learning · Dutch — bilingual opening

De huidige generatie Molukkers in Nederland zou een vrije Molukse staat prachtig vinden, maar ziet het niet gebeuren

Seventy-five years after Moluccan soldiers and their families were brought to the Netherlands, younger generations are breaking inherited silences about colonial loyalty, exile, violence, and identity, opening a new language for old wounds.

De Groene Amsterdammer · By Leendert van der Valk · 16 June 2026 · read the original in Dutch →

Ais de Jong (26) staat met een witte roos in zijn hand op het veld waar ooit de barakken van Kamp Westerbork stonden. Net als de meeste aanwezigen op deze februaridag kent hij het hier onder de naam Schattenberg. Dit was het kamp waar zijn Molukse opa naartoe werd gebracht toen die in 1951 aankwam in Nederland, dit is het kamp waar zijn moeder werd geboren. Ais’ blik dwaalt rond, op zoek naar herkenning. Dan concludeert hij zachtjes: ‘Shit, ik weet het nummer van de barak niet.’ Hij belt zijn moeder.

Ais de Jong, 26, stands with a white rose in his hand on the field where the barracks of Camp Westerbork once stood. Like most of those present on this February day, he knows it here by the name Schattenberg. This was the camp to which his Moluccan grandfather was taken when he arrived in the Netherlands in 1951; this is the camp where his mother was born. Ais’s gaze wanders, searching for something familiar. Then he concludes softly, “Shit, I don’t know the number of the barrack.” He calls his mother.

Ondertussen staat zijn vriendin, Gloria Lappya (27), met haar moeder en tante bij nummer 36. Ze leggen hun rozen op de natte zandgrond. De contouren van de houten barak waarin ze opgroeiden worden aangegeven met speciale begroeiing en een genummerd paaltje. Haar tante wijst naar een grote kale plek: ‘Dit was het veldje waar we speelden.’

Meanwhile his girlfriend, Gloria Lappya, 27, is standing with her mother and aunt by number 36. They lay their roses on the wet sandy ground. The outlines of the wooden barrack in which they grew up are marked by special planting and a numbered post. Her aunt points to a large bare patch: “This was the little field where we played.”

Ais and Gloria are the youngest people present on this day of commemoration for 75 years of Moluccan presence in the Netherlands. They represent the third generation, or the fourth, depending on how one counts. Their six-year-old daughter Mutiara is at home with Gloria’s parents.

The first generation of Moluccan migrants is almost gone. Most visitors in Westerbork, like Gloria’s aunt and mother, are second generation; they were teenagers and twenty-somethings when Schattenberg, like many other Moluccan camps, was cleared in the early 1970s.

This day, a so-called “dialogue table,” has been organized by the Pelita Foundation, which focuses on the aftereffects of the colonial and wartime past for people with roots in the former Dutch East Indies. The day began with the sound of the tifa drum and the deep call of the tahuri shell. Gloria, hidden behind large glasses, beneath the hood of her hoodie: “With that we honor our ancestors. To me it feels like an old memory, even though I did not visit the Moluccas until I was eighteen. With the tahuri, fishermen call the wind to the boats.”

This twentieth of February marks exactly 75 years since the Kota Inten departed from Surabaya, the first of twelve transports that brought some 12,500 Moluccans to the Netherlands, mainly former KNIL soldiers and their families. The gathering in Westerbork marks the beginning of a period full of commemorations and celebrations. On June 21, a national monument to the Moluccan community will be unveiled on the Lloydkade in Rotterdam. Then it will be 75 years since the final transport arrived, again the Kota Inten.

At last Ais, wearing glasses and a flat cap, has received the number from his mother. He lays a flower at 47, where his grandfather lived. He says he is still trying to piece together what his grandparents went through. “My grandfather was a stowaway on one of those ships. But my mother doesn’t know exactly either.”

The children and grandchildren of the first Dutch Moluccans often do not know the stories, because the soldiers and their wives did not speak about them. Yes, the second generation sometimes still cherishes adventurous memories of playing on the heath and of the sense of community; you could walk into any barrack. But they also remember the cold, the lack of hot water, the political tensions and, above all, the suffocating frustrations of their parents, their homesickness and the military upbringing.

