Rutte promised the government would establish a €200 million ($318 million) fund for initiatives that would help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands, as well as a museum. The move marked somewhat of a backdown for the conservative leader, who had previously refused to deliver the apology, arguing that it could start a “polarising” debate in the Netherlands.

He said he’d experienced a personal “change in thinking” and said he was wrong to have thought that the Netherlands’ role in slavery was “a thing of the past”.

While the Dutch take pride in their naval history and prowess as a trading nation, there have been growing calls for children to be taught more about the role the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company’s slave trade played in key sources of national wealth.

But critics of Rutte have complained there was insufficient consultation on the apology and the way it had been “pushed through” by the Dutch cabinet had a “colonial feel” to it.

As the prime minister delivered the apology some of his ministers headed to Suriname, the only sovereign nation outside Europe where Dutch is spoken by a majority of the population, as well as to Caribbean islands that remain part of the Netherlands, many with autonomy including Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Aruba, Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius.

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Sint Maarten Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs told Dutch media the island could not accept a Dutch apology.

“Let me be clear that we won’t accept an apology until our advisory committee has discussed it and we as a country discussed it,” she said.

Six Suriname foundations sought a court injunction to push the apology back to July 1 next year which will mark the 160th anniversary of slavery’s abolition, although it took another decade before slavery was actually phased out in the Dutch colonies.

Roy Kaikusi Groenberg from the Honour and Recovery Foundation, a Dutch Afro-Surinamese organisation, said it felt wrong that those who were descendants of slaves had struggled for years to change the national discussion, and had not been sufficiently consulted.

“The way the government is handling this, it’s coming across as a neocolonial belch,” he said.
“This state of affairs is causing a lot of turmoil in Afro-Caribbean Dutch society.”

But the Prime Minister of Aruba, Evelyn Wever-Croes, said the apology was welcome and a “turning point in history within the Kingdom”.

Rutte acknowledged the disagreement with his actions during the speech, saying there was “no one good moment for everybody, no right words for everybody, no right place for everybody”.

The Netherlands has been forced to address racism at varying levels in recent times, with a top civil servant at the Foreign Ministry apologising earlier this month after an independent investigation found there to be widespread racism in the government department.

The report said that racism at the ministry ranged “from aggressive, direct, overt and conscious to subtle, indirect, hidden, unintentional or unconscious – and that bicultural employees and locally hired employees of colour experience various forms of racism”.

In April, Dutch bank ABN Amro apologised for the similar involvement of its legal predecessors in the slave trade, plantation slavery and the trade in products that originated in slavery.

Earlier this month King Willem-Alexander commissioned independent research into the role of the royal family in the country’s colonial past. He has previously apologised for “excessive violence” perpetrated by Dutch forces during the 1945-49 Indonesian war of independence, which caused 150,000 deaths and involved forces raping, torturing, and executing thousands of civilians.

Apologies for past wrongs in the slave trade remain rare but are growing. In 2018, Denmark apologised to Ghana, which it colonised from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century.
In June, King Philippe of Belgium expressed “deepest regrets” for abuses in Congo.

In 2018, then-prince Charles said Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was an “appalling atrocity” that left an “indelible stain” on the world in a speech in Ghana.

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