth century, Company men rebuilt the city in accordance with Dutch tradition, with canals running throughout the city. Inside of the city’s fortified walls, a dual Dutch-Chinese culture sprung up thanks to thousands of Chinese immigrants from the southern province of Fujian.[2]
Even though Dutch interests in Asia were more economic than religious, the Dutch East Indies saw their fair share of bloodshed during the years of the Dutch East India Company. Batavia’s founder, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, once celebrated as a Dutch national hero, is today reviled as the butcher of the Banda Islands. The Dutch hold on Indonesia was also violently resisted by local princes, the English fleet, and some Japanese merchants. Indeed, Dutch control over all of the islands would not be fully completed until the late nineteenth century. At that point, long after rule by the Dutch East India Company had been replaced by rule from the government in Amsterdam, the Dutch East Indies were the centerpiece of the small, but vigorous Dutch Empire. In 1905, the central government showed its attachment to the East Indies by sending forty million guilders direct from the state treasury to the islands of Java and Madura.[3] Thousands of schools were built in the East Indies between 1900 and 1930, and despite common complaints about how colonialism is always genocidal, the population of Java alone increased five-fold between 1800 and 1900.
Beginning in 1916, a new self-rule movement came into being. Partially inspired by historic expediencies (owing to geography, the crown in Amsterdam usually let Batavia run its own affairs), but also inspired by a growing Indonesian nationalist movement, a People’s Council was created on the islands in order to represent the three main groups: 1) the Dutch and Eurasians, 2) the Chinese, and 3) the Indonesians. Despite growing autonomy, all was not well on the islands. By 1930, the Dutch population stood at 242,000. Unlike older families, newer Dutch arrivals on the islands, especially those fleeing the Great Depression back in Europe, tended to see the East as a pleasure palace purely there for profit. Many of these newer arrivals also refused to interact with the Eurasian (mixed Dutch and Asian) population, which had long been accepted as part of hierarchy of Dutch governance in Asia.
A more powerful threat to Dutch rule came in the form of nationalism. In the 1920s, several Indonesian students who had attended universities in the Netherlands returned to the East Indies armed with revolutionary ideals. The Indonesian Communist Party was easily put down by the KNIL and police after a 1926 revolt in West Java[4], but other parties, like the PNI (Persatuan Nasional Indonesia) and the PI (Perhimpunan Indonesia) proved much harder to destroy. These groups espoused some of the shibboleths of Marxism, but their central idea was a unified Indonesia under the power of a strong central and secular government. Future leader Sukarno would come from the ranks of these groups.[5]
The biggest counterweight to Indonesian nationalism was Islamism, which has a long history on the archipelago. Liberal, Marxist, and Islamist parties frequently duked it out with each other prior to 1942, and several of the more radical elements took out their frustrations on the country’s growing Chinese population. It is important to note that after the Chinese Revolution of 1911, most Chinese immigrants to Indonesia came from Canton as contract workers. Unlike the earlier Fujian Chinese, these Cantonese immigrants tended to keep their own company rather than intermarry with local Indonesians. Batavia was also very distrustful of the Cantonese because of their supposed predilection for forming secret societies.
This internal rancor, along with the German conquest of the Netherlands, made the Dutch East Indies vulnerable to Japanese occupation.
Japanese occupation (1942-1945) can best be described as an unmitigated failure insofar as Tokyo was concerned. While the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army got plenty of resources out of the East Indies, military governance administered by uniformed commanders did not endear the Japanese to the locals. Not until 1944 did the IJA and IJN begin seriously supplying Indonesian insurgents with any meaningful support.
Where Japan did succeed in the East Indies was in cracking the delicate racial balance of the Dutch Empire. In order to show the Indonesians that whites were no longer on top, the IJA placed thousands of Dutch men and women into concentration camps all over the islands. Where possible, Dutch and Eurasian technocrats were removed from the government and replaced by either Japanese immigrants or Indonesians. Several Dutch and Eurasian survivors of the Japanese occupation today claim that they were used as sex slaves, or “comfort women” by the IJA.
Enter the “Turk”
This is the maelstrom that Westerling found himself in in the summer of 1945. Not long after the Japanese officially surrendered, several Indonesian groups, some of whom had been trained by the Japanese, declared unilateral independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This led to a state of war, with the Indonesians using guerrilla tactics in order to defeat their European enemy. The first Dutch troops to arrive in Indonesia came from a mixed bag. The KNIL, which enjoyed an extra 120,000 Dutch volunteers between 1945 and 1949[6], was the most battle-hardened force. The KNIL was made up mostly of European volunteers from the Dutch East Indies and traditionally pro-Dutch ethnic groups like the Balinese and Ambonese. The other force sent to the war zone in 1945 included remnants of the Home Army, a militia force originally designed to wage guerrilla warfare against the occupying Germans.[7] These men tended to be idealists, and given that the reconquest of the Dutch East Indies did not match their ideals of Dutch national liberation, many proved to be lackluster soldiers. The best military force in the Netherlands by far was behind bars in 1945. In that year, between 120,000 and 150,000 Dutch National Socialists were incarcerated. Many of these men had served on the Eastern Front in the Waffen-SS, where Dutch units earned battlefield distinction.
Because of the haphazard nature of Dutch deployments between 1945 and 1946, Amsterdam’s attempt to reclaim the world’s largest Muslim nation proved to be an uphill battle to say the least. Westerling tried to correct the deficiencies in the field by creating a network of local informants. By September 1945, Westerling and his KNIL unit controlled the restive island of North Sumatra thanks to the “Westerling Method.” This method included three prongs: 1) the 570-man strong DST (Depot Speciale Troepen), a commando unit skilled in low-intensity warfare, 2) the use of informal spies drawn from the local population, and 3) very public acts of violence. In his memoirs, Westerling recalls one incident on North Sumatra during the early stages of the war:
We planted a stake in the middle of the village and on it we impaled the head of Terakan. Beneath it we nailed a polite warning to the members of his band that if they persisted in their evildoing, their heads would join his own.[8]
Westerling and his men were part of a broader collection of what Amsterdam called “police actions” in Indonesia. From the very start, these military campaigns found themselves hamstrung due to politics. While Dutch military men often felt at liberty to pursue several different types of counter-insurgency measures, the weak Dutch state made it very clear that they could not hold onto the East Indies in the face of British and American diplomatic pressure. On November 12, 1946, the Linggajati Agreement went into effect, thus granting independence to the important islands of Java and Sumatra. The Indonesian nationalists did not fully abide by this agreement, and by 1947, the ground war got hotter as insurgent attacks received heavier responses from the KNIL and the Royal Dutch Army.
On July 21, 1947, Operation Product was launched as the second “police action” of the war. At that point, Westerling’s DST unit, which numbered only about 130 soldiers, was stationed on the large island of South Sulawesi. Here, Javanese radicals had joined with local insurgents. Westerling’s pacification of South Sulawesi proved to be much harder than his earlier war in North Sumatra. Partly this was due to geography; partly this was due to the fact that, as historian Jaap de Moor wrote, “Dutch authority on South Sulawesi was on the verge of absolute breakdown.”
In order to quell the revolutionary fervor, Westerling instituted a policy of on-the-spot prosecution. A typical example of such activity saw DST men encircle a village prior to dawn, then group all of the men in the village square. If Westerling matched anyone’s name to a list of suspected terrorist, then that individual was immediately executed. While the “Westerling Method” may not have had the full blessing of the authorities in Batavia, they certainly knew about all of the doings of the DST and the airborne commandos of the KST (Korps Speciale Troepen). While his methods horrified other KNIL officers, Westerling was successful. By March 1947, South Sulawesi was pacified. It is believed that between 3,000 and 5,000 locals died in the police action, while approximately 400 died in village executions.[9]
Elsewhere, thanks to Operation Product, the KNIL and the Royal Dutch Army scored several victories on East and West Java and Sumatra. However, the international community condemned the Dutch government for failing to abide by the Linggajati Agreement (the international community said nothing about similar Indonesian violations). On January 17, 1948, the Renville Agreement mandated that the Dutch would occupy East and West Java and Sumatra until a vote could be held. In the meantime, the insurgency continued. At one point, a Islamic state called Darul Islam broke away from West Java.