By the time Gloria and Ais were born, around the turn of the millennium, the Moluccan camps had long since disappeared, and the hope that they might one day return, with Dutch help, to a free Maluku had been replaced by bitterness. The communities had been moved to special Moluccan residential neighborhoods: better living conditions, but the same frustrations.

Ais grew up in Assen, Gloria nearby in the Moluccan neighborhood of Bovensmilde, the small Drenthe village where in 1977 105 primary-school pupils and five teachers were taken hostage by Moluccan youths. Ais’s mother attended that school. Because she was Moluccan, she was allowed to go home, but her school friends were held captive for four days, and several teachers for three weeks. At the same time, the train hijacking at De Punt took place. Gloria’s uncle was one of the hijackers.

That accumulation of violent histories is not unusual in the Moluccan community. The word trauma is heard often this day in Westerbork. The community is marked by strong loyalty, says Désirée Reawaruw-Bellaard, a social worker and regional coordinator at the Pelita Foundation, who is co-leading the day. “Loyalty to your family, to the extended family, to people from the same camps, the same neighborhood, the same island, people who are older, people who had a good relationship with your father. It is almost impossible to satisfy all those loyalties.”

Gloria, who is a poet, has tried to wrest herself free from them. At eighteen she moved away with Ais. She loves the neighborhood, she says, but also felt trapped. It was stifling there. In her poem “Avoidance,” she writes:

dreams die in the neighborhood I break free from negativity I break free from generation upon generation upon generation

It is not easy to write that, knowing that your ancestors are reading along. Still, in Westerbork Gloria receives applause for her candid poems about the pain of the different generations, from her collection Mesra.

Strikingly, the older people present too, of whom it is often said that they hide behind the Indies Silence, use the word trauma frequently. A man in his seventies with a red scarf walks around for nearly the entire afternoon with tears in his eyes. The crying visibly does him good, and he finds much comfort with others.

It reveals the new space that has been opening within the community for several years now, won by a generation for whom the wounds are slightly less raw. It seems that the approach of the youngest generation, which speaks out in music, poetry, theater and visual art, and openly says it benefits from therapy, is also liberating for the older people. Gloria: “I think we are bringing the second generation along in talking about that trauma. That we are showing them: perhaps you are suffering from this too.”

In February, the exhibition Ketahanan opened at Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, likewise to mark the 75 years. Co-curator Manoah Salampessy, 36, held many conversations within the Moluccan community, and he too saw the change taking place. “The third and fourth generations are coming forward with the story. Through visual art, literature, video and the performing arts, we share Moluccan culture with the rest of society. At the same time, more conversations are also taking place within the community. We dare to be vulnerable.”

He absorbed a great deal of pain from his parents, he says. Physical punishment without explanation, but also much psychological pain. “I went into intensive therapy, and now I also know that it was a copy of their upbringing. My parents are 73 and 74. I find it very special that they, too, are now opening themselves to the conversation.”

“The Moluccan community has a very particular migration history, incomparable with that of other groups,” explains Désirée Reawaruw-Bellaard. “It already begins with so much accumulated colonial and wartime history, and then on top of that such a closed military neighborhood community is created.” One could say it is a perfect storm for intergenerational trauma.

The roots lie in the sixteenth century; the Netherlands has no bond with any former colony that goes back so far. It was the Moluccan cloves and nutmeg that lured the first ships toward Southeast Asia in 1595. When ordinary trade was not enough for the VOC, the company subjected the islands to a trade monopoly, often with extreme violence, as during the genocide on the Banda Islands in 1621. On the plantations, enslaved people then labored for centuries for Dutch profits.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Roughly half the Moluccans had been Christianized by missionaries, and a strong tradition had grown of Moluccan soldiers serving in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, the KNIL. They were regarded as loyal and combative, faithful to the flag; in reality, poverty may more often have been a reason to join the KNIL. The soldiers lived in barracks, often on Java, and many of the first Moluccans who would come to the Netherlands in 1951 were anak kolong, literally raised “under the barrack bed.” That was often the only living space for soldiers’ wives and children. A culture of its own emerged, with its own Moluccan-Javanese-Dutch soldiers’ language: Melaju tangsi, barracks Malay.

