In the mid-1950s, then dutch prince Bernhard von Lippe-Biesterfeld — the husband of then Queen Juliana — was in hot water.
A trusted circle around PM Willem Drees suspected the prince of having been deeply involved in an arms smuggle and of being complicit in a murky plan — cooked up by the Dutch paramilitary member Captain Raymond Westerling — to topple Sukarno, the president of the newly independent Indonesia.
The suspicion, if found to be justified, could have had international repercussions that could have endangered the very survival of the Dutch Royal House of Orange. Archives on this case have recently been declassified and controversy ensues. What was the prince really up to?
Until the 1950s, children in the Netherlands still idolized Captain Westerling, who was deemed a patriotic leader of the elite troop. School children adored him and wished him well every morning in mass prayers. Such was the sentiment reflecting the emotional bond and political interest Dutch society had with the colony. It was obvious it would be hard for them to imagine that the Netherlands had lost its prized possession in the Far East.
Westerling, for one, was well aware of the Zeitgeist. Few, however, realized that Prince Bernhard maintained a good relationship with Westerling, the infamous soldier with a war crime record of standrechtelijke excuties (extra-legal killings) of several hundreds villagers in South Sulawesi in 1946.
Now, thanks to a recent book by historian Harry Veenendaal and journalist Jort Kelder, ZKH, Hoog Spel aan het hof van Zijne Koninkelijke Hoogheid (‘ZKH’, High-level game at the palace of His Royal Highness), we know that the two — Bernhard and Westerling — and a number of Dutch dignitaries were intricately involved in a web of intrigue, personal relations and obscure political and business connections.
The book ZKH (the Dutch acronym for “His Royal Highness”) is a result of archival research. Based on
information from the Dutch Marines and various foreign intelligence reports, and in particular the diaries of the Queen’s secretary, Gerrie van Maasdijk, the authors basically argue that Bernhard effectively used his royal status and his good friend and advisor Prof. Jan Willem Duyff (an anti-Nazi hero and a physiologist of the University of Leiden) to manage his political, diplomatic and business interests.
Duyff, “an ambitious man whose aim was to keep the Indies within the kingdom”, had since the mid-1940s kept intensive contacts with the Dutch commander in Jakarta, Gen. Simon Spoor, and through him was connected to “the Rambo of kampung”, Westerling; to Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah (codenamed “Ali Baba”), a Pakistani diplomat-cum-arms dealer who claimed to have contacts with the Daroel Islam; and to Max Alkadrie aka Sultan Hamid II of Pontianak, an Indonesian who was put forward to replace Sukarno.
The plan was to assault the Indonesian leaders at a Cabinet meeting in Bandung on Jan. 24, 1950, arrest Sukarno and PM Moh. Hatta, and “immediately execute them”. Duyff, with a letter signed by Bernhard (dated May 13, 1948), was sent to meet then US president Dwight Eisenhower to ask Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose warships were located near Surabaya, to help restore order in case a civil war broke out if the coup failed. Eisenhower never replied.
In the event, however, Westerling’s military action on Jan. 23, 1950, was so clumsy (and bloody) that it was not even worth naming a coup d’état.
But a coup plan, with a Dutch prince being complicit, against a friendly head of state of a republic that the Dutch had only a month earlier recognized at the Round Table Conference (Dec. 27, 1949), would have been a big scandal. Bernhard, if accused of high treason, could have endangered the monarchy. A royal apocalypse thus loomed.
Incidentally, van Maasdijk, the palace secretary and former journalist with close connections to the PM office, smelled the case and warned Drees. The Dutch administration, who was politically responsible for the House of Orange, was alarmed. Drees, in a panic, immediately intervened in July 1950, urged the prince to restrain, ordered an investigation, took damage limitation steps and quickly covered up the case.
Such was the risk. Why then did the prince go ahead and do what he allegedly did?
Veenendaal appears to have a convincing case on the smuggling of weapons from London or Paris via Pakistan to Yogyakarta, which involved the prince and his associates. On the coup attempt, however, there was as yet no smoking gun. Nothing explicitly pinpointed Bernhard’s hand behind the coup — except, perhaps, his introductory letter for Duyff to Eisenhower. The police investigation report, apparently protecting the prince, did not spell out those who initiated the coup.
But Veenendaal insists “Duyff never acted alone. He needed the full support of the prince”. If so, Westerling’s coup was essentially Bernhard’s adventure.
Clearly, Bernhard had political and financial motives. The illegal arms trade must have delivered a lot of money. (Years later he was found to have received a huge amount of bribes in the so-called Lockheed affair). Interestingly, while denying the allegations, Bernhard indicated that he wished to become a Viceroy (Onderkoning), ruling over the Dutch-Indies on behalf of his wife, the Queen, just as his friend, Lord Mountbatten, representing Queen Elizabeth, was for British-India.
Seen from an Indonesian context, however, it seems strange that the conspirators should have attempted a coup against Sukarno and Hatta when the Dutch diplomatic position after two military actions was very weak. Even more so since they on relied on the Kartosuwirjo-led Daroel Islam, a small part of Indonesia’s freedom fighters, who only started to rebel in 1948 (not “1945” as the authors put it) when they opposed the Renville Agreement. Why the conspirators were that naïve — this seems to have escaped the authors’ attention.
The Bernhard-cum-Duyff-Westerling adventure thus shows how little the Dutch establishment comprehended the nature of Indonesia’s independence revolution.
Writing from a Dutch perspective, Veenendaal and Kelder actually wrote the book to oppose Cees Fasseur, who rejected the allegations against Bernhard. Fasseur, personally close to Bernhard and the Royal family, is the sole historian who has been granted the privilege to see the palace’s private archives. However, in a newspaper, he refused to reply in greater detail. Another historian, Gerard Aalders, has pointed out that Fasseur has been “too arrogant” by “rendering van Maasdijk’s testimonies as ridiculous and completely ignoring foreign intelligence reports on the matter of arm smuggling”.
Given Dutch popular sentiment at the time, no doubt Bernhard was a hero. But to many historians now, he was a crook. In any case, a prince who unconstitutionally played a political game, unlawfully exported weapons for personal gain, and dreamt to become a Viceroy just when the colonial era was coming to an end, he must be both out of place and out of context: a bad anachronism.
The writer is a journalist.
