In the past few years, the Dutch program has built a strong working relationship with people and organizations in the Netherlands who fight for colonial reparations for Indonesia and Indonesians. Among them is Indonesian Jeffry Pondaag, chair of the Committee for Dutch Honor Debts (K.U.K.B.), the force behind reparations court cases in the Netherlands since 2008.
In a most recent court hearing on September 30, the Dutch state was convicted of the 1947 beheading of Indonesian aristocrat Andi Abubakar Lambogo during the Indonesian War of Independence. Lambogo's head was impaled on a bayonet and displayed on the market place, where the town's population, men, women, and children were forced to watch captured freedom fighters kiss their leader's severed head.
By the current ruling of the Dutch court, Lambogo's son Malik Abubakar will receive 874 Euros and 80 cents, calculated in this table by loss of livelihood until the son's 21st birthday and based on the average annual income of a farmer. This is a grave insult to Indonesia and to the Lambogo family, both as a bureaucratic calculation and as a slight to Lambogo's societal position. The Lambogo family has told CNN Indonesia that it will be returning the money as a form of protest.
In the following press release, Jeffry Pondaag explains how the Netherlands continues its colonial thinking to meet the bottom line rather than repair the wrongs perpetrated against human beings.
https://historibersama.com/dutch-state-convicted-for-the-beheading-of-lambogo-k-u-k-b/
After welcoming Jeffry Pondaag as a guest lecturer in our classes and as a consultant in meetings of Humanities Collaboratory antiracism research group this year, we plan to continue this collaboration in a future symposium around the topic of colonial reparations.
