Again: the Dutch and their bad feelings about the colonial past

 Recently, I wrote already about the museum in Hoorn, where Jan Pieterszoon Coen was born and their condemnation of the genocide in Banda, May 1621, 400 years ago. This week there were again two initiatives that strengthened bad feelings about the Dutch and their own past.

The first is the first movie from the Dutch side on the cruel war by Captain Westerling in South Sulawesi. The movie De Oost shows the naive young soldiers who were lured to the last colonial war with the idea that 'they should defend the Indonesians against the self-interest of Sukarno, who created a nation full of internal conflicts'. In fact, in the movie a young soldier becomes member of the troops who under command of 'the Turk' (the common name for Raymund Westerling) terrorised the villages of South Sulawesi by setting many of them in fire and brutally killing all adult men. The movie De Oost is not yet shown in cinemas (closed due to the Covid-19 pandemy), but can be seen at Amazon's prime video and has created a renewed debate in the country. The story-line of the movie reminded me of the jihadi warriors who went to Afghanistan, Irak and Syria in order to do good, defend Islam against its enemies, while for many of them it was a deception, as decribed in the book by Beatrice de Graaf, below.

Veterans from the 1945-1949 in Indonesia criticised the movie because it would suggest that all elements of the army had been involved in violent warfare and indiscriminate killing of Indonesians. Two scholars of the KITLV, the Leiden institute for Indonesian studies, criticised the movie, because it gave no attention to the bravery of the Indonesian soldiers and only showed the brutal tactics of the Dutch army.

The other issue in our country these days is the great exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, the great national museum in Amsterdam, which focuses on the history of slavery and the involvement of the Dutch. This is usually only the story of trade of slaves for the Americas. But now also the Dutch involvement in Asian slavery is shown. First of all this was the case in Banda, where the population of about 15.000 mostly was killed, then the rest sold as slaves in Batavia, while other slaves were brought to Banda to work in the nutmeg culture. But in many other ways the Dutch were involved in the slave trade from India up to Indonesia. A special case is the strong personality of Surapati: a boy who was taken as a slave from Bali to Batavia, where he served as a houseboy in the ansion of the rich Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll (who married a lady ofJapanese offspring).Then he created his own army of runaway slaves and founded a realm of his own in Eastern Java.

On the painting above we can see Surapati as a houseboy in the mansion of the Dutch trader Pieter Cnoll. Below he leads his army against the Dutch (notice the Red-White-Blue flag).