“Violence has been used, we already knew that, but it was not as comprehensive as is now being suggested,” said the chairman of the Veterans Platform. Moreover, the violence came from both sides, he says. “Of course things have gone wrong, as in every war. But in general humanitarian aid has also been provided, food distributed, infrastructure built. That is not discussed.”
Researcher Gert Oostindie emphasizes that in the research report the Dutch armed forces as an institution are held responsible for the extreme violence. “We have not been trying to determine exactly what the individual soldiers have done.”
Little news
The research report does not go far enough for the Committee on Dutch Honorary Debts. “Where two fight, two are to blame, seems to be the approach,” says chairman Jeffry Pondaag, referring to the notion that extreme violence was taking place on both the Dutch and Indonesian side. “But there is one perpetrator, and that is the Netherlands.”
Pondaag expects that the report will not be surprising in that regard. “As long as the Netherlands does not explicitly designate itself as the perpetrator of war crimes, there will be no news,” he says. He sees the investigation as another attempt to smooth out what happened in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949.
That already happened in 1969, says Pondaag. Then the government ordered an investigation into the use of force during the decolonization of Indonesia. The results were recorded in the so-called Excess Memorandum. The cabinet said in it that although dozens of excesses and violent incidents had taken place during the independence struggle, they were exceptions instead of war crimes. That is still the official Dutch position.
The reason for the investigation in 1969 was the story of veteran Joop Hueting, who told on television about the war crimes committed by the Dutch army:
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