Dutch PM apologises for Netherlands’ role in slave trade

 Mark Rutte says Dutch state ‘enabled, encouraged and profited from slavery’ for centuries

Mark Rutte has offered a formal apology on behalf of the Dutch state for the Netherlands’ historical role in the slave trade, saying slavery must be recognised in “the clearest terms” as “a crime against humanity”.

In a speech at the national archives in The Hague on Monday, the Dutch prime minister acknowledged that the past “cannot be erased, only faced up to”. But for centuries, he said, the Dutch state had “enabled, encouraged and profited from slavery”.

For centuries, “people were commodified, exploited and traded in the name of the Dutch state”, he said. Slavery had caused “great suffering, that continues to affect the lives of people now … And for that, on behalf of the Dutch state, I apologise.”

Rutte’s words were due to be echoed by Dutch ministers who had travelled to seven former colonies in South America and the Caribbean that suffered untold misery during the 250 years of the slave trade that helped fund the Netherlands’ economic and cultural “golden age”.

The move followed the conclusions of a national advisory panel set up after the 2020 killing of George Floyd in the US, which said Dutch participation in slavery had been a crime against humanity deserving of a formal apology and financial reparations.

It has, however, caused considerable controversy, with descendants’ groups and some of the affected countries criticising it as rushed and arguing that the lack of consultation from the Netherlands showed colonial attitudes still persisted.

Campaigners have said an apology should instead come from the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, and be made in the former colony of Suriname, on 1 July next year – the 150th anniversary of the day slavery finally ended there.

Slavery was formally abolished in all Dutch overseas territories on 1 July 1863, making the Netherlands one of the last countries to outlaw the practice, but took another decade to end in Suriname because of a mandatory 10-year transition period.

The prime minister of the Dutch Caribbean territory of Sint Maarten, Silveria Jacobs, told Dutch media on Saturday the island would not accept any government apology “until our advisory committee has discussed it and we as a country discussed it”.

A St Maarten activist, Rhoda Arrindell, said: “We’ve been waiting for a few hundred years for true reparatory justice. We believe that we can wait a little further.”

Roy Kaikusi Groenberg of the Honour and Recovery Foundation, a Dutch Afro-Surinamese organisation, said there had not been enough consultation with descendants, who have battled for years to force the Netherlands to come to terms with its history.

“It takes two to tango – apologies have to be received by somebody,” Groenberg said. “The way the government is handling this, it’s coming across as a neocolonial belch.”

The Netherlands has taken time to address its colonial past, only adding the history of Dutch slavery to the school curriculum in 2006. “There is a sector in society that really clings to colonial pride,” said Karwan Fatah-Black of the University of Leiden.

Historians estimate that at the height of its 16th to 17th-century empire, Dutch traders shipped up to 600,000 enslaved Africans to South American and Caribbean colonies such as Suriname and Curaçao, and more to South Africa and Indonesia.

Dutch cabinet ministers were in Suriname, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Aruba, Curaçao, Saba, and Sint Eustatius to “discuss the cabinet response and its significance on location with those present” after Rutte’s speech, the government said.

The first major Dutch foray into slavery was in 1634, when an initial 1,000 slaves were abducted from the Gold Coast – today’s Ghana – to Brazil by the Dutch West India Company to work in its plantations.

The Caribbean island of Curaçao, captured the same year, became a slave-trading hub and in 1667 the Dutch seized Suriname, on the north-east coast of South America, turning it into a plantation colony heavily dependent on slave labour from Africa.

In the Indian Ocean and Asia the Dutch East India Company brought slaves mainly to Cape Town from modern-day Madagascar, and to modern-day Indonesia from the Indian subcontinent.

At its height in the 1770s, historians have calculated that slavery accounted for more than 10% of the gross domestic product of Holland, the richest of the seven Dutch provinces that made up the then United Provinces of the Netherlands.

Rutte’s remarks follow Denmark’s 2018 apology to Ghana, which it colonised from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century, and King Philippe of Belgium’s “deepest regrets” for abuses in Congo, expressed in June this year.

Individual Dutch cities including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht have formally apologised for their roles in the slave trade and the government had previously expressed “deep regret”, but stopped short of a formal apology.

He said on Monday that the year from next July would be a slavery memorial year in which the country would “reflect on this painful history”.

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Source: theguardian

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