Prime Minister Rutte has apologized. What next?
“During my vacation, I visited Fort Vredeburg museum in
Yogyakarta. What a terrible exhibition. The Dutch were presented like the
Germans occupying Holland. Look at our legacy! Railroads, plantations,
buildings, bridges, irrigation!” a Dutch acquaintance complained to me.
I was so stunned that I could not say a word in reply. In a
thought afterward, I could have said, “If the Germans had occupied Holland for
long enough, you would now have a high-speed railway network and industries
like BMW and Siemens in Holland. You would not have the Dutch things you are
proud of, that in reality have come into existence after World War II. Would
you be grateful for that?”
"It's very strange that we keep seeing death notices in
newspapers with phrases like ‘born in Jakarta in 1930’. It should be Batavia,
Jakarta did not yet exist at that time," a Dutch lady told me. Obviously,
she had not the slightest idea about how Batavia came into existence, that is,
by first destroying the original town of Jakarta.
When I told a Dutch friend that I was going to take a day off
to celebrate Indonesia’s Independence Day in The Hague on Aug. 17, he raised
his eyebrows and asked, “Isn’t it supposed to be sometime in December?”,
apparently referring to what he was taught at school.
These were all surprising, particularly because they are
highly educated people with university degrees. In my spare time, every now and
then I read articles and books on the common history of Indonesia and the
Netherlands. I came across an article titled Squaring the circle; Commemorating
the VOC after 400 years, written 20 years ago by Gert Oostindie, a Dutch
history professor, which explained in a sentence, “Knowledge and awareness of
the national past in Dutch society simply do not run deep."
The sentence helps to give a sense of understanding, if not a
sense of pity, when hearing comments contradictory to the atrocious greed that
characterized Dutch colonialism. It helped when a Dutch politician recently
laid flowers on the foot of a J.P. Coen statue in the city of Hoorn. It helped
when former Dutch prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende praised the “VOC
mentality” in 2006.
On Feb. 17, the results of a four-year large-scale study on
the excessive violence committed by the Dutch army during the Indonesian War of
Independence were presented. The study was conducted by three renowned Dutch
institutes, a small part of which worked in collaboration with Indonesian
historians. Immediately after the presentation, Prime Minister Mark Rutte
offered an apology to the Indonesian people, broadcast on Dutch national public
television.
The study’s findings have started to reverse the decades-long
culture of cover-up by Dutch institutions, from The Hague all the way down to
the individuals on the battlefield. The study has ended 70 years of the Dutch
clinging to a far too rosy self-image. One may expect that it will enlighten
Dutch society, giving a deeper knowledge and awareness of the past. However,
understandably, many also fear consequences. Many detailed historical accounts
that can obviously be categorized as war crimes have been exposed.
History is an immensely involving discipline that touches upon the very basics of human existence, where reasoning and emotion are intertwined. The outcome on individuals will lie in a spectrum between pride and shame, honor and disgrace, admission and denial.
In those whose fathers and grandfathers happened to be on the
wrong side of the history, it may result in disappointment, annoyance,
resentment or even anger. Indeed, during the presentation of the results of the
research, a group of people representing Dutch veterans demonstrated outside
the building.
On the question of why the terminology of war crimes and war
criminals was nowhere to be found in the report, the researchers have correctly
explained that such terminologies could impose serious constraints on the
research. On the other hand, it is clear, without doubt, that many of the
thousands of excessively violent actions can be categorized as war crimes, but
that is the task of jurists to determine, not historians.
Now that most of the individual perpetrators have passed
away, we should all focus on looking toward the future. What changes can the
results of the research bring about?
That a government looked away, consciously refused to deal
with severe cases of war crimes and let the perpetrators live their lives
freely until their deaths should not set a precedent for current and future
cases. The International Criminal Court (ICC) sits in The Hague. The ICC was
founded 20 years ago. So at least for 20 years it has turned a blind eye to
possible severe cases under the responsibility of its host.
