The History of the Moluccans in the Netherlands: A Contested Past?

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The History of the Moluccans in

the Netherlands: a Contested Past?

The relationship between the Dutch government

and the Moluccan community 1951-1991

Research master thesis

Hieke van der Voort

Supervisor James Kennedy

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Title The History of the Moluccans in the Netherlands: a Contested Past? The Relationship Between the Dutch Government and the Moluccan Community 1951-1991

Name Hieke van der Voort

Degree Research master History

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor James Kennedy

2nd supervisor Chiara De Cesari

Date October 31 2014

Pictures on title page

Clockwise, starting right upper corner:

- Demonstratie bij het Binnenhof. ‘Christelijk Nederland doe ons recht’ (before april 1955), Collection Moluccan Historical Museum. Series F 90.0325

- ‘Ceremonie rond de Rietkerkuitkering. Premier lubbers overhandigt de gekalligrafeerde tekst.’ (25-11-1986). Collection Moluccan Historical Museum. Series F 99.8340-99.834.8348

- Treinkaping bij de Punt. Een kaper loopt met een RMS-vlag langs de gekaapte trein (05-06-1977) Col-lection National Archive, series 2.24.01.05, number 929-2101

- Aankomst van Molukkers in Rotterdam, 1951 (22/22-03-1951). Collection National Archive. Series number SFA001004357

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Foreword

I distinctly remember moving to the small village of Bovensmilde when I was eight years old. As the new kid in class you simply accept the new world you live in, and so I simply accepted an order of things in which the Moluccan children always sat together - and lived together, for that matter. The Moluccans were simply different, and dangerous too, so my non-Moluccan class-mates told me. The reasons for this were a bit of a mystery to me. During Show & Tell in the last classes of primary school, many Moluccan children told us about their country (while I spoke about hamsters), which did not exist yet but where they would someday move to. A beautiful country, with a flag that represented in the colors the blue see, the white beaches, the green hills and the blood that represented the struggle for the nation. One of the boys in my class once broke into tears after a history lesson, because his uncle had been in a train and got shot. I never understood why, and never paid any more attention to it when I grew older and ‘the Moluccans’ disappeared mostly from my life.

In Utrecht I lived next to the Museum Maluku, and walking home from my classes on postcolonial theory and contested heritage, I slowly started to place these childhood memories in a more academic context. However, I only realized while writing of my thesis that my school class was something of a micro history. In my class were the children of Dutch hostages in the 1977 crisos, and children of Moluccan hijackers - something I found out only weeks ago. My teacher was the son of one of the important spokespeople for the RMS. This thesis is the result of my attempt to filter these childhood memories into academic research. I was surprised to learn that this case had not yet been researched from the perspective of memory studies. The case of the Moluccans is so complex and still so relevant, and it would be extremely interesting if more research were done on it from that perspective.

I want to thank Wim Manuhutu and Henk Smeets for taking the time to discuss my thesis, and for their insights.

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Abbreviations

BP Badan Persatuan (Moluccan organisation for the promotion of welfare of Moluc-cans and the RMS)

CRM Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie en Maatschappij Werk (Ministry of Culture, Creation and Social Welfare)

DS’70 Democratisch Socialisten 70 (Socialist Democrat party) GPV Gereformeerd Politiek Verbond (Reformed Political League) GV Gezamenlijke Verklaring (Joint Statement between BP and the

Government in 1986)

IWM Inspraakpunt Welzijn Molukkers (Participation point Welfare Moluccans) MHM Moluks Historisch Museum (Moluccan Historical Museum) later: MuMa MuMa Museum Maluku (earlier called MHM)

PvdA Partij voor de Arbeid (Labour Party)

RMS Republic Maluku Selatan (Republic of the South Moluccas) PPR Politieke Partij Radikalen [progressive party]

PSP Pacifistische Socialistische Partij

SGP Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (Reformed party) VVD Volkspartij Vrijheid en Democratie (Liberal Party)

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Time Line

1942 January 11 Start of Japanese invasion of Dutch Indies 1945 August 17 Declaration Republic Indonesia by Sukarno

1949 Summer Round Table Conference

1949 December 12 Recognition Republik Indonesia by the Dutch 1950 April Declaration Republic Maluku Selatan

1951 February to July Arrival of Moluccans to the Netherlands 1951 February to July Discharge of Moluccans from the KNIL

1970 August Hostage crisis residence Ambassador of Indonesia 1975 March Attempt to kidnap Queen Juliana by RMS youth 1975 December Hijacking of train at Wijster (Drenthe)

1977 May Hijacking of train at De Punt (Drenthe)

1977 May Hostage crisis primary school Bovensmilde (Drenthe) 1978 March Hostage crisis province hall Assen (Drenthe)

1978 February Molukkersnota

1986 April Gezamenlijke Verklaring

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Introduction

For many Dutch people the history of the Moluccans brings up remote associations of a crisis in the 1970s: the hostage taking of a primary school, the week-long hijacking of a train and the vio-lent ending of this crisis in a bloody shootout by the special forces. Some will recall riots in Mo-luccan residences, while others may remember that in the former concentration and transition camps in Westerbork and Vught there once lived groups of Moluccan soldiers. These fragmented memories are part of a much larger, and far more complex history than most Dutch people will remember – but it is a history that most Moluccans will be able to retell instantly. It is almost impossible to give a neutral or nuanced recollection of the history of the Moluccan minority in the Netherlands, because even the starting point of the history is politically sensitive. The histo-ry of the Moluccans in the Netherlands could begin in the colonial era, the 19th_{century, or simply}

in 1951, when a group of 12,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families were shipped to the Neth-erlands. They were brought to the Netherlands as a makeshift solution to the unexpected prob-lem of decolonization. Moluccan soldiers had fought on the Dutch side during the decolonization of the Dutch Indies after the Indonesian declaration of independence in 1945. After the Dutch finally had to accept the loss of their largest colony, the Moluccans in turn declared an independ-ent Republic of the South Moluccas (RMS) in 1950. The Indonesians would not allow the trained Moluccan KNIL soldiers that remained in Dutch service to disbanded on their home turf, because the new Republik Indonesia did not recognize Moluccan independence. After much debate the Moluccans ended up on Dutch ships for a temporary stay in the Netherlands, until a solution had been found. This solution was never came, and the Moluccans stayed in the Netherlands – where they became a distinct group in the Dutch cultural landscape.

