“Very special,” says 95-year-old Mrs. Tahapary-Paais. “And also very important.” As the daughter of a marine, she still has 1951, the year she arrived in the Netherlands, fresh in her mind: “We had to leave Indonesia within 24 hours, so we had to pack very quickly. When we arrived in the Netherlands we were given rice table.”
After the independence of Indonesia and the dissolution of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL), the colonial army of the Netherlands, more than 3,500 Moluccan soldiers were brought to the Netherlands. Relatively many Moluccans served in the KNIL. In 1951 they thought they would be temporarily brought to the Netherlands, pending a definitive solution to their political situation and the establishment of their own, independent state.
