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oa De Nederlandse koloniale herinnering en de universele mensenrechten
De casus ‘Rawagede’
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, Volume 128, Issue 1, Jan 2015, p. 109 - 130
Abstract
Dutch colonial memory and universal human rights. The case of ‘Rawagede’
This article asks what relationship exists between the Dutch ‘coping with the colonial past’ (‘omgang met het koloniale verleden’) and the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung – which is focussed on the Holocaust. It asks especially what role human rights play in both the German and Dutch cases, connecting recent theories of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung to the Dutch attempt at coping with the colonial past, particularly the Dutch massacre of the male population of the Indonesian village of Rawagede in 1947. The article focusses on the relationship between historical time and legal time and on the ways in which ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ are distinguished. Its conclusion is that the Dutch state subscribes to a variant of coping with the colonial past in which neither human rights nor historical truth play a role comparable to the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung.