Dutch Memorial Day: Erasing people after death

Here’s why the Netherlands cannot recognize Indonesia’s 1945 independence: if the Netherlands recognized that date, that would mean that the country had attacked a sovereign nation after World War II with the purpose of recolonizing it. And then the massacres, euphemistically referred to in the Netherlands as the “police actions”, would not be “police actions” but war crimes, as explained in an upcoming book by Ady Setyawan and Marjolein Van Pagee. According to the official Dutch story, however, Indonesia was “Dutch” during the “police actions”, and thus killing your own people is not a war crime but, rather, law enforcement gone wrong. Except that law enforcement in the “police actions” were not police officers but soldiers serving in the Dutch army. The publication “De Doden Tellen” (“Counting the Dead”), issued by the government-appointed national Memorial Day committee, betrays the inconsistencies of the official story. It cites the conflict as “police actions” while simultaneously using language of military “conquest”. “During the so called police actions, the Netherlands conquers areas and declares them as Dutch territory once again”, the publication says. The Netherlands wants to count the people it has killed as its own, so as not to have committed war crimes, while at the same time not commemorating their deaths. What lies beneath the surface of the exclusion is segregation on the basis of race. Dutch colonialism did not grant citizenship to indigenous Indonesians. Now, 70 years later, colonial apartheid policies that separate, disadvantage and denigrate one race in favor of another are applied after death, on Dutch Memorial Day. On a day that commemorates civilian casualties of war, Indonesian civilian casualties are not commemorated because they had no citizenship under colonial rule. The chair of the official government national Memorial Day Committee, Gerdi Verbeet, admits as much when she says that “those who had no Dutch passport are not remembered at the moment”. There is further evidence of a racial exclusion policy on Dutch Memorial Day: Indonesian victims of World War II are also not commemorated. Although the number is not verified, civilian casualties from World War II in Indonesia are commonly estimated at 4 million. The official document that counts the dead to be commemorated on Dutch Memorial Day lists around 20,000, a stunning discrepancy. The way that the Dutch come up with such a wildly different number is because they exclude all indigenous people. Millions of people are thus erased on Dutch Memorial Day.

Annemarie Toebosch in Dutch Memorial Day: Erasing people after death (theconversation)