During the Second World War, many of these soldiers and family members ended up in Japanese internment camps. After liberation, they fought in the KNIL against Indonesian independence. When Indonesia became independent in 1949, a substantial number sought their own Republic of the South Moluccas, Republik Maluku Selatan, the RMS. It became unsafe for soldiers of the by then disbanded KNIL, and in 1951 they were brought to the Netherlands while awaiting a solution.

The more than twelve thousand former soldiers and their families, dispersed across camps like new Moluccan islands throughout the Netherlands, trusted in the support of the country they had served for generations, whose language and topography they had learned at school. Because their stay was to be temporary, integration into Dutch society was discouraged. In the drafty barracks, former soldiers sat at home unemployed. No solution came, no support. The packed suitcases gathered more and more dust. Weeks became months became years.

The second generation made itself heard in the 1970s. Some Moluccan youths found an outlet in music, others in drugs; most, despite the obstruction, nevertheless found their way into civilian society. But a number turned to violent political actions. In 1970 the Indonesian embassy in Wassenaar was occupied by 33 armed youths; in 1975 came the train hijacking at Wijster and an occupation of the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam. Four people died. Two years later, young people hijacked a train at De Punt, ultimately costing the lives of six hijackers and two hostages. At the same time, youths took the primary school in Bovensmilde hostage.

“Bovensmilde” in particular was by no means approved by everyone in the community, but understanding was widespread. The Moluccans had often drawn attention to their situation, but the Dutch government scarcely listened to their objections. They felt deceived and abandoned.

Meanwhile the camps had become neighborhoods. Even today there are residential neighborhoods from Assen to Nijmegen, Maastricht and Breukelen where a number of houses are assigned exclusively to people of Moluccan background. But most neighborhoods have become more mixed over the years. The third and fourth generations are increasingly integrated, but also celebrate Moluccan culture. According to Statistics Netherlands, the Moluccan community numbered more than 71,000 people in 2021. Moluccan identity is a source of pride. But also of unprocessed histories.

Dean Reawaruw, 58, always thought he was not much affected by the traumas of his childhood. But in recent years he has dared to “look at it more,” and now he reaches a different conclusion. He tells the story at the kitchen table in Gouda, beneath framed pictures of two ships. The upper one is the Kota Inten. On that first transport of 1951 were his grandfather, grandmother, aunt and father. His father was fourteen at the time. Below it hangs the Norwegian ship the Skaubryn, chartered by the Netherlands. On it was his mother, then twelve years old, with her family.

Dean’s voice breaks for a moment as he explains why the pictures hang so prominently in their home. “Well, without those two ships I wouldn’t be here, and neither would my brother and sister. It is the foundation. I feel sorrow that it had to happen this way. They did not come here voluntarily. Still, I am also glad those ships brought my parents safely here.”

He too laid a flower in February at Schattenberg, where his father grew up under the yoke of his grandfather: a deeply traumatized former soldier who had lived through terrible things. Life in the family was not always easy.

And so Dean’s father, too, acquired two faces: a pious man with a role on the church council, an important linchpin in the community, who at home had loose hands. When his parents argued, Dean would jump between them and then catch the full force of it. As the eldest son, he received the most “little blows,” he says. Sometimes the house was locked against him and he had to sleep in the shed, or he would be put out of the car halfway through a drive and had to walk home. He was not allowed to cry, because men did not do that. Then he was beaten until he stopped. “It was not an easy childhood, but I also loved my father; he had beautiful sides too.”

It is a story heard more often in the Moluccan community. Johnny Manuhutu, the singer of the best-known Moluccan band, Massada, tells almost exactly the same thing in his book Astaganaga: a church elder who was violent at home, but also a proud man of principles, full of wise life lessons.

Dean has recently come to understand his father, and his grandfather, better. When he met Désirée, he had already noticed in himself that he sometimes became unreasonably angry about things at work. He is a project engineer in large ventilation systems. “I could be completely thrown off balance if someone criticized me. I started looking at it more: why do I react like this?”

He went into therapy, something part of his family made light of a little, but to which the somewhat younger guard responds well. “I often talk about generational trauma with my cousins. Then they look at me as if to say, ‘Do I have that too, actually?’ Yes, definitely, because we come from the same bloodline.”

