PARIS, Dec 19 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in Monday issued a formal apology for the country's historic role in slavery.
«Slavery is a criminal system that brought great suffering to untold numbers of people, suffering that continues to affect the lives of their descendants today. We in the Netherlands must recognize our role in this history. I used to think that we could not take take meaningful responsibility for what happened so long ago. I believed that the role of the Netherlands in the history of slavery is a matter of the past that needs to be left behind, but I was wrong,» Rutte said, speaking at the National Archives in The Hague on Monday. The broadcast was conducted on the prime minister's Twitter account.
The head of the government of the Netherlands stressed that several centuries of oppression and exploitation have an impact on what is happening today: they are expressed in racist stereotypes and discrimination. According to him, for centuries the Dutch state and its representatives «contributed to the preservation of slavery and profited from it.»
«For centuries, under the Dutch rule, human dignity was violated in the worst possible way. The Dutch state after 1863 failed to properly see and recognize that our role in slavery continued and continues to have negative consequences. For this, I I want to apologize on behalf of the state of the Netherlands,» Rutte said.
The Netherlands in the 16th-20th centuries was a significant colonial power. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies on July 1, 1863. Currently, several overseas territories of the disbanded Netherlands Antilles are dependent on the Netherlands: Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, as well as the Caribbean Netherlands: the islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius.