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‘Decolonization’ and white supremacy in disguise
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Racism illustration (Shutterstock/File)
T
he magnificent room was fitted with wallpaper that blended perfectly with the lavish materials built from the blood money of the Dutch East India Company. The building that houses the Netherland’s Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) is a silent witness of the colonialism the country once committed.
After the strenuous efforts activists made against the Dutch government’s research project on “Independence, decolonization, violence and war in Indonesia, 1945-1950”, the Dutch researchers invited them to a roundtable discussion on Jan. 31 in the same building.
Annemarie Toebosch of the University of Michigan and I were initially invited to attend the meeting via Skype, as I live in Melbourne. We were given the opportunity to send in a five-minute video of questions to the meeting.
The response I received from the Dutch researchers was in stark contrast to what Toebosch received. Not only was my presence erased at the meeting and afterward, but they also silenced me for speaking up.
Fourteen activists including Jeffry Pondaag and Sisca Pattipilohy and nine Dutch researchers attended the meeting, which was streamed live on social media.
The unlikelihood that the Dutch researchers would take the activists’ input seriously could be seen from their seating positions. The Dutch researchers sat at the head of the table, showing that they were the boss, while the activists sat at the opposite end.
The boss of the researchers told me not to judge fellow Indonesian researchers for being involved in the project, and then proceeded to ignore the rest of my message completely.