The Dutch like to present themselves as a generous and hospitable people. The Nether-lands has a long history of migration, or so the national narrative goes. Already in the sixteenth century the Dutch received a large population of Sephardic Jews, followed by groups of Hugue-nots in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century there were Jewish refugees and Indies and Surinam migrants in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands historically seemed to have few problems with racism or discrimination. With the arrival of the Moluccans in the Netherlands, this situation changed. The Moluccans did not come to the Netherlands of their own accord, but on orders of the Dutch Indies Army (KNIL). They did not want to stay in the Netherlands, and did not wish to adjust to Dutch culture to the point of giving up their own South East Asian culture. In the 1970s there were violent clashes between young Moluccan RMS activists and the Dutch government - often called a unique case of political violence in the Netherlands, because they

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entailed the death of many civilians and were organized by political activists who had been born and raised in the Netherlands. In recent years the Moluccan violent actions have usually been viewed as the result of radicalization among a group of youths in the Netherlands, and as such treated as a problem of radicalization among youth rather than as radicalization within the con-text of postcolonial migration. This is an approach, however, that does not do justice to this complex development, because the general motivation for the violent actions was widely sup-ported by Moluccans as well as some Dutch groups. The ideas of the activists were not radical, only their actions were.

Indeed, in studying the largest recent research projects on postcolonial history in the Netherlands, one must inevitably come to the conclusion that the Netherlands never faced the problems that other former colonies faced. Although postcolonial migrant groups lobbied for recognition of, for example, their rights as war veterans, the Netherlands never experienced institutional or systematic racism against ethnic minorities.1_{In Dutch academic literature there}

is a tendency to emphasize that the Netherlands had little problems with multiculturalism, com-pared to other former colonies. Especially the series Postkoloniaal Nederland by Gert Oostindie and Ulbe Bosma take this position. Their respective books Postkoloniaal Nederland (2009) and

Terug uit de koloniën (2009) suggest that many migrants were at first appalled at the so-called kille ontvangst or cold welcome by the Dutch people after the Second World War.2_However,

after struggling for recognition of their experiences and service to the Netherlands, the groups of migrated Indos and Surinamers assimilated quite quickly to Dutch culture. This was mostly thanks to what Oostindie calls their postkoloniale bonus, the fact that they were often educated in the Netherlands, spoke Dutch and had a network of family and acquaintances in the Nether-lands. This helped them to find their way into the Netherlands without any major problems. Ac-cording to this vision the problems only started to arrive when large groups of migrants without this postcolonial bonus came to the Netherlands: the guest workers from Turkey and Morocco, and some economic migrants who came from the colonies in the wake of decolonization. These people did not have the necessary cultural and social capital to build a life in the Netherlands and this caused issues with unemployment, low education levels and a general cultural depriva-tion.

In this image of the Netherlands as a culture of migration, the Moluccans stand out. They did not have the postcolonial bonus of the other postcolonial migrants, and thus faced socio-economic problems similar to the guest workers. But although the Moluccans were not as well educated and versed in Dutch culture as the other postcolonial migrants, they did share a history

1

Ulbe Bosma. Terug uit de koloniën. Zestig jaar postkoloniale migranten en hun organisaties (Amsterdam 2009)

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with the Dutch. The Maluku Islands had been part of the spice trade since the 18th century, and the KNIL had used soldiers from the Moluccas since the second half of the 19th century. Despite these ties the Maluku Islands had always been far away from the administrative capital at Java and unlike some Javanese the Moluccans did not work or live in the homes of Dutch people. The Dutch and the Moluccans shared a colonial history, but their perspective was very different. When the Moluccans came to the Netherlands and lived together in temporary residences, away from Dutch society, this feeling of different perspective started to grow, and the Moluccans built an identity around their perspective on history.

Despite the fact that the case of the Moluccans is quite unique in the Dutch history, sur-prisingly little academic research has been devoted to their history. Most of it has taken place after 1991, when the Moluccan Historical Museum was commissioned by the Dutch government to write a history of the Moluccan community in the Netherlands. In 2006 In Nederland gebleven was published by Henk Smeets and Fridus Steijlen.3_{The group of historians who are concerned}

with the history of the Moluccans is small, and many of these historians have a personal connec-tion with the subject. Until now, moreover, most academic works have been written from a so-cio-economic or political perspective. The aforementioned works by Bosma and Oostindie most-ly discuss the way the Moluccans were organized in groups and associations, and how they posi-tioned themselves in the Netherlands as a postcolonial minority. Bosma and Oostindie mostly describe the Moluccans as postcolonial migrants with the disadvantage of lacking a postcolonial bonus. They are only postcolonial in the sense that they are connected to the Netherlands through the colonial past. Although it is correct to observe that the Moluccans have had a weaker socio economic position than other postcolonial migrants. It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to the sources of this disadvantaged position. Simply stating that the Moluccans did not have a postcolonial bonus, without questioning the premises of this postcolonial bonus, does not do justice to the complex history of the Moluccans in the Netherlands. Why did some of the Moluccans integrate well into Dutch society, while other Moluccans until today live in

Moluc-can neighborhoods away from Dutch society? Why did MolucMoluc-can youths radicalize until the

point of committing violent actions against Dutch civilians? Other postcolonial migrants faced similar hardships in their first years in the Netherlands, but they never came to the point of radi-calization.

In this respect the history of the Moluccans in the Netherlands is very much related to

memory. It is a history that has been of vital importance for the identity of the Moluccans living

in the Netherlands. Despite the violence and the riots in the Netherlands, however, it is a history

3_{Fridus Steijlen and Henk Smeets. In Nederland gebleven. De geschiedenis van Molukkers 1951-2006} (Amster-dam/Utrecht 2006).

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that is hardly discussed in the Dutch schoolbooks. In the Dutch historical canon that was created in 2006 Srebrenica, the independence of the Antilles and Surinam and the discovery of the gas field in Slochteren are mentioned, but not the Moluccan violence.4_{It is true that the Moluccan}

community is a small minority in the Netherlands in terms of numbers, but it is in the very least interesting that the single case of terrorism by a minority in the Netherlands is not mentioned as an important event in Dutch history. This omission in the historical shows that the Moluccan violence is a story that is not considered to be of vital importance to the Dutch culture or histo-ry.5

It is more often than not taken for granted that the Moluccans simply chose to isolate themselves from Dutch society, without asking if this isolation was in fact self-chosen. Questions of this nature are hard to answer, and require a meta perspective. However, relatively new sub-disciplines such as memory studies and critical heritage studies are well suited to answering them, more so than traditional historical research methods. And if the Dutch history has con-tested pasts, then the case of the Moluccans is pre-eminently a case worth analyzing. Moluccan and Dutch people still have entirely different recollections of the past, especially where the or-der and causality of historical events are concerned. In the 1970s these different collective memories came to a violent clash, but they have been the reason for the damaged relationship between the Moluccan community and the Dutch government since 1951. Although the situation improved significantly since the early 1980s, there are still several political groups, weblogs and Facebook pages dedicated to the injustice that has been done to the Moluccans by the Dutch government.6_{And not only members of the Moluccan community feel that the Moluccan past is}

contested. In an online poll by the Dutch magazine Historisch Nieuwsblad, that was held in 2012, 82 percent of the voters agreed with the statement that the Dutch government betrayed the Mo-luccan soldiers after the war.7_{At the same time the Moluccan history is hardly a topic of}

discus-sion in the history books, and few Dutch citizens know the history of the Moluccan community in the Netherlands.

