Dutch Government to Compensate Indonesian Victims of Colonial Violence

Late last month, the government of the Netherlands announced that it would pay compensation to the children of Indonesian men summarily executed by Dutch forces during the nation’s struggle for independence in the 1940s. 

The announcement followed a court ruling in March, which found that nine elderly women living in Indonesia are widows “of men unlawfully executed under the responsibility of the Dutch state” and are thus entitled to damages. The men in question were killed in 1946-47 by Dutch forces in what is now the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi.

“Children who can prove that their father was a victim of summary execution as described... are eligible for compensation,” Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok and Defense Minister Ank Bijleveld said in a letter to the Dutch parliament. The compensation on offer amounts to 5,000 euros ($5,900).

For years, relatives of victims of the Dutch campaign against Indonesia’s independence fighters have been pushing for compensation from the Dutch government. As far back as 1968, a Dutch report acknowledged “violent excesses” in Indonesia, but argued that Dutch troops were conducting a “police action” often incited by guerrilla warfare and terror attacks. Even in the current case, the Dutch government argued that the statute of limitations for any compensation had passed.

In 2013, the Dutch government apologized for atrocities committed by its forces in fighting between 1945, when Indonesia declared its independence from Dutch colonial rule, and 1949, when the Netherlands was finally forced to recognize Indonesia’s independence. In March of this year, the Netherlands’ King Willem-Alexander also formally apologized for his country’s aggression during its 350-year rule over the Dutch East Indies, and recognized 1945 as the beginning of Indonesia’s independence.

The recent Dutch ruling marks just the latest effort by a European nation to acknowledge and atone for its Asian imperial conquests. In June, King Philippe of Belgium expressed his “deepest regrets” for acts of appalling violence and brutality that were inflicted during his country’s rule over the so-called Congo Free State. Under the vain and capricious rule of Philippe’s ancestor, Leopold II, Belgian officials and rubber concessionaires are alleged to have killed around 10 million people, and maimed many millions more.

British officials, too, have apologized for specific imperial atrocities. In 2013, Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed “sincere regret” for the torture and abuse committed by British colonial officers against Kenyans during a rebellion against British rule in the 1950s. Shortly after his election in 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for British failings during the Irish Great Famine, while Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year begged forgiveness for the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India.

These actions are all well overdue, as gestures of recognition and atonement for the atrocities of the past. They also call attention to the profound and wrenching impact that Western imperialism had on the nations of what is today Southeast Asia. By the turn of the 20th century, nearly the whole of the region lay under varying shades of Western control. While Indonesia – then an agglomeration of islands known as the Dutch East Indies – was under Dutch rule, the French tricolor flew over what are now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, while Myanmar, Malaya, and parts of Borneo were colored British imperial red. For nearly half a century, the United States ruled the Philippines, following three centuries of stagnation under the Spanish Empire.

The legacy of imperialism continues to weigh heavily on the modern nations of Southeast Asia. To this day, Myanmar and Malaysia still grapple with the racial divisions fostered by London in order to facilitate the extraction of resources for the benefit of corporate shareholders in London and Glasgow. Destructive colonial wars waged by France and the Netherlands to hold back nationalist revolutions in Indo-China (now Vietnam) and the Dutch East Indies caused immense human and material damage. In the case of Indo-China, this prepared the ground for a further generation of war and upheaval.

Then there is the sheer amount of material wealth that Western corporate raiders extracted from their Southeast Asian colonies. The Indian economist Utsa Patnaik has estimated that during the period 1765 to 1938, Britain drained the equivalent of $45 trillion in today’s dollars from its Indian colonies. As far as I am aware, similar estimates have not been made for Southeast Asian colonies – but one would have to assume the amounts would be colossal.

“The immense economic inequality we observe in the world today didn’t happen overnight, or even in the past century,” write the political scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of several books, including “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.” 

“It is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism.”

In many ways, the political cultures of the modern nations of Southeast Asia are direct products of the imperial experience. Colonization was not just a matter of physical subjugation; it also prompted a searing self-examination in which traditional sources of political and moral authority were questioned, dismantled, and assailed. In time, it gave birth to new ideas of nationhood and fierce identities attached to them. Indeed, these identifications have often been used by post-colonial Southeast Asian as a foil against criticism from former colonial powers, and as a catch-all response to any disapproval of how they govern their countries in the present.

Apologies and actions like that taken by the Netherlands represent an important acknowledgement of historical wrongs, and will help lay the foundation of a new era of European engagement with the world. At the same time, they cannot hope to be anything more than symbolic salves for the dislocation and long-term impacts of the imperial project. While the number of Southeast Asians who personally experienced the contusions of Western imperialism grows smaller with every passing year, the taint and developmental legacy of Western imperialism will likely persist for many generations to come.