Act Daily News
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Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized Monday for the Netherlands’ “slavery past,” which he stated continues to have “negative effects.”
Rutte’s feedback have been a part of the Dutch authorities’s wider acknowledgment of the nation’s colonial previous, and an official response to a report entitled “Chains of the Past” by the Slavery History Dialogue Group, revealed in July 2021.
“For centuries under Dutch state authority, human dignity was violated in the most horrific way possible,” Rutte stated throughout a speech on the nation’s National Archives in The Hague.
“And successive Dutch governments after 1863 failed to adequately see and acknowledge that our slavery past continued to have negative effects and still does. For that I offer the apologies of the Dutch government,” the Dutch prime minister stated.
Rutte additionally spoke briefly in English on Monday, saying: “Today, I apologize.”
“For centuries, the Dutch state and its representatives facilitated, stimulated, preserved, and profited from slavery. For centuries, in the name of the Dutch State, human beings were made into commodities, exploited, and abused,” Rutte stated.
He stated that slavery have to be condemned as “crime against humanity.”
Rutte acknowledged that he had skilled a private “change in thinking” and stated that he was improper to have thought that the Netherlands’ position in slavery was “a thing of the past.”
“It is true that no one alive now is personally to blame for slavery. But it is also true that the Dutch State, in all its manifestations through history, bears responsibility for the terrible suffering inflicted on enslaved people and their descendants,” he stated.
In early 2020, the Dutch authorities returned a stolen ceremonial crown to the Ethiopian authorities.
The nation profited significantly from the slave commerce within the seventeenth and 18th centuries; one of many roles of the Dutch West India Co. was to move slaves from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch didn’t ban slavery in its territories till 1863, although it was unlawful within the Netherlands.
Dutch merchants are estimated to have shipped greater than half one million enslaved Africans to the Americas, Reuters reviews. Many went to Brazil and the Caribbean, whereas a substantial variety of Asians have been enslaved within the Dutch East Indies, which is trendy Indonesia, the company wrote.
Dutch kids are nevertheless taught little concerning the position Netherlands performed within the the slave commerce, Reuters added.
Conversations concerning the nation’s angle to race have long-surrounded one in all its vacation traditions. The character of “Black Pete” usually sees a white individual carrying full blackface, an Afro wig, pink lipstick and earrings, and is commonly a part of the Netherlands’ St. Nicholas festivities in December.
Rutte in 2020 stated the nation his views on “Black Pete” had undergone “major changes” – however he wouldn’t go so far as banning it.