THE HAGUE: Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Monday officially apologised for 250 years of the Netherlands’ involvement in slavery, calling it a “crime against humanity”.

The apology comes almost 150 years after the end of slavery in the European country’s overseas colonies, which included Suriname and islands like Curacao and Aruba in the Caribbean and Indonesia in the East.

“Today on behalf of the Dutch government, I apologise for the past actions of the Dutch state,” Rutte said in a speech in The Hague.

“We, living in the here and now, can only recognise and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity,” he said. Dutch ministers have travelled to seven former colonies in South America and the Caribbean for the event.

Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch finance minister and deputy prime minister, said on an official visit to Suriname last week that a “process” would begin leading up to “another incredibly important moment on July 1 next year”.

Descendants of Dutch slavery will then celebrate 150 years of liberation from slavery in an annual celebration called “Keti Koti” (Breaking the Chains) in Surinamese.

But the plan has caused controversy, with groups and some of the affected countries criticising the move as rushed, and saying the lack of consultation by the Netherlands smacked of a colonial attitude. But Rutte in his speech on Monday said that choosing the right moment was a “complicated matter”.

“There is not one right time for everyone, not one right word for everyone, not one right place for everyone,” he said.

The Dutch funded their “Golden Age” of empire and culture in the 16th and 17th centuries by shipping around 600,000 Africans as part of the slave trade, mostly to South America and the Caribbean.

At the height of its colonial empire, the United Provinces known today as the Netherlands possessed colonies like Suriname, the Caribbean island of Curacao, South Africa and Indonesia, where the Dutch East India Company was based in the 17th century.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2022