SORRY seems to be the hardest word. Or so it appears to the Dutch. On Feb 17 — more than 70 years after the bloody war for Indonesia's independence was fought — Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was finally moved to say sorry to the Indonesians.
And that too after a five-year study by Dutch and Indonesian researchers revealed that the colonial power sanctioned the systematic use of extrajudicial killings and torture. "I make a deep apology to the people of Indonesia today for the systematic and widespread extreme violence by the Dutch side in those years and the consistent looking away by previous cabinets," The Guardian quotes Rutte as saying after the publication of the report.
Indonesia would have applauded him if he had called "the systematic and widespread extreme violence" war crimes, which they were.
According to the newspaper, an estimated 100,000 Indonesians were killed compared with 5,300 Dutch soldiers between the declaration of independence by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta and the withdrawal of the Netherlands' forces on Dec 27, 1949.
Like saying sorry, calling a spade a spade appears to be a very hard thing for the Dutch to do, too. To that spoiler, Rutte added another. The blame, he went on to say, didn't belong to individual soldiers but to the "prevailing culture".
A court in The Hague didn't think so when on March 27, 2020 it ordered a very reluctant Dutch state to pay compensation to victims of colonial atrocities committed by its soldiers.
But then again, isn't culture an amalgamation of individual behaviour? Bad soldiers make a bad army. And vice versa. Perhaps the prime minister was being politically correct.
For the longest time, the official position of the Netherlands government has been that the Dutch were the victims of Indonesian violence. And their army was a bunch of well-behaved soldiers. So much so that a good section of Dutch society believes that the Netherlands did no wrong in its colonial past. In a YouGov survey conducted in June 2019 quoted by The Guardian, only 17 per cent thought colonised countries were worse off. Another 27 per cent thought colonised countries were better off, and 37 per cent thought they were neither better nor worse off. Some 20 per cent pleaded ignorance.
Blame it on "the consistent looking away by previous cabinets", a phrase used by no less than Prime Minister Rutte.
Small wonder, even Dutch academics seem too reluctant to admit their country's historical evils. One such is Piet Emmer, a retired history professor, who infamously put it thus to the British newspaper: "You are not allowed to say it, but colonialism introduced modern civilisation." This is how history gets badly rewritten.
At least the Dutch version. Colonialism was, at best, corporatised barbarism. Dutch East India Company's record should be telling enough. With professors like this, history is best left unwritten.
Rutte must be credited for taking a step or two forward by setting the record straight. But half measures are dangerous and unwelcome, at least to the Indonesians who had suffered 350 years of Dutch atrocities.
Is it any surprise that The Jakarta Postwants the Dutch apology to be returned "to the sender with a thank you note".
We understand why. Never do things by halves. A Dutch treat is no treat.