Rutte apologizes to Indonesia as study uncovers colonial violence

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has apologized to Indonesia after a study found that the Dutch army used structural violence, including against the civilian population, during Indonesia's 1945-49 war of independence.

"For the systematic and widespread extreme violence from the Dutch side in those years and the consistent looking the other way by previous governments, I apologize deeply to the people of Indonesia today on behalf of the government," Rutte said in Brussels on Thursday, according to a report by Dutch TV station NOS.

Rutte spoke of "confronting" findings. "They are harsh, but unavoidable." He said the government takes full responsibility for the "collective failure."

War crimes in the then colony of the Dutch Indies were tacitly tolerated by the political and military leadership, according to the study conducted by three Dutch research institutes, the most comprehensive study of its kind, which was released earlier in the day.

For decades, the government in The Hague claimed that there had only been isolated attacks and that the army had generally behaved correctly. This is no longer a credible position, the researchers conclude.

At all levels, the army was prepared to ignore "the written and unwritten norms of law." In total, it is estimated that more than 100,000 Indonesians and about 5,000 Dutch soldiers were killed in the war.

One of the heads of the inquiry, Gert Oostindie, spoke on Dutch radio on Thursday of a wide range of violence: "torture, ill-treatment during interrogations, shooting of captured soldiers and civilians without trial, villages set on fire."

Indonesia had declared independence after almost 350 years of colonial rule at the end of World War II. The Netherlands then sent troops to South-East Asia.

Reports of violence and massacres had been around for a long time, but it was not until 2017 that the government commissioned the scientific investigation.

The study conducted by the Royal Netherlands Institute of South-East Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH) and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.