Honorable Prime Minister Rutte, president and members of the Dutch Parliament and Senate,
We took note of your intentions to finally confess your crimes against humanity for the last 400 years of enslavement, slave trading and continued colonization of our bloodline and ourselves in the present. How can you admit your complicity but deny decolonization and the right to self-determination to the descendants, the diaspora of our dehumanized ancestors, the victims of your criminally inhuman economy.
And the apologies are nothing but propaganda in an effort to patronize and deviate the attention of principally the free Caribbean leadership who are aspiring reparations for the atrocities committed and their effect on the generations that followed, compounded by colonialism.
How is possible, Hon. PM Rutte, that you confess heir of the past government’s crimes committed against humanity to our ancestors, you continue to commit same crimes against the descendants and single-handedly acquit yourself of these crimes by means of an apology? Is that actually an apology, Hon. PM Rutte?
We know that you have no idea of what you want to apologize for as you were denied your history, you were intentionally miseducated about your past to continue without remorse your racism-based economy. It brought you your “Gouden Eeuw”, brought you from a fishing village to one of world’s richest nations, but brought others piracy, contraband, and slavery and destructions of nations, which model you continue forward modernized in the 20th and 21st century.
This so-called apology of yours is unacceptable as your government just sets out for another world-level misleading propaganda while you continue colonizing our territory. Your government’s actions, decisions, laws, and policies toward our Bonaire people constitute infringements of our fundamental rights and have resulted in a recolonization that violates articles 1, 55, 73 and 103 of the Charter of the United Nations and resolutions 742, 747, 945, 1,514 and 1,541 that affirm the inalienable rights of the people of Bonaire to self-determination.
Your government systematically encroaches on several of our Bonaire people’s international legal instruments: United Nations Charter; United Nations Decolonization Declaration; The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; International Covenant on All Forms of Racial Discrimination; United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
1955… You stunted at the world stage-United Nations, and continued committing same crime as we are in this situation today because of the biggest Dutch lie in history. When in 1955, Mr. Johan Beyen as Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs assisted by Prime Minister of the Netherlands Antilles Mr. Jonckheer misled the United Nations that they represented the free people of the Netherlands Antilles, and thus the Netherlands obtained absolution from reporting obligations and had us removed from the list of non-self-governing territories (NSGT). We were never decolonized and were never equal nor free.
1863 … As the Netherlands one of the last nations that never wanted to let go or abolish slavery you stunted … told the world that you abolished slavery, meanwhile your government making law to keep the so-called free slaves, our ancestors, by law captive and working for same slave master on same plantation … took the shackles from the ankles transforming them to laws and mental shackles up to today.
We all know that the abolition law of slave trade in 1814 and the 1818 law that made participation a criminal offense led up to continued discussions in your parliament. For more than half a century, they debated not the humanitarian beliefs or feelings of shame about this form of commerce, but a defense of the Dutch rationale of economic pragmatism, condemning slavery in theory, but allowing its continuation in practice up to 1863 and beyond. And up to now all your governments have kept yourselves and yours and our peoples in a state of cognitive dissonance through cultural, educational, legal, and colonial manipulation, denying the fact that your government was one of the cruelest colonizers in the world’s history.
In the light of the cabinet’s official recognition of the crimes against our ancestors and thus accepting the responsibility of being the continuation of your predecessors’ racist and economic crimes committed against us, the descendants of the victims, we would like to kindly request you the following:
That as your government seems not to be in the state of mind to recognize that you are continuing committing the same crimes, your apology is a hypocrisy. We would like to ask you and your government that same simple question as the first chair of your first national assembly, during the Batavian constitutional debate, Pieter Paulus “apostle of humanity” asked in 1796: “In which way all human beings can be considered equal?”
This same question remains today, December 19, 2022, 225 years later: “In which way – Are we, your so-called “Kingdom partners”, who were annexed as recently as October 10, 2010, re-occupied, re-colonized, and embedded in your constitution under unequal rights against our free will, – considered equal human beings?
Finally, we will not accept any apology meanwhile you continuing to colonize us. We herewith kindly request you to cease being an accomplice to the continuation of Dutch colonialism, declared a crime against humanity.
Respectfully yours,
James Finies – President Nos Ke Boneiru Bek
Davika Bissessar – President Bonaire Human Rights
