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Netherlands reasserts commitment to improve ties with Indonesia
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Preserving the environment: Bogor Botanical Gardens head Didik Widyatmoko (center, in white shirt) and then-Dutch Ambassador for Indonesia Rob Swartbol (right, in orange shirt) cut a ribbon to mark the launch of the Ecodome on Nov.13, 2017. (JP/Theresia Sufa)
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he Netherlands has reasserted its commitment to maintaining equal ties with Indonesia, a country that was once a Dutch colony that has now become much more than a developing country, former Dutch envoy Rob Swartbol said.
Swartbol served as Dutch ambassador to Indonesia since October 2014. He left Jakarta last week for a new post in Moscow as Dutch ambassador to Russia.
Prior to his departure, Swartbol said Amsterdam had witnessed Indonesia growing significantly over time, resulting in a change of the Netherlands' perspective toward the archipelagic country.
“What I have been trying to do is to get a relationship where we are equal partners. We share information and transfer knowledge. We try to get more understanding so that we can work easily together,” he said, adding that during the colonial era, the two countries had unequal interaction with the Netherlands being the colonizer of Indonesia.
The Netherlands has since 2016 perceived Indonesia as a more equal trade partner and therefore decided to stop providing development aid for the Southeast Asian country by 2020.
The Netherlands, currently in the transition process to fully scrap the aid scheme, based its decision on the fact that Indonesia has grown significantly in the past two decades.
World Bank data shows that Indonesia’s gross domestic product (GDP) surged to US$931.8 billion in 2016 from $364.5 billion in 2006. The country’s GDP stood at $1.04 trillion last year.
