The Rawagede Massacre

I love the Netherlands. I was born and raised there and proud to call myself a Dutchman. Like all other countries in this world, it has pages in history that are not so glorious.

I believe that the best way for any country to deal with the darker days of its history is not to deny or run away from it. But rather confront it and deal with it.

The Rawagede massacre is one of those darker days in Dutch history.

On December 9, 1947, Dutch soldiers raided the West Javanese kampong Rawagede, now Balongsari. A large part of the male population of Rawagede, were killed without trial. Until the 1990s, there was hardly any attention to mass murder in the Netherlands. While such acts of violence were for decades, dismissed by the Dutch government as ‘excesses’, we now know that they fit into a pattern of frequent and structural…