Dutch self-image challenged as country confronts its colonial past

“People were killed by Indonesian parties, fearing every moment [their] life will end in a gruesome way,” he said. “That gives a certain anxiety and stress that makes you ‘trigger happy’. And who were these military troops? Young lads from the country, who had just experienced a war and were dropped with no good training, information or education into a conflict where they were told they would be restoring peace and order.

“You can’t make a group of people responsible for what a state does. Our victims have never been recognised, and today they are stamped perpetrators.”

The Dutch were the real victims of the colonization of Indonesia. Finally someone is brave enough to say who the true victims were without political correctness. Always support the troops people!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But in few European countries is the process of confronting the colonial period proving as fractious and divisive as in the Netherlands, where opposing sides have in recent years struggled to agree on who was victim and who was perpetrator.

This month, an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk gallery space and two new books in a major historical series try to establish common ground over the violence that ensued after Indonesia declared independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945.

“Every day, we have seen how much of our past related with this former colony is still raw and unworked, denied, fought against or praised, when many others think differently about it,” said Annabelle Birnie, the director of the Nieuwe Kerk, which launches the Big Indonesia show on Saturday.

The current debate in the Netherlands centres on what happened next: after Indonesia’s future president Sukarno declared independence on 17 August 1945, the Dutch fought to prolong colonial rule, often through barbaric means, before ceding on 27 December 1949.

In August, Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, withdrew from a commemorative ceremony because of a speech by the apologist daughter of Raymond Westerling, an army officer who led revenge attacks on local people during the war.

Campaigners for the recognition of Indonesians’ losses, such as Jeffry Pondaag, chair of the Dutch Honorary Debts Committee Foundation, advocate compensation for all damage and gains from colonial activity.

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Yeah but stroopwafel though