Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will speak Monday in reaction to a report on the country’s role in the worldwide slave trade, prompting speculations he may apologize.
Rutte says his National Archive speech will be “important.”
Some activist groups in the Netherlands and its former colonies believe an apology should be made next year on the 160th anniversary of slavery’s abolition. Many enslaved people continued working on plantations for a decade following slavery, so activists consider next year the 150th anniversary.
Barryl Biekman, chair of the Dutch National Platform for Slavery Past, wondered, “Why rush?”
The Dutch government expressed regret for the nation’s historical role in slavery but stopped short of a formal apology. Rutte said such a pronouncement could polarize society. Parliament now favors an apology.
Rutte’s remark comes after the Black Lives Matter movement and the police killing of a Black man in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
The prime minister’s address responds to a government-appointed advisory board’s report from last year. It recommended the government apologize and recognize that the slave trade and slavery from the 17th century until abolition were crimes against humanity.
The report concluded Dutch institutional racism “cannot be separated from centuries of enslavement and colonization”
Starting July 1, 2023, the government will observe a slavery memorial year “will ponder the past’s pain. How this past affects many people now.”
An independent study last month uncovered rampant prejudice at the Dutch foreign ministry and diplomatic missions.
In Suriname, where Dutch plantation owners made great profits using enslaved labor, activists and politicians say they haven’t been solicited for input, reflecting a Dutch colonial attitude. Compensate, they say.
The Dutch were prominent trans-Atlantic slave traders in the mid-1600s. Dutch West India Company became the largest trans-Atlantic slave trader, stated Leiden University’s Karwan Fatah-Black.
Amsterdam and Rotterdam have apologized for city fathers’ complicity in the slave trade.
Denmark apologized to Ghana in 2018 for its mid-17th- to mid-19th-century colonization. Belgian King Philippe “deeply regrets” Congo abuses. Pope John Paul II apologized for slavery in 1992. Americans have fought about removing sculptures of Southern slaveholders.