At the same time as his therapy, Dean began to unravel his father’s story. Together with Désirée he went into the archives, because his parents had told him little. He did know that just before the war his grandfather had lost his wife and four children in a short span of time. He was called to the front during the Japanese invasion and had to leave behind his children, three and five years old.

What exactly he experienced is not clear from the documents, but he was held in several internment camps and was shipped on the Japanese vessels on which atrocities are known to have taken place. After the occupation, Indonesian independence fighters took him to one of Surabaya’s most notorious prisons. Only after seven years could he go in search of his children again. Dean’s father, by then twelve, had spent all that time in an orphanage where famine prevailed.

“That your father had attachment problems, to put it professionally, is, let’s say, hardly surprising,” Désirée sums up. After that came the stay in the Netherlands, in a former concentration camp, where residents still found hidden Jewish papers in the drafty walls of their barracks. The elders sometimes forbade the children to play in the woods in the evening, because restless spirits were said still to roam there.

Désirée sees that the second generation absorbed the blows of the first. “With that pile of traumas, the already internally divided community, originating from a thousand islands, ends up in a neighborhood culture in which the outside world is the enemy that betrayed you.” That creates a strong bond, sometimes so strong that it tightens dangerously.

As with Gloria and Ais. They talk about it in the Moluccan community building of Bovensmilde, a kind of football canteen with a 1970s suspended ceiling that is still the center of the neighborhood. In the gymnasium, a small exhibition has been set up about the Moluccan neighborhood in the little Drenthe village. In one photograph, Ais recognizes his mother during her profession of faith at eighteen. Balanced on the gymnasium basketball hoop is a traditional boat five meters long, made by Gloria’s father and used as a table for makan patita, a communal festive meal for two villages meeting each other.

The traditional structures of villages and islands still exert their influence in the Dutch community. Historical ties exist between villages that are pela with one another. Every Moluccan is expected to know with whom he or she is pela. Even in the Netherlands, it can determine whom you may or may not date.

Gloria and Ais were allowed to date, but felt another social threshold. Both received a recommendation for vwo, the pre-university track, which meant they went to a different school from the Moluccan neighborhood children. “Almost everyone does practical education,” Gloria says. “It feels as if you are an outsider. I would rather not have gone to vwo myself, but my mother thought I should simply study at my level.”

At school they noticed that teachers, perhaps unconsciously, discriminated. They had to work just a little harder to be seen. But within the community too, both felt a kind of disapproval from peers. It is a pattern Dean, also highly educated, recognizes. “Our parents too had grown up with the idea that you had to learn a practical trade, so you could help build a free Moluccan state.”

At eighteen Gloria decided not to make her profession of faith, a major break with her upbringing. When she was pregnant she moved with Ais to Rotterdam. There she pursued various courses of study: photography, teacher training in Dutch, but it was a lot with such a little one along. They moved back to Assen. Now she is doing MBO marketing, has enrolled to study Dutch at university, and is making her way as a writer.

Ais did not finish school at that time and worked in warehouses. Since last year he has nevertheless started studying again, in integrated safety and security management. Meanwhile he works at a wholesaler in hairdressing supplies, and he has just landed a new position as brand manager.

In that hectic period of uprooting, moving and starting a family, their journey to the Moluccas was formative. “Everyone always calls that coming home, our generation too,” says Gloria. “And that is how it feels. It is my father’s parental home, so it is my home too. But you also notice that you are very Dutch. What happens here, that you are different, applies there too.”

In Westerbork, Gloria had recited a poem: “I am too Dutch for my aunts on the islands / too Moluccan for my neighbors.” Exactly that, says Ais: “You live in a community where you never feel completely at home. So what is our identity? I am not white, but not dark either; I am not Moluccan, but not Dutch either. Or yes, I am Moluccan, but then again not that Moluccan. And Dutch, yes, but not that Dutch.”

Dean too came “home,” but only when he was 58. There at last he stood on the island of his father and grandfather, before the bridge that led to his village. He was accompanied by a village elder who knew the Adat well, the precolonial rules of life. Dean had to fix his gaze on the mountain, where his ancestors once lived before the Dutch directed them toward the coast. He had to say an incantation and stamp on the ground three times, to make contact with the land and say that he had come home as anak negeri, a child of the village.

