As their country was once head of a colonial empire, many in the Netherlands naturally retain ties to Indonesia.

The annual Tongtong Festival, held this year from May 27 to June 7, is just one way for the Dutch to explore their interest in and cultural links to their former colony.

Started by the Dutch and Indonesian communities in The Hague in 1959, the festival features performances and workshops on batik, wayang and much else, as well as hundreds of booths selling handicrafts and culinary delights. Recently the festival included Asian and Pacific nations, although it is still mainly '€œa huge Eurasian kumpulan, a grand annual reunion of people with roots in the Indies'€, said one participant, Lexa Jaffe-Klusman.

In one booth, Jaffe-Klusman was arranging handicrafts and pictures made, she said, by children in Nusa Penida, Bali. Her organization, Oom Piet (Uncle Piet), had helped with their education and playing was an important part of learning, said Jaffe-Klusman, an advocate of the Montessori method.

Jaffe-Klusman, a baby during the end of Dutch rule in Indonesia, said her mother was from West Java and her grandfather was a railway engineer who pioneered new routes, among others from Cirebon to Gempol in Central Java.

At a restaurant nearby, Yvonne van Genugten, director of the Indonesia-Netherlands Cultural Studies Center, distributed comic books entitled The Return, a homecoming story. Her center initiated an exhibit in Arnhem and a website on '€œThe Story of the Netherlands East Indies'€.

Her community also explores the '€œIndo'€ identity of Dutch people with Indonesian roots. It aims to ensure that '€œexperiences of the Indo community in the former Netherlands East Indies during and after the Second World War must never be forgotten'€.

Jaffe-Klusman recited how her mother took in many women with children into their Bandung home when their husbands were prisoners of the Japanese.

Young Indonesian Netherlanders, the third generation after World War II, take it for granted that many Dutch have mixed blood. Thus, the young '€œIndo'€ identify as Dutch, like some Indonesian dishes and understand some Indonesian. Families often spend vacations in Indonesia.

As a result, mixed cultures have become common in Dutch society. A Tongtong performance includes traditional martial arts from Central Java, but instructor David Partowihono speaks Javanese, not Indonesian, being a descendant of plantation workers brought by the Dutch to Suriname. His twin daughters are among his students in his Sedulur Budi Asli silat school.

Psychologist Henri Otgaar of Maastricht University, also of Indonesian descent, said he was long attracted to silat and instructs at the Pancasila School, which performed with Sedulur Budi Asli students to standing ovations.

Former parliamentarian Sam Pormes, hailing from one of several Maluku communities in the Netherlands, said he spent little money to gain a seat for his Groenlinks Party. After visiting his homeland he said, '€œit would be impossible'€ to run for any office in Indonesia. '€œI would need a billion'€ rupiah, he said.

JP/Ati Nurbaiti

The town of Leiden used to host the world'€™s richest archive on various aspects of Indonesian and Netherlands history, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KTLV).

A deputy rector of the University of Indonesia, Bambang Wibawarta, regrets the failure to retain the documentation center. With cuts to education and cultural subsidies, including to iconic institutions like the KTLV, the links between the Netherlands and Indonesia depend heavily on cultural ties.

Such people-to-people links remained strong despite diplomatic spats such as the latest one on the death penalty, said scholar Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, part of a government delegation to the Netherlands.