40 Years Later, Moluccans Await Repatriation

Forty years after the Netherlands lost the pearl of its East Asian empire, thousands of its former colonial subjects still live in exile here, awaiting repatriation to their own nation that never came to be.

Camp Lunetten in Vught is the last of 74 resettlement camps established to house Moluccan troops who fought for the Dutch in their losing war with rebels in the 1940s in what then was the Dutch East Indies and now is Indonesia.

Lunetten, a former Nazi concentration camp, is the Netherlands’ most visible symbol of Moluccan nationalist aspirations, despite the fact that their homeland, a sprinkling of islands west of New Guinea, was long ago swallowed up by Indonesia.

The 220 Moluccans still living in the ramshackle brick buildings maintain it is their symbol of defiance against the Dutch, whom they say reneged on a pledge to secure them an independent Moluccan nation.

“As long as we don’t have our own nation, we’re just living from one day to the next. We’ll always be Moluccans,” said 30-year-old Ety Huliselan, who was born, reared and still lives in Camp Lunetten.

“We’ve always been homesick here. It’s not our country but a strange country,” said her 61-year-old father, Johannes, a former private in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army.

Still Cling to Vision

Despite assimilation and the passage of four decades, most Moluccans still hold to the vision of an independent homeland, according to current and former Dutch government officials.

The Dutch government said it promised only to do its best to secure a Moluccan homeland and that political realities have since ruled out such an effort.

Moluccan resentment exploded into terrorism in the 1970s when Moluccan nationalists seized a school, two trains and the Indonesian Consulate in Amsterdam. The attacks left 11 people dead.

When the Indonesian separatists defeated the Dutch in 1949, the Moluccans proclaimed their own Republic of the South Moluccas.

To save them from possible Indonesian reprisals, however, the Dutch evacuated about 4,000 Moluccan troops and 8,500 dependents to the Netherlands in 1951.

In all, about 45,000 Moluccans now live in the Netherlands, many still torn between their families’ authoritarian traditions and the more liberal Dutch culture.

Moluccan drug abuse and Dutch-language illiteracy rates far exceed the national average, and their unemployment rate of up to 60% is four times higher.

Successive Dutch governments have tried to integrate the Moluccans into Dutch culture but have also given them more preferential treatment than any other ethnic minority in this nation of 14.6 million.

‘Pampered by State’

“These people have been pampered by the state for years,” said Maurice van Hurck, the Welfare Ministry official responsible for Lunetten. “They’re looking for an enemy on which to vent all their aggression and the enemy is the Welfare Ministry.”

Until 1956, all Moluccans lived in camps, where they were issued free food and clothing. Since then, the government has built them 2,800 rental units and about 50 churches in a program that has no parallel even in the generous Dutch welfare state.

A $6.9-million Vught housing project, designed along the organizational lines of a Moluccan village, stands virtually empty because Lunetten’s residents refuse to move.

The residents maintain that their camp has great symbolic value in their fight and that leaving it would imply giving in on their position that they are victims of government neglect.

Van Hurck said rents in the camp start at the Dutch guilders equivalent of only $8 a month, and gas, electricity and water are free. Rents in the new housing complex start at $90 a month, which is still extremely low by Dutch standards. Gas and electrical services for a Dutch household run $90 to $180 a month, depending on the size of the home.

The Moluccan nationalist movement, which has a president-in-exile, 79-year-old Johannes Manusama, provided the Moluccans with a “new foothold to hang on to their pride,” said Annelies Kouwenhoven, a specialist on Moluccan culture.

“It’s the teaching of a lifetime to Moluccans that the entire Moluccan culture be transferred from father to son, from mother to daughter,” said Kouwenhoven, former secretary of the Dutch-Indonesian Joint Committee on Moluccan Affairs.

Some Lunetten residents claim that they were never officially demobilized from the Dutch army and are owed 38 years’ back pay by the Dutch government.

The government has paid for Moluccan youths to travel to the Moluccan islands so they could choose between life under Indonesia and life in the Netherlands.

Only a few have opted for the Moluccas, Kouwenhoven said.

Lena Dejong, 32, a second-generation Moluccan woman married to a Dutchman, said young Moluccans continue to profess a belief in Moluccan nationalism only out of respect for their elders.

“We’re used to so many things here,” she said.