Holland apologizes for over two centuries of slavery: behind-the-scenes look at an apology that comes 150 years too late

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, gave a speech on Monday in The Hague on the role of the Dutch state in 250 years of slavery in which he apologized.

Rutte, spoke words predicted for 150 years by descendants of people enslaved by the Kingdom of the Netherlands between 1621 and 1873: “Slavery was a crime against humanity”Y”I apologize on behalf of the government” for the role of the Dutch state.

In a speech to the National Archives in The Hague, Rutte spoke of a system that inflicted “unspeakable suffering,” allowing it to be “condemned and recognized in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity,” terminology that had not been used first by the government to refer to slavery.

“For centuries the Dutch state and its representatives have allowed, encouraged, maintained and profited from slavery. People have been commodified, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state (…) Today, on behalf of the Dutch government, I apologize for the actions of the Dutch state in the past,” he said.

Slavery it was “a criminal system which has caused untold suffering to untold numbers of people around the world, and continues to affect people’s lives here and now,” stressed Rutte, who deemed the National Archives to be the place for this “search for the national soul.” . .

In a speech to the National Archives in The Hague, Rutte spoke of a system that inflicted “unspeakable suffering,” allowing it to be “condemned and recognized in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity,” terminology that it had not been used before by the government to refer to slavery.

“For centuries, the Dutch state and its representatives have done this allowed, encouraged, maintained Y They benefited of slavery. People were commodified, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state (…) Today, on behalf of the Dutch government, I apologize for the actions of the Dutch state in the past,” she said.

Slavery it was “a criminal system which has caused untold suffering to untold numbers of people around the world, and continues to affect people’s lives here and now,” stressed Rutte, who deemed the National Archives to be the place for this “search for the national soul.” . .

The racism

He admitted that, for a long time, he thought “it’s not possible to take meaningful responsibility” for something that happened in the past and that he didn’t witness himself, but acknowledged that “I was wrong” because “centuries of oppression and exploitation” still affect societies today.

“In racist stereotypes, in discriminatory patterns of exclusion, in social inequality,” he said. While it is true that “no one living today is personally guilty of slavery”, the Dutch state “in all its historical manifestations, is responsible for the great suffering inflicted” on enslaved people.

Other Dutch government representatives were present this Monday in Suriname and six islands in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, St Eustathius, Saba and Sint Maarten. There they planned to hold meetings with local representatives about the apology, which Rutte himself called a “significant moment.”

Hundreds of thousands of people

The the legal slave trade ended in 1814but survived in the Dutch colonies until 1873. “More than 600,000 African women, men and children slaves were sent to the American continent in appalling conditions by Dutch slave traders (…). They have been separated from their families, dehumanized, transported and treated like cattle,” Rutte denounced.

This was often under the government authority of the West India Company, while in Asia between 660,000 and more than 1 million people were trafficked into areas under the authority of the Dutch East India Company between the 17th and 19th centuries.

“The numbers are incredible. The human suffering behind this is even more unimaginable. Are countless stories and testimonies of survivors who demonstrate how cruelty and arbitrariness had no limits in the slave system,” he denounced.

He referred to slave registers, “a dry and contradictory enumeration precisely because it underscores the absurdity of a system in which one person transformed another into a commodity.” It was “so inhuman and unjust a system” that, when it was abolished, those who were financially compensated by the state were “slave owners” and not the victims.

The controversy

The journey to December 19 was long, given that the organizations representing the descendants of slaves have been urging them to apologize for years, but the journey since choosing the date (three weeks ago) has been too short, in the eyes of the same organizations, very critical of haste.

They think so the date has no special meaning and they preferred this gesture to be made on July 1, in Keti Koti (breaking of chains), the commemoration of the formal abolition of slavery in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles in 1863 (although slaves worked on the plantations for another 10 years, until they were no longer legally “under state control”).

They also criticized enslaved communities they weren’t involved in the process, nor in the content of the speech.

One of the reasons given by analysts to explain the government’s haste is Provincial elections in March for which the composition of the Senate is also chosen: the government fears that the campaign will cause a division in the coalition and that there will not be enough political support for an apology if postponed to 2023.

But Rutte warned that his intention is not to “delete those pages with an apology”, because “we cannot change the past, we can only face it”, and he assured that the gesture made today is “a comma, not a point “, towards “dialogue, recognition and healing. Will an apology be accepted?

The implications

The role of the Netherlands in slavery it went hand in hand with the expansion of their colonial and commercial interests around the world in the 17th century, called the Dutch “Golden Age”.

After the creation of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 and the Dutch West India Company (WIC) a few years later, trade, including the slave trade, developed rapidly.

The country and its cities, such as Amsterdam, they became enormously richculture and art flourished, with rembrandt (1625-1669) as one of its greatest figures.

In 1634, the WIC began trading thousands of slaves from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) to New Holland, Dutch Brazilto send them to work on the plantations.

The same year, the company captured Curaçao, a Caribbean island formerly held by the Spanish, which quickly became a center of the slave trade.

In 1667, the Dutch colonized Suriname on the northeastern coast of South America, which became a plantation territory heavily dependent on slave labor from Africa.

The Dutch came to trade about 650,000 slaves in total.

The role of the Dutch in the slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Asia is less documented, but equally important, according to experts.

Slaves were mainly brought in to Cape Town from what is now Madagascar and Indonesia, formerly called the Dutch East Indies, where human trafficking with people captured on the Indian subcontinent flourished.

The question of apologies for the Dutch state’s role in the slave trade in these former colonies It has been bred for years.

But the matter gained momentum last year with the release of a commission report recommending the government recognize slavery as a crime against humanity and apologize.

A recent survey in the Netherlands indicated this only 38% of the population was in favor of an official apology.

Also important were the British, French and Spanish empires.

The British were the greatest in history. In the early 20th century, it extended from western Canada to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. In 1913 he ruled over 400 million people, about a quarter of the world’s population and land area.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the second largest colonial empire belonged to France which in 1931 ruled over 12 million square kilometers of territory and 60 million inhabitants, from French Guiana in South America to much of West Africa and New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

But, in its heyday in the late 1700s, the Spanish empire was bigger, covering about 13.7 million square kilometers of territory, especially America.

EFE AND AFP