Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema has called on the Dutch government to officially apologise to former Moluccan colonial soldiers and their families, 75 years to the day after the first ship carrying them arrived in the Netherlands.

Speaking at a commemoration on the Javakade in Amsterdam’s eastern docklands, where a fleet of ships carrying roughly 12,500 people from the Moluccan islands in Indonesia arrived in the early 1950s, Halsema said the Netherlands “still has a debt to settle and an apology to make”.

The Moluccan men were career soldiers who had fought for the Dutch colonial army, the KNIL, in the 1945–49 war against Indonesian independence. After the Dutch were defeated, the Moluccans were seen as collaborators and could not safely return home; the short-lived Republic of the South Moluccas they had hoped to return to was crushed by Jakarta in 1950.

Independence struggle

The Dutch government brought the soldiers and their families to the Netherlands for protection and on the understanding that the stay would last six months. But on arrival the men were summarily dismissed from the army and their families were housed in former military barracks and wartime camps. Most never managed to return.

“The Netherlands remains, for many Moluccans, an unwanted stop on the way home”, Halsema said. “Whether in the reception camps or later in the Moluccan neighbourhoods, there has always been a packed travelling chest ready for the return journey”.

She said the unfulfilled promise of return had shaped successive generations, “with the tragic low point being the escalation of the 1970s” – a reference to the 1975 Wijster and 1977 De Punt train hijackings and the siege of a primary school in Bovensmilde, carried out by young Moluccans demanding Dutch action on an independent Moluccan state.

Too little too late?

A government apology would be a “meaningful gesture”, Halsema said, “especially now that first-generation Moluccans are still among us and able to receive it”. The late former prime minister Dries van Agt, who as justice minister in 1977 ordered the military assault that ended the De Punt hijacking, had privately urged the king to apologise to the Moluccan community before his death.

A temporary monument bearing the names of the eleven ships that brought Moluccans to the Netherlands was unveiled at the Javakade on Wednesday. Earlier in the day a separate memorial was unveiled at the nearby navy base for 14 Moluccan marines who continued in the Dutch navy after the KNIL was disbanded.

For some Moluccans the calls for an apology come too late, however. “Precisely because it fails to materialize and takes so long, I feel like: just let it go then,” one Moluccan descendant told broadcaster NOS. “We will just ensure in other ways that we recognise ourselves”.