Prime Minister Rutte delivered his speech at the National Archives in The Hague, a “place for national self-examination,” as he termed it. He began his speech with a greeting in the languages of Suriname and the six Caribbean islands that are part of the Dutch Kingdom.
“Even if we don’t hear the unwritten rumors of the past, the story that emerges from all the documents is not only beautiful. It is often ugly and downright embarrassing,” Rutte said. You called slavery in which the Netherlands actively participated “a criminal system which has caused untold suffering to untold numbers of people and continues to operate in the present”.
Since the 17th century, between 600,000 and over 1 million people have been shipped from Africa to America by the Dutch and traded under appalling conditions. “The numbers are staggering, the human suffering behind them even more inhuman,” Rutte said. “They were taken from their families, dehumanized, treated like cattle.”