4_{These are almost random examples from the Dutch canon. The entire list can be found through} http://www.entoen.nu

5_{Although the violence itself has been discussed, these works more often than not take radicalization as a} prem-ise and do not look at the causes of radicalization. E.g. P. Bootsma. De Molukse Acties. Treinkapingen en gijze-lingen 1970-1978 (Amsterdam 2000); F. L. Bovenkerk, L. Bovenkerk-Teerink, Brunt (e.a.), Zuidmoluks terro-risme, de media en de publieke opinie (Amsterdam 1982); R. Bron and C. Bijl de Vroe, ‘Zuid-Molukse gijze-lingsacties jaren 70’ . E. Muller (ed.) Crises in Nederland. Rampen, rellen, gijzelingen en andere crises.

(Deventer 2011) pp. 591-610; F. Dermant; B. de Graaf ‘How to Counter Radical Narratives: Dutch Deradicaliza-tion Policy in the Case of Moluccan and Islamic Radicals’. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2010) 33:5, pp. 408-428.; B. de Graaf and F. Demant. ‘How to Counter Radical Narratives : Dutch Deradicalization Policy in the Case of Moluccan and Islamic Radicals’. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2010) 33:5, pp. 408-428.

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See for example http://etherinathe.wordpress.com, http://www.historien.nl/interview-ex-treinkaper-sahetapy/, 7_{Bas Kromhout, ‘Lezersforum: de Molukkers zijn verraden’ . Historisch Nieuwsblad (2012) 6. Online:} <http://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/nl/artikel/29000/lezersforum-de-molukkers-zijn-verraden.html>

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In this thesis I will connect the history of the Moluccans with the field of memory studies. The study of memory has proven to be very useful to solve complex problems , concerning disputed or ‘contested’ history. It provides tools to look at national history from the standpoint of minori-ties and groups with a collective memory that diverges from the dominant historiography. Memory can fill in the gaps of history, because it uses different tools than traditional historiog-raphy. By looking at the representation of memories in individual memories, memorials, tradi-tions and the media it shows how the identity of a group is formed through these memories. Memory also points at the relationship between history and politics. It shows how collective memory shapes identity, which in turn shapes politics. It can thus do serious harm when the history of a minority is not included in the official history of a country. Every society harbors different ‘mnemonic communities.’8_{In itself that is not problematic, because collective memory}

is the defining factor for the identity of a group, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs already wrote in 1925. And, as the famous quote by Ernest Renan on nation states goes: ‘Forget-ting is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.’ When the political parties of a country forget certain historical events in order to create a stronger national image, it can cause serious prob-lems and discord in a nation, especially in a heterogeneous society with several minorities who can easily lose their historical legitimation as civilians of that nation.9

What was the influence of competing collective memories on the relationship between the government and the Moluccan community in the Netherlands? In the next chapters I will try to answer this question by looking at the development of a collective memory in both the Dutch and the Moluccan community. I will start with a theoretical chapter on memory and history, to provide my empirical research with a theoretical framework. In the second chapter I will give a general background of the two different mnemonic communities, to see how and where the dif-ferent perspectives on history were developed. I will look at how the Moluccans were received in the Netherlands, and at their experiences in the Netherlands in the first few years. In the third chapter I will look at the radicalization of the second generation of Moluccans, to see how the collective memory that they had grown up with, was placed in the context of international activ-ism, and how the Dutch and the Moluccans grew further away from each other. The Dutch per-spective on the Moluccan history became apparent in this time, and the misunderstanding of each other’s memory clashed in the violent actions in the 1970s. In the fourth chapter I argue that the first and most important step towards reconciliation was taken with the Molukkersnota and its counter nota of 1978. I will analyze the discourse of the document and the discussions

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Eviatar Zerubavel. ‘Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past.’ Qualitative Sociology (1996) 19:3 9_{See for a work with many case studies on this subject A. Assmann and L. Shortt (ed.) Memory and Political} Change (Basingstoke 2012)

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that followed it, and compare these to the discourse of the Gezamenlijke Verklaring of 1986. Both documents have been important steps in the process of reconciliation and a comparison be-tween the two shows how quickly the collective memory of both mnemonic communities changed in the early 1980s. Finally, the last chapter deals with the Moluccan Historical Museum. This museum was a gift to the Moluccan community from the Dutch government, as a ‘living monument’ of the past. I will analyze the permanent exhibition and the public discussion about the museum, to see how (or rather: if) the museum was used as a form of reconciliation between the Dutch and the Moluccans.

Following the case of the Moluccan community not only allows me to track the develop-ment of a contested past in the Netherlands, it also allows me see how Dutch society deals with postcolonialism – although on a side note. It is clear that the Moluccans were the only minority who explicitly refused to assimilate to the Dutch culture on Dutch terms. Important spokesper-son Johan Manusama more than once said that the Moluccans did not want to be forced in a Dutch straitjacket, but preferred to assimilate in their own time and pace. In the 1970s the gov-ernment was not only ill prepared for the violent actions of the Moluccans, but even less pre-pared for the demands of the Moluccan community: to be taken seriously as a former colonial subjects, and to be treated as equals who have a right to live in the Netherlands on their own terms. The Moluccan youths were convinced that violence was the only possibility to communi-cate this vision. Only when the Dutch government finally acknowledged it made mistakes, could the process of reconciliation be started.

