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The Dutch National Institute for the History and Legacy of Slavery (NiNsee) doesn’t believe the Dutch cabinet is too hasty to apologize for its history of slavery. Says President Linda Nooitmeer News time. Various Surinamese interest groups he indicated that they were having difficulty with this.
Organizations came with that criticism after the cabinet announced on Friday what form the previously announced apology for the past of slavery will take. Seven cabinet members will each travel to a different former colony of the Netherlands and simultaneously deliver their apologies on December 19. Prime Minister Rutte is doing the same in the Netherlands.
The National Repair Commission Suriname (NRCS) believes that the Netherlands is working too hastily. But Nooitmeer cannot agree with this. “At NiNsee, we have been working for twenty years to get an apology from the Dutch state. As far as we are concerned, the apology should have taken place in 1863. So when you talk about timing, we say: we are actually almost 160 years late. .”
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Another point of criticism from Surinamese interest groups is that it is not the king or prime minister who is coming to apologize, but Legal Protection Minister Franc Weerwind. “At NiNsee we have always emphasized the symbolic value of the king,” says Nooitmeer.
“But we also said it’s important that recognition be given at the same time in all these different places. All those people suffered under the slavery regime.” That’s why Nooitmeer thinks the cabinet idea that apologies in each former colony are made simultaneously by a different cabinet member is also a good solution.
This is what people on the street in Paramaribo think about the way the Dutch government wants to apologize for the past of slavery:
“People will ask: Is this apology sincere?”
News that an apology will take place on Dec. 19 hit Suriname ‘like a bombshell’, says Iwan Brave, editor-in-chief of the Surinamese newspaper The real time. “He came out of nowhere. You already knew it in advance: this is not going to go well with the Surinamese community.”
He understands the criticism that the Netherlands is working too hastily in this way. “The party receiving the apology needs to be prepared as well,” she says. “What’s the text going to be? Do you want to receive it. Do you want to have all those kinds of preparations ready.”
For Nooitmeer it is more than tone of voice an apology. “What words are used? What do they radiate?”
As a positive example, he cites the speech of the mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma. “The first sentence of his speech was: Transatlantic slavery and the slave trade was a crime against humanity. Bam. We didn’t whisper it to him, but because we pointed to what we think is important in it, he made that speech up that did it justice to the feeling we had.”
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He understands that desire to influence the process. “The good news of all the criticism is that there is a lot of involvement, and this is also because people are really feeling the impact of slavery’s past. So anything that has to do with this process is being put under magnifying glass, this also applies».
He agrees that it shouldn’t stop at apologies. “We want to focus on the process after the apology. It’s about the recovery agenda. How will the apology be implemented? What action plan will result?”
He points to the apology that Hague Mayor Jan van Zanen made a week and a half ago for The Hague’s quota of slavery. “He immediately attached an action plan, which will also include discussions with the citizens of The Hague. This is absolutely important.”
