TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Prime Minister Rutte has apologized. What next?
A recently released study on colonial violence in Indonesia has started to reverse the decades-long culture of cover-up by Dutch institutions, from The Hague all the way down to the individuals on the battlefield.
Change Size
A Dutch military reenactment takes place. JP/Boy T. Harjanto (JP/Boy T Harjanto)
A
s a second-generation free Indonesian, ever since the beginning of my professional life in the Netherlands some 30 years ago, I have felt blessed to have gained new insights into history when searching for explanations for surprises in my encounters with the Dutch people.
“During my vacation, I visited Fort Vredeburg museum in Yogyakarta. What a terrible exhibition. The Dutch were presented like the Germans occupying Holland. Look at our legacy! Railroads, plantations, buildings, bridges, irrigation!” a Dutch acquaintance complained to me.
I was so stunned that I could not say a word in reply. In a thought afterward, I could have said, “If the Germans had occupied Holland for long enough, you would now have a high-speed railway network and industries like BMW and Siemens in Holland. You would not have the Dutch things you are proud of, that in reality have come into existence after World War II. Would you be grateful for that?”
"It's very strange that we keep seeing death notices in newspapers with phrases like ‘born in Jakarta in 1930’. It should be Batavia, Jakarta did not yet exist at that time," a Dutch lady told me. Obviously, she had not the slightest idea about how Batavia came into existence, that is, by first destroying the original town of Jakarta.
When I told a Dutch friend that I was going to take a day off to celebrate Indonesia’s Independence Day in The Hague on Aug. 17, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “Isn’t it supposed to be sometime in December?”, apparently referring to what he was taught at school.
These were all surprising, particularly because they are highly educated people with university degrees. In my spare time, every now and then I read articles and books on the common history of Indonesia and the Netherlands. I came across an article titled Squaring the circle; Commemorating the VOC after 400 years, written 20 years ago by Gert Oostindie, a Dutch history professor, which explained in a sentence, “Knowledge and awareness of the national past in Dutch society simply do not run deep."
The sentence helps to give a sense of understanding, if not a sense of pity, when hearing comments contradictory to the atrocious greed that characterized Dutch colonialism. It helped when a Dutch politician recently laid flowers on the foot of a J.P. Coen statue in the city of Hoorn. It helped when former Dutch prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende praised the “VOC mentality” in 2006.