Finally, some notes on method. This thesis is written in English, but most sources and lit-erature are in Dutch. In order to improve legibility I have translated all quotes in English as well as I could. In the footnotes I placed the original Dutch quote in brackets. I have chosen not to translate all words. I use, for example, the word woonwijken instead of its English translation neighbourhoods or districts. In Dutch the Moluccan districts (the literal translation) are usually referred to as ‘de Molukse wijk’. The woonwijken could best be translated as neighbourhoods. However, the term ‘neighborhood’ does not fully cover the meaning of a Molukse woonwijk. They are not just neighbourhood where a cultural minority lives together. They represent a specific culture: they are areas which are not very often visited by Dutch people, where the inhabitants have a strong sense of community. Living in a woonwijk is a way of life, and this is emphasized by the use of the Dutch word. In my research I mainly relied on the archives of the Ministry of CRM and the archives of Museum Maluku. The archive of CRM contains all official policy documents and correspondence to the Moluccan organizations. The archive of Museum Maluku does not only hold the archives for the museum itself, but also holds archives of key persons and organi-zations, such as Johan Manusama and Badan Persatuan. Unfortunately I encountered some

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prob-lems with these archives. Many documents on the Moluccans, especially those on the violent actions, are under embargo and cannot be viewed until 2053. The archives of the Museum Malu-ku are extensive, but not available in its entirety. After the museum was closed the archives have been stored and not all items are available for research.

For the purpose of my thesis I thought a long, chronological view would make more sense than a dense research of one period of time. However, this does mean that my analyses are by no means extensive or complete. A full analysis would take at least dissertation, but if this thesis can serve as a preliminary study it points the way to longer and more in-depth research on the subject.

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Chapter 1 - The theory of memory

1.0 Introduction

Memory is a concept that seems to have become increasingly important for historical research. In the last decades especially cultural history appears to have a obligatory memory compo-nent.10_{There have been many theoretical discussions about the relationship between memory}

and history. Is memory an inadequate version of history, or is history simply one aspect of cul-tural memory? Memory is an almost intuitive concept with which to work, but a concept that is hard to specify, because it has so many uses and meanings. It is associated with digitalization and the technical aspects of historiography. How to preserve historical testimonies and how to save historical data? How do we store historical data in the digital age? This leads to the ques-tion of representativeness of history. Who do historical data actually represent? How does histo-ry represent those people who do not leave behind publications, ego documents or other written proof of their existence, moreover, their thoughts and motivations? Memory is associated with cultural hegemony: it can also serve as a tool to balance the traditional narrative of the ‘great white men’ with the history of women, ethnic and political minorities, as well as the history of ‘the common man’.

Depending on the definition memory is either a tool for cultural historians who wish to save the illiterate from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, as E.P. Thompson once wrote so eloquently, or simply a new perspective on issues that seem to have been long beyond solving.11

Memory is suitable to give new insights into complex questions and issues, where simple histor-ical facts do not give any solace. This is especially the case in historhistor-ical issues which are called ‘contested pasts’: when historical events lead to fundamentally different interpretations. Con-tested pasts show the political aspect of memory. What happens when a minority has a memory of an event that is divergent from that of the majority of a population? When it concerns a sub-ject that has political implications history can become oppressive. Memory is pre-eminently use-ful to show the relationship between the past and the present. Memory can show how events of the past still influence social groups in the present. In that sense memory can also be defined as immaterial heritage. Heritage and memory are in fact often put together in museums in the last few years. History is the past that is no longer here – it is defined by that fact it forms a break

10

See for a historiography of the use of memory in history Patrick Hutton, ‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’. The History Teacher (2000) 33:4, pp. 533-548

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from the past. Heritage, on the other hand, is the past that lingers in the present. It is a bridge between the past and the present, which makes it different from history.12_{The same holds true}

for memory, but heritage is usually material while memory is not.13

In this first chapter I will explore the definition of memory and the importance of memory for the particular subject of my thesis. The history of the Moluccans in the Netherlands was and somehow remains a contested past in the Netherlands. It is a past in which memory plays an important role in shaping the identity and worldview of the Moluccans. This aspect of the Moluccan identity is implicit in many academic works on the Moluccan community, but has never explicitly been researched, as far as I am aware. I am convinced that memory is not only a way to make the implicit explicit, because it exposes all kinds of unspoken assumptions that have guided the behavior of both the Moluccans and the Dutch in the first fifty years of the stay of the Moluccans in the Netherlands. After an examination of these assumptions and interpreta-tions of the past it becomes possible to see where these differences have caused misunderstand-ing, bitterness and ignorance – and it will be possible to gain more insights into the motives of both parties.

1.1. Collective memory. Remembering and forgetting.

In Dutch the word ‘memory’ can be translated as either ‘herinnering’ or ‘geheugen’, much like the German ‘Erinnerung’ and ‘Gedächtnis’. This distinction is not made in English, but it makes defining the two aspects of memory easier. Memory on the one hand means the act of remem-bering and signifies the device that is used to store the memory on. On the other hand it also signifies the memory itself, that which is remembered. In modern thinking about memory Mau-rice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann have been influential. Halbwachs, a French sociolo-gist, wrote a book on collective which was first published in French 1925, to be translated in English only in 1991. The Assmanns elaborated on Halbwachs’s definition, adding their own thoughts about the relationship between remembering and forgetting. The basic idea of collec-tive memory, according to Halbwachs, is that remembering is never an individual process. A memory is formed within a social framework (‘cadre social’), and shaped through interaction with other people. Individuals in a group share a set of memories, and their individual memories

12_{This is a definition as it is used by Andreas Huyssen and David Lowenthal. D. Lowenthal, The Past Is A} For-eign Country (Cambridge 1988), introduction.

13

Heritage is defined as the physical remnants of the past, while memory, in the meaning of collective memory is tangible only through symbols, festivities and other cultural expressions. See also R. Harrison. Heritage: Crit-ical Approaches (London and New York 2013), introduction.

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turn into a collective memory by speaking about memories: they are socially mediated.14_{In turn}

this sharing of memories creates a social framework that enables individuals to place new mem-ories within that context. The group is shaped through shared memmem-ories, and simultaneously the group provides a context for individual memories to be shaped in. Halbwachs is also the founder of the idea that each group has its own version of an event, and that collective memory plays a large role in maintaining the group identity. This group can be based on anything: a shared reli-gion, blood, socio-economic position, nationality or any other characteristic. Such groups are called ‘mnemonic communities’: a community that shares specific memories.15

Memory lies at the basis of any group identity. In order to fully explain this, Jan and Alei-da Assmann make a distinction between two forms of collective memory. Cultural memory and communicative memory. Communicative memory is memory that is discussed every day and that is part of the active memory of people. It might be the last world championship or the coro-nation of the king. Cultural memory is ‘characterized by the distance from the everyday.’16_The

cultural memory of the group is its foundation. In the case of a nation, it might be the great struggle for independence, or religion. They are the points of reference for a group, the events and traditions that seem ‘islands of time’ in the sense that they are used in every day expres-sions, traditions and rituals.17_{This cultural memory is not only the legitimation and the}

founda-tion of a cultural group, but it also serves as a system of values. Values that fit into the symbols of the cultural memory are acceptable, and other values might be denied. Cultural heritage is an expression of this cultural memory. ‘Through its cultural heritage a society becomes visible to itself and to others. Which past becomes evident in that heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society.’18

In the original work by Maurice Halbwachs the concept of forgetting was not specifically addressed. Aleida Assmann added the idea of scarcity to memory. She made a distinction be-tween storage memory and functional memory. 19_{Cultural memory and communicative memory}

are terms used to describe how a mnemonic community is founded. The distinction of storage and functional memory is used to explain how some memories become cultural memory while others do not. Functional memory can be defined as the memory that can be directly recalled and which influences daily life. This could be called public history: the events that are taught in school, that are commemorated in daily life (like World War II) and the events that serve as a

14

Assmann, Jan; Czaplicka, J. ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’. New German Critique (1995) 65, pp. 125-133, p. 126.

