Dutch ashamed of colonial past
Dutch ashamed of colonial past
By Helmut Hetzel
THE HAGUE (DPA): "Awareness of so-called 'police actions' in the Republic of Indonesia is only slowly getting through to us. It is a painful process and far from over."
These are the opening sentences of a review in the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool of a book published by Dutch author Louis Zweers, containing what are described as forbidden photographs of brutality by Dutch colonial police on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The photographs have been published at a sensitive moment: World War II ended in the Pacific on Aug. 15, 1945 with the capitulation of Japan. Indonesia, which had been under Japanese occupation, was returned to its former colonial power, the Netherlands.
The Japanese had driven the Dutch out of Indonesia in 1942. On Aug. 17, 1945 Indonesians on the streets of Jakarta were shouting "Merdeka, Merdeka" ("Freedom, Freedom"), proclaiming independence. It was a proclamation which the Netherlands chose to ignore.
The Netherlands, themselves just liberated by Allied forces from German occupation, sent thousands of soldiers to Indonesia. There followed four years of colonial war and bloody repression. The "police actions", as this colonial war is still often euphemistically described in Holland, had begun.
Zweers' volume of photographs now reveals the brutality of the Dutch army in Java and Sumatra. He discovered the pictures by chance in the imperial archives in Den Haag.
"They have never been published before and were presumably never meant to be," said Zweers.
Around 200,000 Indonesians lost their lives in "police actions". Ten thousand Dutch were killed in the fighting, which did not end until Dec. 27, 1949, and then only under pressure from the U.S. and the United Nations.
For many elderly Dutch people, the loss of what they thought of as their beautiful "tropical Holland" remains an open wound. Holland's problems in coming to terms with its colonial past were demonstrated during Queen Beatrix's state visit to Indonesia in 1995, when she failed to apologize formally to her Indonesian hosts for the war crimes committed by Dutch soldiers.
Still now, Holland refuses to recognize the date of Indonesian independence as having been Aug. 17, 1945.
Sixty-seven year old Frouke Huisman is certain that Zweers' photographs were taken by her brother Ben, who died five years ago.
"He sent me a few prints from Indonesia secretly in 1946. At that time he was working as a photographer in the Royal Netherlands Indonesian Army (KNIL). After he came back we never talked about his time in Indonesia again," she explained.
Like the Huisman family, many other families still avoid talking about their Indonesian past, although hundreds of thousands of Dutch people have roots there.
Politicians, too, largely ignore the colonial past. While the end of World War II in Europe and the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation is celebrated each year on May 4 and 5, there is nothing to mark Aug. 15, nothing to mark the deaths of either the Indonesians or Dutch people who died.