In June, Dutch prime minister Rob Jetten apologised for the Netherlands' treatment of the Moluccan community – a reckoning with one of the first migration stories in postwar Europe.
The Moluccans are from the Maluku Islands, now part of Indonesia. Under Dutch colonial rule, many were recruited into the colonial army, partly because they were Christian, which made them seem more trustworthy to the Dutch than the Muslim-majority population.
Indonesia declared independence in 1945, triggering a war against the Dutch. Many Moluccan soldiers stayed loyal to the Dutch during the conflict, and when Indonesia gained sovereignty in 1949, they feared retaliation and were reluctant to integrate into the new state, instead backing an independent Moluccan state.
But the Indonesian government refused to let them return to the Moluccas, so in 1951 the Dutch government decided to temporarily relocate 12,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families to the Netherlands. Most had little choice but to accept.
Many were told they would stay for only a few months, but they ended up spending decades hoping for a return to an independent state that never came. Most never went back.
Much of Jetten's recent apology concerns what happened when the Moluccans arrived in the Netherlands. The soldiers were immediately discharged from the army, losing both their income and pension – most couldn't even read the discharge letter, since they didn't speak Dutch.
The government dumped them in camps under grim conditions, some of them former Nazi camps, then later resettled them into 71 segregated housing estates still known today as “Moluccan neighbourhoods”.
Because their presence was seen as temporary, nobody bothered to integrate them, and many were essentially unable to work. The Dutch state made no effort to help establish an independent Moluccan state, partly to avoid straining relations with Indonesia, which saw Moluccan independence claims as illegitimate.
The result was an in-between existence – not really in the Netherlands, with no clear path home – that fuelled a deep sense of betrayal among soldiers who had fought – and been ready to die – for a country that seemed to have forgotten them.
By the 1970s, radicalised second-generation youth carried out violent actions to push the Dutch government to do something about their situation and support an independent Moluccan state. In total, 12 people died, most of them in a 1977 train hijacking that ended in a military raid killing six hijackers and two hostages.
Some measures were introduced in response, including a job scheme and cultural funding, but support for a state of their own never materialised.
Today, an estimated 70,000 people of Moluccan descent live in the Netherlands, and the majority still live in or near a Moluccan neighbourhood. These tight-knit communities are an important part of Moluccan identity, which remains strong and distinct within Dutch society.
“Many feel the apology to be important, if only to pay respect to the first generation who came and whose hopes of a speedy return were thwarted,” historian Wim Manuhutu told The European Correspondent. Though some feel it came too late, he added, since most of that generation is no longer alive to hear it.
Manuhutu hopes words turn into action, starting with more attention to colonial and Moluccan history in Dutch schools. Their story isn't part of the curriculum, and many people still assume they were simply economic migrants.
Many Moluccans call for recognition of the socio-economic effects that continue to affect descendants of the first generation. A 2020 report by the Dutch statistics agency CBS found Moluccans are more likely to have temporary, lower-paid jobs, reach lower levels of education, drop out of school more often, and rely more frequently on state benefits.
What makes the Moluccans' story so distinct is that they were among the first postcolonial communities to arrive in postwar Europe. “They arrived in a country that, at the start of the 1950s, was still very monocultural and white,” Manuhutu explained. “They stood at the beginning of what later became multiculturalism in the Netherlands.”