15_{Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps. Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago 2003), p. 3.} 16_{Assmann and Czaplicka, ‘Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity’, p. 129.}

17_{Assmann calls these expressions of cultural memory ‘figures of memory’. Ibidem, p. 129.} 18

Ibidem, p. 133.

19_{The ‘ars’ and ‘vis’: ars is the art of storing memories, vis the process of remembering. Assmann, Aleida.} Cul-tural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambrdige 2011), p. 18.

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frame of reference in public opinion. It is what could be called the cultural canon of any society. Besides this collective functional memory there is also a storage memory. Functional memory, as the word implies, is functional to reinforce the cultural memory of a group. Storage memory, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. Storage memory consists of all traces of memory that ex-ist, but which are not functional to the cultural memory. It is the memory that is conserved in archives.20_{A distinction between the two kinds of memory uncovers a very important aspect of}

memory. Memory is always political. The functional memory, according to Aleida Assmann, has a limited capacity. Functional memory is therefore competitive. Transferring a memory from the archive to the functional memory means that another memory is erased from the functional memory. This gives memory an aspect of power. Who makes the selection, and on basis of what criteria? And who coordinates the archives? Only those memories that are ‘stored’ will be pre-served for future use.21_{There is thus a risk that the memories of minorities without power will}

be erased from the functional memory. And, even worse, there is a risk that these memories are lost from the archival memory, which means there is no chance that those memories will ever again be part of the functional memory.22

The four distinctions within memory: cultural memory and communicative memory, functional and archival memory, also show two essential characteristic of memory. The first is that memory is not permanent, but fluid and subject to change. Memory can be transfer between storage memory and functional memory, and communicative memory can become part of cul-tural memory. Essential to this concept is the idea of scarcity and forgetting. All functional mem-ories are ‘mediated representations of the past that involve selecting, rearranging, re-describing and simplifying, as well as the deliberate, but also perhaps unintentional, inclusion and exclusion of information.’23_{The second characteristic is that a group needs memory to form its identity,}

and that it needs a timeless cultural memory to use as a frame of reference. The cultural memory is always expressed in institutions and traditions, such as museums. These institutions provide members of the group with mnemonic templates and they are important to the ‘mnemonic so-cialization’ of the group.24_{Again, heritage is a key element: objects of heritage are relics of}

cul-tural memory, and they help to place new memories in the context of the culcul-tural memory.

20

Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (Cambridge 2011) 21

The Assmann’s call this ‘ reservoir for future functional memories’ and ‘a resource for the renewal of cultural knowledge’. Quoted in: Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 37.

22_{Jeffrey Olick. The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York 2007),} p. 24.

23_{Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (ed.). Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke 2012), p. 3.} 24

Eviatar Zerubavel. Time Maps. Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago 2003), p. 5. And James Wertsch, ´Resistance to Change´ in: Assmann and Short, Memory and Political Change, pp. 173-185, p. 176.

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The real question is who manages the transfer of communicative memory to cultural memory, and from functional memory to archival memory. And, more importantly, who ensures that these memories are adequately remembered? Eric Hobsbawm has shown the danger of blindly trusting on cultural memory. Sometimes traditions are presented as cultural memory, as events that founded the group. But as Hobsbawm pointed out in his influential work The

Inven-tion of TradiInven-tion, leaders of naInven-tion states have often used cultural memory as a strategy to

legit-imate their own agenda. The Dutch monarchy is a great example of a tradition which is repre-sented as a timeless and essential part of the Dutch cultural memory, while it in fact has only been constituted little over 200 years ago. 25_{Memory is instrumental to the purpose of political}

leaders, in this case – it is used to build an artificial cultural memory and to provide nations with an heroic self-image.26_{Concluding, deconstructing memory can be very useful in exposing}

hid-den power. In the next paragraph I will show how this idea of memory as power is used in the context of (post)colonial history.

1.2. (Post)colonial memory and cultural amnesia

A lot of research has been done about forgetting and remembering, especially in the context of contested pasts: histories that are painful or controversial. In the case of genocide, the Holocaust or civil war, it can be difficult for a nation state to deal with conflicted memories of the past. A society may have mnemonic communities that have a fundamentally different interpretation of the past. In horrific cases, such as the Rwandese or Bosnian genocide, but also in cases on a smaller or less catastrophic scale, like the difference between the former East and West in Ger-many or the student protests in Italy, remembering and forgetting plays a big role.27_Sometimes

there is one dominant discourse that is contradicted by a minority. This means that, although individuals may have their own memories, the public memory of an event is one-sided and leaves no room for nuance or dissent. This is yet another aspect of memory, which flows from the inconsistency between storage and archive memory. In a society several mnemonic commu-nities exist, each with their own cultural memory. These groups exist in a larger nation state, which has a cultural memory of its own. Following the theory of the Assmann’s there is a limited amount capacity in the cultural memory of the nation state, which means that memory becomes politically loaded. As memory is fluid, it ‘by definition involves sharing, discussion, negotiation,

25_{Or the Scottish tradition of wearing kilts, now seen as an ancient tradition, was actually a lost tradition which} was reinvented in the 19th century. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (ed.), The Invention of Tradition (Cam-bridge 1991)

26_{Erll, Memory in Culture, p.44.} 27

C.f. Assmann and Short, Memory and Political Change; Bell, Duncan (ed.) Memory, Trauma and World Politics. Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (London 2010); Hajek, Andrea. Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe. The Case of Italy (Hampshire 2013).

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and often conflict. Remembering consequently becomes implicated in a range of activities that have as much to do with identity, power, authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of conserving and recalling information.’ In this process, the memory of a mne-monic minority may get lost in favor of maintaining the memory of a more dominant group: a problem of conflicted memory.28

Conflicted memories do not only occur in countries that are strongly divided. Selecting and forgetting memories is a process that happens in many countries and cultures, whether in-tended or not. Countries that have a history of colonialism almost always have difficulty in forg-ing a narrative of history that is acceptable to all inhabitants. As Astrid Erll notes participation in the collective memory of a nation states indicates that a group is really part of the nation.29_Not

being included leads to polarization between those who are included and those who are not. ‘Wars’ over memory can be the result. Representatives of a dissenting group will challenge the collective memory of the majority, by presenting a counter-memory. States with a turbulent past and a heterogeneous make-up of inhabitants are susceptible to these memory wars. (Post)colonial nations are therefore especially sensitive, because they often deal with a process of decolonization and after that with a postcolonial immigration stream. Subjects of former col-onies often have a perspective on historical events that is very different from that of the former colonizers. The colonizers remember the loss of a colony, and a subsequential blow to the na-tional identity, while the formerly colonized often struggle for recognition of their own post-colonial identity and the losses, especially when the decolonization process has been violent. When the former colonizer is challenged with this different perspective, it can lead to a feeling of discomfort and, consequentely, a form of displacement activity from the colonizers.

This displacement is called cultural amnesia: a type of amnesia in which some events are erased from the collective memory, as if they never happened – even if the results are still visi-ble. This cultural or social amnesia can be defined as: ‘a mode of forgetting by which a whole society separates itself from its discreditable past record. This might happen at an organized, official and conscious level – the deliberate cover-up, the rewriting of history – or through the type of cultural slippage that occurs when information disappears.’30_{Here again, the discrepancy}

between what is remembered and what has happened is clear. A lot has been written about this type of amnesia. Some memories can be so painful that they are paralyzing and that simply

28

William Fitzhugh Brundage. Where These Memories Grow. History, Memory, and Southern Identity. (Chapel Hill 2000), p., 3.

29_{Astrid Erll. Memory in Culture (Basingstoke 2011), p. 17.} 30

Definition by Stanley Cohen, quoted in: Susanne Buckley-Zistel. ‘Between Pragmatism, Coercion and Fear: Chosen Amnesia after the Rwandan Genocide’, in: Assmann and Shortt. Memory and Political Change. Pp. 72-89.

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getting them seems the only viable option.31_{The Holocaust is of course the greatest example of}

this in recent Western Europe. Even in the Netherlands historiography after the war focused much more on the heroes of resistance and the victory over the Germany, than on the victims of the war and the Holocaust. Only in the 1970s did it change into a historiography that included the traumas of the war.32_{Societies can suffer from a collective trauma, which is ‘a form of}

expe-riences that originates not in the individual psyche but as a social and discursive phenomenon and has found its way both into psychology and into public discourse,’ according to Dominic LaCapra.33_{The mechanisms that apply to individual traumas also apply to collective traumas. A}

trauma means that some subjects become unspeakable. People do not remember events, or choose not to remember them – consciously or unconsciously.34

Ann Laura Stoler nuanced the idea of cultural amnesia in the context of decolonization. She argues that colonial histories are usually not completely erased from the national history of the colonizer, but that they sometimes ‘remain safely sequestered on the distant fringes of na-tional narratives where they have long deemed to belong.’35 Colonial experiences are shared in

literature and art, but not so much in official narratives. According to Stoler colonial history is not so much a case of cultural amnesia, but it is a case of aphasia. Aphasia is a medical condition with which people are unable to speak. Their brain cannot process information and transform it into words. It is different from amnesia, because unlike with amnesia people can remember, but they cannot find the words to speak about it. ‘Aphasia in its many forms describes a difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty compre-hending what is spoken.’36_{France, which has had a violent and quite late ending of the colonial}

era, specifically in Algeria. The Harkis, Algerians who had fought on the French side in the war for independence, who ‘were placed in forest hamlets under military surveillance throughout the provincial countryside and … who were sweeping the streets, tending the gardens of Parisi-an summer homes in Provence, Parisi-and providing the agricultural labor in the breadbaskets of France,' resemble the Moluccans in the Netherlands.37

31

Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (ed.). The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester 2004), p. 7.

32

Lou de Jong’s 14 volume Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog is the best example of this type of historiography. See Rob van der Laarse and Frank van Vree’s De dynamiek van de herinnering. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog in een internationale context. (Amsterdam 2009)

33_{Silke Arnold – De Simine. Mediating Memory in the Museum. Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia (Basingstoke} 2013), p. 38.

34

See Susanne Buckley-Zistel’s analysis of the case of amnesia in Rwanda. Susanne Buckley-Zistel. ‘Between Pragmatism, Coercion and Fear: Chosen Amnesia after the Rwandan Genocide’, in: Assmann and Shortt. Memory and Political Change. Pp. 72-89.

35_{Ann Laura Stoler. ‘Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France.’ Public Culture (2011) 23:1, pp.} 121-156, p. 121.

36_{Stoler, ‘Colonial Aphasia’, p. 125.} 37_{Ibidem, p. 140.}

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According to Stoler the Harkis have been ‘forgotten’ in most versions of French recent history. In this case it not simply forgetting and remembering, but it is a case of more or less consciously choosing to let the colonial history disappear into archival memory, instead of ad-dressing it in the functional memory, i.e. the institutionalized practice of academic historical research. It is easier to ignore the issue of race and colonialism, because addressing this issue would mean that cultural memory of the French nation state would be have to be reconstructed. Only when a mnemonic minority started to critically demand a revision of the colonial history, historians could no longer ignore this subject. At that point it became easy to use the ‘passé compose’, as Stoler puts it: the past tense in French that signifies a finished or accomplished past. This leads to a narrative of regret, in which the past can be written off as regrettable, and in which those who have been treated unfairly by and in the past are redeemed, without really questioning the perpetrators of this injustice.38_{In the next paragraph I will go further into the}

notion of narratives of regret.

1.3. The politics of regret?

According to Stoler’s theory there are only two options in discussing difficult and contested pasts. The past can be ignored, in the case of colonial aphasia. And the past can be presented as a ‘passé compose’, a regrettable event. In this instance the past is presented as something which is regrettable and which should be remedied. This second solution has been theorized by Jeffrey Olick in his work The Politics of Regret. In his work he gives a model for reclaiming dealing with counter-memories an contested pasts, by taking the state of Germany as a case study for how apologizing and regretting has such a regular process that it has turned into a culture of regret. He distinguishes three phases in this process, which I will describe later in this paragraph. These three phases must be gone through in order to come to terms with a contested past. In compli-ance with what Stoler says, these steps have a downside. They make apologies and regret a polit-ical instrument, instead of a way to solve the problem of contested pasts. There is no real perpe-trator in a culture of regret, there are only victims and sympathizers. At the same time apologies have become also a formal element of society. Olick argues that ‘regret is the emblem of our times’, in the sense that societies have become increasingly aware of the political aspects of their cultural memory.39_{Different mnemonic communities develop a technique of ‘mnemonic}

re-sistance’, in which they ‘have challenged official versions of the past and demanded redress for perceived contemporary and historical wrongs’.40_{Politicians are under pressure to apologize for}

38_{Ibidem, p. 144.}

39

Jeffrey Olick. The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Social Responsibility (New York 2007), p. 14.

