The Indonesian roots of Prime Minster Rutte and his dilemma between 15-17 August

 For Dutch people a commemoration is held on 4 May each year of the people who died in World War II, while the new freedom in the country is celebrated on 5th of May. This year has a more elaborated celebration because of 75 years after 1945. On 15 August there is a special celebration in The Hague at the monument for the victims of Japanese rule in Indonesia, January 1942- 15 August 1945. This year the monument in The Hague was smeared with red paint by an Aliansi Merah Putih who claim that The Netherlands should not only mourn for the fate of their own citizens, but recognize that it made the wrong choice not to celebrate Indonesian Independence on 17 August. Instead the Dutch tried between 1945-1949 to renew their control in Indonesia.

This year prime minister Rutte was not only present in his official function, but talked about the fate of his family: his father (working in a Dutch firm in Indonesia) was imprisoned and had to work for the Japanese. his wife and two cildren were in separate camps and his wife died just before the end of WWII. Back in the Netherlands his father remarried and had four more children, among them Mark Rutte. In his speech he discussed the difficult and different choices and memories of Dutch citizens. They all have their own priorities: the largest group are the Eurasion or Indo people. They emphasize, together with the offspring from Dutch people who suffered in Japanese camps and from the bersiap violence, between September 1945 and early 1946, that Indonesian freedom fighters killed thousands of people, just coming out of the Japanese camps. But also the Moluccan and Papua people in the Netherlands have their own ideas about the past and the difficult divorce between the Dutch colonial power and the Indonesian nationalism under Soekarno. An academic research about the last colonial war of 1945-9 has not yet published its results, but the focus of research is already criticized by many people concerned. One should not forget that about 2 million out of the Dutch population of 17 million in the Netherlands in some way have 'Indonesian roots'. As an involved academic in this process I am still very happy that in the fight against the Dutch, the difference of  religion was not an important issue (it became a cause of civil war in various regions like West Java, South Kalimantan, Sulawesi). Anyway, this debate still proves that Indonesian-Dutch relations still are influenced by different interpretations of the past.