DUTCH LEADER APOLOGIZES FOR SLAVE TRADE HISTORY

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands on Monday formally apologized on behalf of his government for the country’s role in abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. He also said Dutch governments had not done enough to acknowledge that slavery had had lasting negative effects since it was abolished in the Dutch colonies in 1863.

“We’re not doing this just to come clean,” Rutte said. “We’re not doing this to leave history behind us.”

The run-up to Rutte’s apology was fraught, with multiple groups of descendants saying that the government had not consulted them and that the occasion lacked any significance.

“This apology marks a historic moment,” said Pepijn Brandon, a professor of global economic and social history at the Free University of Amsterdam who has studied 18th-century Atlantic slavery for the Dutch economy. But, he added, “they couldn’t have been prepared any worse.”

Armand Zunder, the chair of the National Reparations Commission of Suriname, said the speech did not go far enough.

“What was completely missing from this speech is responsibility and accountability,” he said.

July 1 marks 150 years since the end of slavery in the Dutch colonies, and next year was declared a national year of remembrance. Part of the reason the apology happened Monday, Rutte said, was because he wanted to do it before the start of the official commemorations.