Selamat Hari Kemerdekaan! Vandaag is het feest! In Indonesië wordt normaal gesproken, pre-Corona, op 17 augustus de Onafhankelijkheid uitbundig gevierd, met ceremonies, praalwagenoptochten en, ironisch genoeg, met allerlei oud-Hollands geïnspireerde spelletjes als activiteit voor jong en oud.
Nederland erkent deze datum echter nog steeds niet als Onafhankelijkheidsdag en daar is een reden voor: “Here’s why the Netherlands cannot recognize Indonesia’s 1945 independence: If the Netherlands recognized that date, that would mean that the country had attacked a sovereign nation after World War II with the purpose of recolonizing it. And then the massacres, euphemistically referred to in the Netherlands as the “police actions,” would not be “police actions” but war crimes, as explained by Ady Setyawan and Marjolein Van Pagee.
According to the official Dutch story, however, Indonesia was “Dutch” during the “police actions,” and thus killing your own people is not a war crime but, rather, law enforcement gone wrong. Except that law enforcement in the “police actions” were not police officers but soldiers serving in the Dutch army.”
