by Axeslammer Wed Dec 12, 2007 12:25 pm
EMP wrote:Have any other South Molluccans played for Holland? If so who? Also, who scouted him? Wouldn't have thought it would be the first place to look, or was he based in Holland already?
It's one of the darkest pages in our history and we are hardly taught anything about it in our schools : the colonisation of Indonesia, their war for indepedence and our "politionele aktie" (going to war, trying to beat the insurrection down....calling it a "policing activity"). The part of the Moluccans in all of that has been completely overlooked...
I don't know exactly what happened (because no one talks about this giant of a skeleton in our closet), but I have been told (by my parents) that we made a deal with the Moluccans : they would join in our army in exchange for the promise that the Netherlands would actively support the forming of an independant Moluccan state.
A lot of them died fighting for the Dutch cause in Indonesia and when it was time for the Dutch government to repay that debt we reneged on it...
That's why a lot of them live in the Netherlands, they're refugees who'll probably never be able to return to the country they still think of has home (3 generations later).
Scouring the web I can't find much information about it, this is the closest I got :
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cove/4232/9911/INA-maluku-9910.html
The Dutch are hugely indebted to Moluccan soldiers, whom they recruited as the core of their colonial army a century ago. Moluccan soldiers fought alongside the Dutch against Indonesia during a 1945-1949 battle for independence, which Indonesia eventually won. In 1950, the Moluccans rose against the new Jakarta-based government in a failed attempt to proclaim the Republic of the South Moluccas. They were an independent state for nearly nine months. Thousands of RMS soldiers fled to the Netherlands for fear of repercussions, and the Dutch now stand accused of abandoning them.
"The soldiers and their families were taken to former concentration camps by the Dutch government under the promise they would return to a free Molucca after six months," said the BP's Tuparia. But Indonesia'a annexation of the spice islands was already a fact and many Moluccans settled in Dutch villages outside the camps in the Netherlands. Most of them live there to this day.
In 1975, in a dramatic attempt to draw attention to their separatist cause, six young RMS activists ambushed a train in the Netherlands on December 2 and took hostages. Three hijackers were killed and three have completed their jail sentences for the incident, which lasted nearly two weeks. The tragedy highlighted the need for dialogue and so the Moluccans in the Netherlands set up the IWM, a body representing the various parties involved in the Moluccas. Their hopes for the islands' future are modest.
"There's zero chance RMS will gain power (on the Moluccas). We are just asking for a clear standpoint from the Dutch government out of courtesy for the first generation," said IWM's Christine Nanlohy. The group's priority is the welfare and safety of the people on the Moluccas, and it is trying to help the people there by lobbying for economic and humanitarian aid, she said.
"So far the Dutch role regarding the situation on the Moluccas has been rather timid," she said. 
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