‘It is now up to us to stand up for those who suffer from inhumane and desperate circumstances that cut through our souls. I am thinking of the population of Gaza, of the Israeli hostages that are held there, to the Ukrainians who are affected by Russian aggression and all others who are also suffering from war and violence anywhere in the world. ” That is what King Willem-Alexander said on Friday evening at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific in The Hague, “Never Together Together Magen about difficult and confrontational questions.
Willem-Alexander also made a plea for a diverse society: “Peace starts with recognizing and embracing differences. Differences in people’s backgrounds and ideals. Differences in thinking and doing. A peaceful society is not a society in which we are all supposed to resemble each other. Peace is not to live with people who are different than we are otherwise, but we are different than we are otherwise, but we are different than we are otherwise, but different than we are otherwise, other than us. The characteristic of our lives in freedom and as a source of you will recognize this as an Indian Dutchman.
Our Father and Saté
On the field near the Indian monument, it already smelled of saté around the many eateries in the afternoon, while the sound system was tested on stage further on. The sung our father sounded, the tattoo, a piece of Wilhelmus, some military ceremonial in the exercise with greeting the banner, parts of the testimonies of older and younger people who had to be pronounced in the evening, chairman Thom the Graaf of the national commemoration who already tried the first sentences of his speech.
In his speech, later, De Graaf, who is also vice-president of the Council of State, weighed his words: of course this commemoration is about the dead who have fallen in the Second World War. But there was also a context, he said: “After the Japanese capitulation there was a authority vacuum in which many were not sure. It took many years of negotiations and military violence before the colonial era really ended.”
And he indicated that commemoration has an important function in the present: “We commemorate to honor the dead, but also to condemn war aggression and inhumanity. Then in the Dutch East Indies. And now in Ukraine, in Gaza and in so many other places in the world.”
The commemoration of the end of the Second World War, this day eighty years ago, is now growing into a national event. The entire country is considered the end of the war in the Pacific. The National Commemoration Foundation 15 August this day ensured that groups everywhere in the Netherlands can eat a symbolic portion of rice together, nasi bungkus. This refers to the simple meals that the Red Cross handed out after the war in the Dutch East Indies to returned prisoners of war.
Thousands died
On August 15, only the people who have fallen victim to the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies are officially commemorated. Previously it was mainly about the prisoners of war and Dutch citizens who were locked up in Kampen by Japan. Thousands died in hunger, hardship and illness.
Because this was found too ‘Eurocentric’, the focus of the commemoration has been broadened in recent years, to all Dutch subjects who lived in the former colony. Two million Indonesians, for example, who initially thought that they were liberated from the Dutch colonials by a ‘friends Asian brothers’, as the Japanese called themselves in their propaganda, came in the later phase of the occupation by hunger. It was the result of conscious Japanese policy. The commemoration has been further extended to all those who fell in the colonial war between the Netherlands and Indonesia from 1945 to 1950, both on the Dutch and Indonesian side.
But in particular the young person, third generation, believes that it should actually be considered that everything has done the Netherlands during the entire colonial period. For example, Lara van Leeuwen, a volunteer who helps with the organization of this day, says that she of course went to the commemoration. “But it is now for the first time that I think that the commemoration should be much more than that Second World War or the War of Independence. If you think that the Dutch have just considered that country to have their property for centuries, that they thought it was okay to plunder that country completely. That is actually so bizarre!”