Decolonizing Dutch research

Date: October 19th, 2017

K.U.K.B. Chairman Jeffry Pondaag: “The Netherlands is known as a constitutional state, in The Hague you have the international Court. I actually looked up to the Netherlands. But not when you talk about what we experienced in Indonesia. It’s unbelievable. Justice is very important for me but I don’t see justice, also not on the 14th during the kick-off event of the research. … They succeeded… The Dutch government, the historians, the education system.
They succeeded in misleading the Dutch people. … What I want to emphasize: How could the Netherlands think to have the right to claim an area 18,000 km away as their property? … And where are the Dutch intellectuals?”

 

 

Francisca Pattipilohy: “I think it is much more important to research what colonialism did to people. Not only what it did to the colonized, but also what it did to the colonizers. I think when researching colonialism it will also help the colonizers. To become more informed and have more understanding about the problems that we now have. Violence is not the problem, violence is only the consequence of colonialism…”

 

Sandew Hira: “If the research is colonial, it is like a chicken, it can’t fly high…It can only fly there… Then you ask the chicken: can you be an eagle, to fly high, can you be ‘decolonial?’ How can you ask the chicken to be an eagle? So that’s why, to ask the chicken (the colonial research to be decolonial) is an idiotic idea!”