“It was very emotional. I did not yet know my family there, but it felt like coming home,” he says. “At the same time it was also very sad that I could not do this with my parents. They did not have the money for it; they had to raise three children and paid for my studies.”

The strange thing is that his father and mother had never been to the Moluccas either. They were born on Java, in the barracks. That is true of a very large part of the group that arrived in 1951: they are anak kompanie, children of the company. Moluccan-Dutch soldiers’ children. Even part of what is now regarded as adat, as traditional, has strong Dutch connections. As an example, Désirée mentions the traditional katredji dance, often danced in a farmer’s smock and with a polonaise. The fact that most of the Moluccan community in the Netherlands is deeply Christian cannot originally be adat either.

It is exactly what Gloria and Ais say. Ais: “Many of the customs we now think of as Moluccan are Dutch. The Dutch settled on the islands as early as the end of the sixteenth century.” Gloria: “From the outside, the violence of the actions and the violence within families are seen as typically Moluccan. But the upbringing the second generation received was not a Moluccan upbringing but a military one. And that does not come from their father, but from the Dutch army.”

Outside the community building in Bovensmilde stand several monuments. The most prominent, for the first generation, is a tall column with a tahuri on top. It was made by Gloria’s uncle, one of the De Punt hijackers, who was also an artist. A Moluccan flag has been attached to every lamppost in the neighborhood. That flag is banned in Indonesia; you can be imprisoned for years for it.

The young couple notice that their parents heard hardly any stories about the war and its aftermath. Only recently did it become clear to Ais how deeply the school hostage-taking had cut into his mother. “She was eight when it happened here, and her sister and brother were in there too.” He gestures toward the place where the school stood. “A few years ago, a number of the hostage-takers made public apologies. Only then did it become clear how much it had actually been lodged in her system without her knowing it. It turned out she was very angry with those people.”

At the opening of the exhibition in Het Noordbrabants Museum, Manoah Salampessy says: “The new generation of Moluccans is taking a step forward. Our parents and grandparents often lived in isolation, because they were frequently not allowed to work and lived in segregated camps or neighborhoods. Many people outside the community think of train hijackers and the Satudarah motorcycle club when they think of Moluccans, but we are now working on a new chapter, in which we reflect on our community and our rich culture and carry that outward as well.”

Gloria: “We can take more freedom to ask questions. Sometimes a grandfather or grandmother may still say a little more to grandchildren, but often the answers are not there.”

Ais’s grandmother took him to important places in the Moluccas. The now 94-year-old woman thinks it important that he know where he comes from. Sometimes she tells a little about the wartime period, such as how she escaped from the camp in an ox cart and had to beg to stay alive. But much remains unclear. Three years ago Ais went to her birth village on Java and discovered in the archives what his great-grandfather had gone through. For example, that in the Japanese camp, before his eyes, someone was beheaded for refusing to walk over the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina.

Again, that accumulation of trauma. It feeds their discussions, Gloria’s poems, their view of the world. The journeys to Java and the Moluccas showed them how the colonial past still reverberates in the distribution of wealth. Ais: “We have a passport that is valid in 185 countries, but my cousins there don’t even have a passport; it costs too much money.”

They would find a free Moluccan state beautiful, but it is not something they actively pursue. “I don’t see that happening,” says Ais. “I would like people to be free to express themselves.” Ais saw how Indonesia uses, or exploits, the Moluccas, through tourism, but also through nickel mines and the extraction of other raw materials. Riches that, once again, disappear from the community.

It was there too that they encountered the name they gave their daughter: Mutiara, which means pearl. She is the fourth generation and likes her grandfather’s papeda, a jelly made from sago palm, best. “Her Moluccan identity will come to her naturally,” Gloria says. “But we want to teach her that it does not matter where you belong, that she may be herself and does not have to adapt to a group.”

They are glad that Mutiara is still getting some Malay and that she has a large family, but they try to keep her away from coercive loyalty. Gloria: “I think we often cross our own boundaries in order to do what is expected. But if she doesn’t want to give an auntie a kiss, then she doesn’t have to. That has nothing to do with respect, but with respecting your own boundaries.”

This summer they are going to the Moluccas again. This time with Mutiara and Gloria’s parents. Gloria: “It will shape her. She will see that she comes from there, but she will also know that she comes just as much from here. She is a human being. And a human being is free.”