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events of the past, as if they are representatives of the cultural memory of a nation state. This culture is heavily influenced by the idea of universal human rights and the idea that the past is political. A culture arises in which ‘only gestures of reparation, apology, and acknowledgement can restore the dignity of history’s victims and can deter new outbreaks of inhumanity.’41

Apologizing and showing regret is an essential part in ‘restoring the dignity of history’s victims,’ according to Olick. He distinguishes three phases in the process of reconciliation with the past. First there is denial by repressing memories of the past. Then there is the phases of public confrontation, and recognition of the hurtful past. Then there is a phase of normalization, in which the past become part of national history.42_{Olick is not the only one who distinguishes}

phases in coming to terms with the past. In Conflicted Memories Konrad Jarausch discerns not three, but four stages in the process of coming to terms with a contested or conflicted past. He focuses specifically on decolonization and the way this process has been dealt with by the for-mer colonizers. The first phase of decolonization is the initial phase in which a colony is still col-onized. In the second phase is the phase of denial and of forgetting by ‘throwing a veil of silence over the past drama.’ The third phase is that of ‘anamnesis and the return of ghosts from the past.’43_{Although the public is trying to forget the events of the past, there are traces, witnesses}

and other remnants that make it hard to forget. With this phase Jarausch in all likelihood means a period which is similar to Stoler’s theory: that the past cannot be erased, and that there will eventually be a demand from a mnemonic community to revive the ‘ghosts from the past’. Final-ly, there is the fourth phase, the phase of reparation. This phase of reparation is characterized by ‘the increasingly systematic attempt to repair errors and crimes of the past, in particular on the part of states, whether they do this on their own initiative or are pressure into doing so by asso-ciations or social groups. Reparation generally takes on three forms: financial, consisting of re-imbursements to people who were stripped of their property; legal, by means of investigations leading to trials; and symbolic (…)’44_{This phase has taken an increasingly more important place}

in the process of reconciliation, according to Olick. Jarausch also describes a fifth phase. Alt-hough this phase is not common enough to be called a real phase, there is a tendency towards a phase of ‘judiciarization’, in which history is subject to trial. This is mostly the case in states that need transitional justice by means of truth commissions, international crime courts, et cetera. In less extreme cases the judiciarization could also mean a an institutionalization of the past, in the form of memorials, school text books or other ‘official’ symbols of history.

41_{Of course the human rights discourse itself is also heavily influenced by the memory of the Holocaust. The} idea that the Holocaust forms a breaking point in the history of humanity, as for example Hannah Arendt posed, has helped to develop this idea further. Olick, The Politics of Regret, p. 126.

42

See chapter 7 of Politics of Regret. 43_{Jarausch, Conflicted Memories, p. 31.} 44_Ibidem.

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All three authors (Stoler, Olick, Jarausch) share the idea that there are phases in coming to terms with contested pasts. Recognition and acknowledgement are important in this process, because they allow minorities to claim a place in society that is equal to that of the majority. Recognition starts with facing the past, rather than looking away of pretending it does not exist, as Stoler remarks. All authors agree that this step towards recognition is not a natural step. This step is almost without exception forced upon a nation state by mnemonic minorities who mand that their memories become part of the national historical canon. What follows these de-mands is a phase in which the government tries to repair the past, through a number of ways: by financial compensation or a restoration of rights, but also symbolically, through apologies and adding the contested past to cultural memory. This seems like a sensical end of the problem, but in practice simply ‘adding’ a memory to cultural memory is a complex affair. The traditional view of memory is that it is a competitive, limited concept. If one memory is added to the cultural memory it means that other memories will have to go or will at least by muddled. This is the Assmann’s traditional definition of collective memory. In the case of colonial history this is ap-parent: the white, sometimes nostalgic memories of colonialism cannot coexist with the memo-ries of minorities who have a very different perspective on the same event. The cultural memory of a former colony does not match with the memories of the minority that came to the country after decolonization. The cultural memory of a nation is thus compromised when a minority claims a place in the same cultural memory. According to Assmann’s view there is no solution but to constantly compete for a place in the public sphere.45_{In practice, however, that would}

mean that there is no way out of this problem, especially in nation states with a very strong cul-tural memory.

In Multidirectional Memory Michael Rothberg does come with a solution to this problem. He rethinks the concept of ‘memory’ by adding the notion of multidirectionality. Multidirection-al memory moves away from the static, traditionMultidirection-al approach to memory. Instead of static and fixed, memory is ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; … productive and not private.’46_{In other words there is no such thing as ‘the’ cultural memory of a nation}

state. Multidirectionality ‘encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into be-ing through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction.’47_{In this vision national cultural memory could benefit}

45

See Aleida Assmann. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media Archives (Cambridge 2011). Astrid Erll. Memory in Culture (London 2011) and others.

46

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. (Stanford 2009), p. 3.

47

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from the new memories of the mnemonic communities that migrate to a country. When memo-ries are placed in the context of other memomemo-ries they are deepened out and given new meaning. Memories are in dialogue with each other, rather than in competition. With his own research on the relationship between decolonization and the Holocaust, Rothberg shows that the decoloniza-tion process forced a debate about the Holocaust in the Western world, while the Holocaust it-self later helped to give context to decolonization in the non-Western world.

Multidirectional memory can be a solution to a postcolonial debate that is stuck between aphasia and apologetic historiography. Creating a memory that incorporates the memories of all people takes the edge of the contested past, and makes it a shared past. This is of course not without struggle or difficulty, but it is a starting point that is more hopeful than a starting point based on the idea of competitive memory. Not in the last place because the idea of multidirec-tional memory itself is so interesting. Multidirecmultidirec-tional means that memory can and should not remain isolated: it changes and develops when it comes in contact with other memories, and other mnemonic communities. This interaction is vital for the development of the memory, be-cause if memories are devoid of any interaction they run the risk of becoming corrupted. A mul-tidirectional approach to memory leaves room for discussion and reconciliation. As memory is so important to the identity of social groups, a memory that is devoid of interaction with other memories runs the risk of becoming static and even corrupted. When a memory is kept isolated and when it is not placed into (historical) context, it can be repeated until it has become a script. A script that is culturally significant to the mnemonic community, but that is also historically inaccurate because it has not been tested by the historical reality. In the case of the Moluccans and the Dutch this happened on both sides. The strong relationship between cultural memory and identity in this case shows that a lack of interaction in memory can have serious political consequences.

