Dutch leader apologises for Netherlands’ role in slave trade

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP):

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised on Monday on behalf of his government for the Netherlands’ role in slavery and the slave trade, in a speech welcomed by activists as historic but lacking in concrete plans for repair and reparations.

“Today I apologise,” Rutte said in a 20-minute speech that was greeted with silence by an invited audience at the National Archive.

Ahead of the speech, Waldo Koendjbiharie, a retiree who was born in Suriname but lived for years in the Netherlands, said an apology was not enough.

“It’s about money. Apologies are words, and with those words you can’t buy anything,” he said.

Rutte told reporters after the speech that the government is not offering compensation to “people – grandchildren or great-grandchildren of enslaved people”.

Instead, it is establishing a 200-million euro (US$212-million) fund for initiatives to help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to boost education about the issue.

Rutte apologised “for the actions of the Dutch state in the past: posthumously to all enslaved people worldwide who have suffered from those actions, to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants into the here and now”.

Describing how more than 600,000 African men, women and children were shipped, “like cattle” mostly to the former colony of Suriname, by Dutch slave traders, Rutte said that history often is “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

Rutte went ahead with the apology even though some activist groups in the Netherlands and its former colonies had urged him to wait until July 1 of next year, the anniversary of the abolition of slavery 160 years ago, and said they had not been sufficiently consulted in the process leading up to the speech. Activists consider next year the 150th anniversary because many enslaved people were forced to continue working in plantations for a decade after abolition.

Mitchell Esajas, director of an organisation called The Black Archives and a member of activist group Black Manifest, did not attend the speech despite being invited, because of what he called the “almost insulting” lack of consultations with the black community.

He said it was a historic moment, but lamented the lack of a concrete plan for reparations.