THE HAGUE, The Netherlands — Dutch Prime
Minister
Mark Rutte on Monday officially apologized for 250 years of the
Netherlands’ involvement in slavery, calling it a “crime against humanity”.
اضافة اعلان
The apology comes almost 150 years after the end of
slavery in the European country’s overseas colonies, which included Suriname
and islands like Curacao and Aruba in the Caribbean and Indonesia in the East.
“Today on behalf of the Dutch government, I
apologies for the past actions of the Dutch state,” Rutte said in a speech in
The Hague.
“We, living in the here and now, can only recognize
and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity,” he
said.
Dutch ministers have travelled to seven former
colonies in South America and the Caribbean for the event.
Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch finance minister and deputy
prime minister, said on an official visit to Suriname last week that a
“process” would begin leading up to “another incredibly important moment on
July 1 next year”.
Descendants of Dutch slavery will then celebrate 150
years of liberation from slavery in an annual celebration called “Keti Koti”
(Breaking the Chains) in Surinamese.
But the plan has caused controversy, with groups and
some of the affected countries criticizing the move as rushed, and saying the
lack of consultation by the Netherlands smacked of a colonial attitude.
But Rutte in his speech on Monday said that choosing
the right moment was a “complicated matter”.
“There is not one right time for everyone, not one
right word for everyone, not one right place for everyone,” he said.
‘Golden’ Age?
The Dutch funded their “Golden
Age” of empire and culture in the 16th and 17th centuries by shipping around
600,000 Africans as part of the slave trade, mostly to South America and the
Caribbean.
At the height of its colonial empire, the United
Provinces known today as the Netherlands possessed colonies like Suriname, the
Caribbean island of Curacao, South Africa, and Indonesia, where the Dutch East
India Company was based in the 17th century.
In recent years, the Netherlands has been grappling
with the fact that its Rembrandt and Vermeer-filled museums and historic towns
were largely built on the back of that brutality.
Spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement in the
US, it has also raised questions about racism in Dutch society.
Pressure has been growing at home with the cities of
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht formally apologizing for the slave
trade.
Rutte had long resisted, previously saying the
period of slavery was too far back and that an apology would ignite tensions in
a country where the far right remains strong.
He has now changed tack, but that has not pleased
everyone.
‘Enslaved people’
Sint Maarten’s Prime
Minister Silveria Jacobs told Dutch media on Saturday the island would not
accept a Dutch apology if made on Monday.
“Let me be clear that we won’t accept an apology
until our advisory committee has discussed it and we as a country discussed
it,” she said.
The fact that another Dutch minister sent to
Suriname, Franc Weerwind, is himself of Surinamese descent sparked criticism
from the slavery restitution group there on the grounds that he is a
“descendant of enslaved people”.
Slavery was formally abolished in Suriname and other
Dutch-held lands on July 1, 1863, but the practice only really ended in 1873
after a 10-year “transition” period.
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