It's time for the Netherlands to recognise Indonesian independence properly: Opinion
Together with decolonial activists in the Netherlands and Indonesia the Yayasan Komite Utang Kehormatan Belanda (www.kukb.nl – Foundation Committee for Dutch Honor Debts) launched an Open Letter to the Dutch Government demanding recognition ‘fully and without reservations’ of August 17, 1945 as the official independence date of the Republic of Indonesia.
This Open Letter has two objectives. Firstly, the Netherlands must concede that the repression of the Indonesian fight for justice and freedom between 1945 and 1949 was not an internal Dutch affair but an illegal invasion of another country. Hence the atrocities committed by the Dutch army and its local collaborating militias were war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Secondly, the Netherlands must recognise that more than 300 years of colonial rule over Indonesia was not some effort to do good that went wrong. It was always a criminal endeavour exclusively aimed at enriching the Netherlands at the expense of millions of brutally enslaved people. Colonialism was and is a crime of theft, as codified in the UN Charter, UN Resolutions and international law.
What to the uninformed outsider may seem a trivial detail about a specific date touches on the core of the problem. 81 years after Indonesian independence from its former coloniser, the Netherlands still refuses to accept full accountability for its crime of colonialism.
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On March 10, 2020, King Willem-Alexander expressed his apologies in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for what he called “the excessive and disproportional violence of the repression” during the liberation struggle of Indonesia between 1945 and 1949.
On June 14, 2023, prime minister Mark Rutte 1 followed up by recognising August 17, 1945 as the official date of Indonesian independence. He did so during a debate in parliament and declared to do this “fully and without any reservations”. To the outside world that seemed to settle the issue. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The words spoken by the King and the prime minister do not match the facts. In practice, the Netherlands still maintains the legal fiction of the date of November 27, 1949 as official date of independence, when the Netherlands signed an agreement to finally end the futile attempt at reconquering its colony.
This allows Dutch courts up to this day to dismiss any claims of reparations for war crimes by victims of the colonial repression (and their descendants) during the period of 1945 and 1949, as they consider these victims still to be ‘Dutch citizens’ until 1949.
Why is recognition of the date of 1945 so important?
Right after World War II the Netherlands, assisted by allied British colonial forces and remnants of the Japanese occupation army, tried to reestablish its racist colonial hegemony over the Indonesian archipelago.
After liberating its own country of the scourge of Nazism, the Dutch ruling elite considered that justice and freedom were an exclusively European privilege not to be extended to lesser brown people in a distant country, more than 11,000 kilometres from its shores. It did so with deadly repression, massacres, extrajudicial executions, torture and disappearances.
By now claiming to recognise ‘fully and without reservation’ the independence of Indonesia since 1945, while doing the opposite in its courts, the Netherlands prove to the world that postcolonial racism is still rampant.
The brutal repression of the fight for freedom of the Indonesian people was not some ‘internal affair’, it was the illegal occupation of another country. Likewise, 300 years of Dutch colonialism was an occupation, a massive system of theft, exploitation, racism and corruption. The violence of colonialism was not some ‘excess’, it was its essence.
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As long as the Netherlands refuse to accept full accountability ‘without reservations’ for its international crime of colonialism, the country has no moral authority to lecture any other country on human rights, justice and freedom.
Next August 17, 2026, the Dutch leading newspaper De Volkskrant will publish the Open Letter. The fight for justice is international. We therefore invite people all over the world to sign the Open Letter on the web page of De Goede Zaak (‘the good issue’).This essay represents the views of its author. The content has been edited by Global South World only for clarity of reading.