1.4. Dutch memory culture

How does the Dutch memory culture fit into the theory discussed in the above paragraphs? In recent years the number of historical works on the subject of postcolonialism has increased. Like many European nation states, the Netherlands is a former colony. It was so well into the 20th century. The Netherlands lost the Dutch Indies to Japan in World War II, after which Japan lost the Dutch Indies to Indonesian nationalist. After the war the Netherlands tried to win back the Dutch Indies with a series of violent ‘police actions’. In 1949 the Netherlands was forced to rec-ognize Indonesian independence. After 1949 groups of people came (back) to the Netherlands: Dutch who had been living in the Dutch Indies, the group of mixed Dutch-Indonesians, ‘indos’, and some Indonesians who had studied in the Netherlands or had Dutch ancestors. In the last

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decade a large research project was undertaken by Gert Oostindie, Ulbe Bosma, and Lizzy van Leeuwen under the title Bringing History Home: Postcolonial Identity Politics in the Netherlands. In this large project the three authors wrote about postcolonial migration and the postcolonial debate in the Netherlands; how it has developed since decolonization in the 1940s/50s. Oost-indie’s conclusion in his monograph Postkoloniaal Nederland is that the Netherlands has never had an extensive or intense public debate on postcolonialism, but that postcolonial migration has nevertheless gone remarkably well compared to other countries, there was little discrimina-tion or racism in the Netherlands and there was never much conflict. There has never been much of a public debate on postcolonial migration, because there has never been much need for it. The Netherlands has no ghettos, there is not very much racism or discrimination and after the

ontzuiling [‘depillarization’] of the Netherlands, there was also not much of a class of religion

barrier left, leaving room for the social mobility of all people including immigrants.

The problems that did occur were easily sorted out, due to the Dutch pragmatic ap-proach and something which Oostindie calls ‘the postcolonial bonus’. Many migrants, especially war veterans from the former Dutch Indies, felt unwelcome in the Netherlands.48_{Oostindie and}

other, such as Martin Bossebroek, have called this the ‘kille ontvangst’, the cold welcome. There was little empathy for veterans and other war victims from the colonies. However, this ‘cold welcome’ solved itself as these postcolonial migrants easily migrated into Dutch culture. Oost-indie explains this with the concept of the ‘postcolonial bonus’ of the so-called repatriates: these were people who had a Dutch passport but had lived all their life in the colonies. Due to this, they had the benefit of speaking the language well and have enough cultural and social capital to be heard by the Dutch society. When some problems occurred in the early years, the repatriates were able to solve them. A group of former Dutch and Indo KNIL soldiers, for example, demand-ed the right to be commemoratdemand-ed during the annual national World War II commemoration on May 4th_{. They received this right after some years: a pragmatic solution, because the Dutch did}

not want to get into conflict with the veterans.

In the perspective of Oostindie the Netherlands is presented as a sometimes rough, indif-ferent, and rude country, but also a pragmatic and open-minded country that does not cling to its past. The consensus seems to be that most migrants met some cultural friction at the start, but then more or less easily integrated into Dutch culture. This image of the Netherlands as a hospitable and generous country for migrants is an old narrative, and the Dutch government is fond of referring to the fact that the Netherlands received the Huguenots and the Sephardic Jews from Spain when they were in trouble, and the Jews from Germany during World War II. Only when large groups of economic migrants came to the Netherlands, who did not integrate well

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into the Dutch culture, problems with racism and discrimination started to arise - but these problems have nothing to do with decolonization.

There are some facts that suggest that this image is too rosy. War and decolonization are closely connected in the Netherlands. In the overview of postcolonial monuments that Gert Oost-indie, Henk Schulte Nordholdt and Fridus Steijlen made, it becomes clear that the Netherlands in fact was not very quick to include postcolonial migrants in the cultural memory of the war. First the war veterans from overseas struggled to be placed on the Dutch national monuments for the war. This happened as early as 1950, although the first national Indies monument for the Indies veterans was placed only in 1988.49_{There were other monuments, however, such as the Indie}

monument in Enschede (Overijssel) that was placed in 1960, and the monument for the Japa-nese female internment camps (1971) in Apeldoorn. Being recognized for fighting in a patriotic war was important for the sense of belonging of KNIL soldiers, but it was only later the real is-sues of postcolonialism were addressed.

The case of the Moluccans is a much bigger anomaly in Oostindie’s theory. In the post-war cultural landscape of the Netherlands, the Moluccans stand out as a group that does not fit into the theory of easy intergration. The Moluccans came to the Netherlands collectively, and unlike the other Indies migrants, did not have the ‘postcolonial bonus’.50_{The Moluccans are}

sometimes compared to the Harkis in France, as I mentioned before in paragraph 1.2.51_Both

minorities are ‘natives’ of a colony who have fought on the side of the colonizer, and who have afterwards been brought to the country of the colonizer, where they had to fight hard to gain an acceptable socio-economic position. In the Dutch postcolonial debate the Moluccans are often seen as the exception to the rule. As we will see later in this thesis, the Dutch government noted with surprise in the Molukkersnota of 1978 that the Moluccans did not seem to actually want to integrate into Dutch society, but wanted to stick to their own culture. It was assumed that mi-grants would simply adapt to the Dutch culture - they could stick to their own cultural habits, but it was assumed that they would adapt to the Dutch system of law, education and politics. As Bosma, Van Leeuwen and Oostindie’s research shows, many migrants did. The Moluccan case is presented as an improbable exception to this pattern. As Oostindie puts it, ‘apart from the now concluded, moderate Indisch lobby against the Republic of Indonesia and the short period of

49

Gert Oostindie; Henk Schulte Nordholt; Fridus Steijlen. Postkoloniale Monumenten in Nederland. Post-colonial Monuments in the Netherlands (Amsterdam 2011), p. 24.

50_{Oostindie calls this the postcolonial bonus, and uses it as a concept to explain why some groups of migrants} integrated well into Dutch society while other groups had much more problems with adapting to Dutch life. 51_{See for a comparison Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland, p. 62, 70 and 214. The resemblance was also noted} in Smeets and Steijlen, In Nederland gebleven (2006).

The History of the Moluccans in the Netherlands: A Contested Past?