Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister has apologised on behalf of the government for the historical involvement of Netherland in slavery and slave trade. He made the apology at the National Archives in the Hague on Monday.
“Today I apologize,” Rutte said in a 20-minute speech at the National Archive.
Rutte who spoke to reporters after the speech said that the government is not offering compensation to “people — grandchildren or great-grandchildren of enslaved people.”
Instead, it is establishing a 200 million-euro ($212 million) fund for initiatives to help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to boost education about the issue, AP reported.
Rutte apologized “for the actions of the Dutch state in the past: posthumously to all enslaved people worldwide who have suffered from those actions, to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants into the here and now.”
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Describing how more than 600,000 African men, women and children were shipped to the former colony of Suriname, by Dutch slave traders, Rutte said that “history often is ugly, painful, and even downright shameful.”
“They were wrenched from their families and stripped of their humanity. They were transported, and treated, like cattle under the governmental authority of the Dutch West India Company,” the prime minister said.
