The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, Thursday offered “profound apologies” to the Indonesian people for the violence recorded during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949), following the publication this Thursday of an official report denouncing the “systematic and excessive violence” in that period.
Rutte apologized for “the systematic and widespread extreme violence by the Dutch in those years and the constant looking the other way by previous cabinets.” But he stressed that the responsibility for this “black page” does not fall on the soldiers “sent poorly prepared on an impossible mission” and pointed to “a colonial sense of superiority” and a “collective failure” of the agencies of the time, where he included to the Dutch government, armed forces and judiciary.
This Thursday the results of a five-year investigation carried out by 115 experts in the Netherlands and Indonesia, financed and commissioned by the Dutch Government itself, were published, and its conclusions contradict the official version maintained until now that the violence during that war it was “an exception”.
They concluded that the armed forces used structural, extreme and widespread violence, that there was ill-treatment and torture, extrajudicial executions, arson in villages, theft and destruction of property and food supplies, disproportionate airstrikes and shelling, and “what they were often random mass arrests and mass internments.”
torture methods
“It was known from top to bottom, but it was tolerated, disguised and left practically unpunished,” said historian Rémy Limpach at the press conference to present the report, in which he also stressed that there were excesses of violence by Indonesia. , which was colonized by the Netherlands for three centuries.
Among the evidence they used are diaries, letters, interviews and memoirs, such as that of Yaseman, who was tortured in 1947 and recalled torture methods that included kneeling on glass, mock executions, sticking cigarettes up nostrils and electric shocks. “The torture was not only to gather intelligence, but also to extract confessions. Those victims have made confessions to stop the torture. (…) So the Indonesians were sentenced to prison terms or death on the basis of forced confessions” Limpach adds.
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King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands apologized in 2020 to Indonesia during a state visit to Jakarta, where he spoke of “excessive violence”, but until now the Dutch state had never acknowledged the extent of the violence.
Asked regarding the possibility of the affected groups claiming reparations from the Netherlands, Rutte said: “These apologies are what they are: full recognition that we have all failed.”