The last gasp of Dutch military power in the Dutch East Indies came in December 1948, when the brilliant General Simon Hendrik Spoor launched Operation Kraai. The Royal Dutch Army captured the insurgent capital of Yogyakarta and put hands on President Sukarno, the declared leader of the Indonesian Republic. The goal of Operation Kraai was to force the intransigent Indonesians to abide by earlier agreements, and in January 1949, everything seemed to show that a Dutch victory was in sight.
Just like in 1946 and 1947, the world intervened in order to stop the Kingdom of the Netherlands from achieving total success. The United Nations Security Council demanded that the Dutch Empire give Java, Sumatra, and other islands to the Indonesian Republic, and by December 1949, the Dutch officially left Indonesia for good. In the face of UN threats, including the withdrawal of Marshall Aid from the Netherlands, the crown in Amsterdam had no choice.
As for Raymond “The Turk” Westerling, he and his DST proved not so ready to give Indonesia away to Sukarno and his radicals. Beginning in 1948, when Westerling lived in West Java, he began creating a secret army which he called the Army of the Righteous Ruler. Westerling’s men came from the KNIL, the DST, KST, and local militias dedicated to creating a federalist Indonesia. All agreed that they did not want to see Jakarta (the new Republican name for Batavia) in control of the entire archipelago. One book, Harry Veenedaal’s Z.K.H, Dangerous Game at the Court of His Royal Highness, asserted that Dutch Prince Bernard secretly supported Westerling’s army. A coup, which Westerling launched in 1950, failed miserably. While federalism in Indonesia would continue for some time (and aspects of it continue to this day), Westerling’s quixotic hope of a Dutch return would never materialize. The last piece of the old Dutch Empire finally evaporated in 1962, when the Dutch handed over the colony of Netherlands New Guinea to the UN.
Westerling’s postwar life lacked the adventure and daring of his brief fling with fame between 1946 and 1950. Westerling moved to the Netherlands and married a Eurasian woman named Yvonne Fournier. The couple had several children. Some time in the mid-1950s, this old warrior began studying at the Amsterdam conservatory. His one public performance, a 1958 rendition of Puccini, bombed. When he died of heart failure in 1987, Westerling had divorced Yvonne, remarried, and ran an antique book store in Amsterdam.[10]
For many in the Dutch public now, Westerling’s name is synonymous with war crimes. “The Turk” is painted as the most vile face of Dutch imperialism. His men are often accused of murdering over one thousand innocent Indonesians during their pacification campaigns on North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and Celebes. On a larger level, Westerling’s behavior is often portrayed as the norm during the Netherlands’ war in Indonesia. Of course, such accusations are music to the ears of Jakarta.
In a delicious twist of fate, the “Westerling Method” and the exploits of the DST have at least one admirer—the Kopassus, or Indonesia’s Special Forces Command. Much like the DST, the Kopassus have been damned by the international community for using extralegal measures to put down Islamist, separatist, and Marxist rebellions. The organization’s most infamous moment came in 1965, when the transitioning “New Order” government decided to kill off the entire Indonesian Communist Party. Between 400,000 and 500,000 suspected Communists (many of whom were ethnic Chinese) were executed. The international community, as can be expected, reacted to these killings with horror. These days, many on the Left accuse the United States in being complicit. It is much closer to the mark to say that the massacres of 1965-66 had much stronger connections to Indonesia’s past, including the older conflict between nationalists and Marxists and the even older conflict between Indonesians and Chinese. The 1998 anti-Chinese riots and mass rapes give credence to the latter notion.
If one could ask “The Turk” about such things, he would probably say that Indonesia should have stayed under the Dutch flag.
Bibliography:
[1] Vlekke, Bernard H.M. The Story of the Dutch East Indies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1946): p. 55.
[2] Vlekke, 181.
[3] Vlekke, 175.
[4] Vlekke, 186.
[5] Reid, Anthony. The Indonesian Revolution, 1945-1950 (Hawthorn, Victorian, Australia: Longman, 1974): 7.
[6] Romijn, Peter. “Learning on ‘the job’: Dutch war volunteers entering the Indonesian war ofindependence, 1946-46,” Journal of Genocide Research, 14 (3-4), September-November 2012, pg. 320.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Westerling, Raymond. My Memoirs (Antwerp, Amsterdam: N.V. Uitgeverij P. Vink, 1952): p. 87.
[9] Sidarto, Lina. “Westerling’s War.” Jakarta Post (19 May 2010).
[10] Ibid.