Indigenous representatives like Raoni Metuktire, an internationally recognized Kaiapó leader, followed the Supreme Court trial on the temporary framework, inside and outside of the courtroom in Brasilia, in a case that will determine whether the land rights of the indigenous peoples of Brazil have extreme limits established by the constitution. CREDIT: Nelson Jr./SCO-STF-FotosPúblicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 9 2023 (IPS)

Children were thrown into the air and stabbed and cut with knives and machetes. The attackers first opened fire on the victims of the massacre before finishing them off with knives so that none of the 244 indigenous people of the village would survive. The 1904 massacre permanently marked the Xokleng people and may play a decisive role in the future of the native peoples of Brazil.

The tragedy is emblematic of the genocide suffered by indigenous people in Brazilian history. There were more numerous and recent killings, especially during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. But the 1904 massacre is at the center of a trial in the Supreme Court that will determine the progress of the demarcation of indigenous territories in this South American country.

The trial was triggered by a move by the government of the southern state of Santa Catarina. In 2016 the state’s Institute of the Environment (IMA) lay claim to part of the demarcated land of the Xokleng people for a biological reserve.

But in 2019 the Supreme Court recognized that the case had national repercussions, setting a precedent for all demarcations of indigenous lands, because the IMA’s claim cites something that is called the “temporary framework”.

This framework states that native peoples only have the right to the lands that they physically occupied when the current constitution was promulgated on Oct. 5, 1988, creating the present system of demarcation of indigenous reserves.

The trial began in 2021, with the votes of two of the 11 Supreme Court justices, one against and the other in favor of the temporary framework. It was then suspended due to Judge Alexandre de Moraes’ request for more time to analyze the issue. It was not resumed until last month, on May 7, when Moraes issued his vote and argument, before it was suspended again on Jun. 7.

The 1904 massacre was part of his argument against the framework, as an example of the violence used to dispossess indigenous peoples of their land, which showed that it would be “unjust” to demand their physical presence on their traditional lands on any precise date. The Xokleng were “forced to leave their land in order to survive,” the judge argued.

Judge Alexandre de Moraes (C), of Brazil’s Supreme Court, is the shining star of the country’s judiciary. He issued a vote that could be decisive for the future of indigenous peoples’ lands. He also presides over the Electoral Court and is conducting investigations that could sentence former President Jair Bolsonaro to ineligibility for political office or to jail for spreading disinformation and acting against democracy. CREDIT: Alejandro Zambrana/Secom-TSE-FotosPúblicas

Violence

The Ibirama-Laklãnõ Indigenous Land, where 2,300 people live today, almost all of them from the Xokleng community along with a few Guarani and Kaingang families, was demarcated in 2003: 37,000 hectares recognized as their territory by the government of Santa Catarina in 1926, according to official documents in possession of the native residents of that land.

But in 1965 the military dictatorship limited their territory to just 14,000 hectares. In addition, 10 years later, it ordered the construction of dams in the Itajaí river basin, which crosses the region, to curb flooding in cities and landed estates downstream.

Consequently, it flooded the Xokleng lands and further reduced the area where the indigenous people live and farm, as well as cutting off their roads, aggravating their isolation. An anthropological study conducted in the 1990s recommended that the territory should be expanded to the previous 37,000 hectares, but this was called into question by the local government and by landowners who had invaded part of the land.

Public attention was drawn to the near extermination of the Xokleng people by a book by anthropologist Silvio Coelho dos Santos, “Indigenous people and whites in southern Brazil: the dramatic experience of the Xokleng” ((Indios e brancos no Sul do Brasil: a dramática experiencia dos xokleng, in Portuguese), which includes a report of the 1904 massacre in the newspaper “Novidades”.

Many similar atrocities have been committed in Brazil. But the fact that this massacre in particular was well-documented and proven undermines the temporary framework, defended by many politicians and landowners and used in their legal arguments and in their attempts to reduce conflicts over land.

But it clearly runs counter to the constitution, according to Marcio Santilli, former chair of the governmental National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) and founder of the non-governmental Socio-Environmental Institute.

“The basic unconstitutionality is that the articles (on indigenous people) do not address the temporary framework and recognize indigenous territorial rights as ‘original’. According to the constitution, there is no indigenous person without land,” he told IPS.

Thanks to the constitution’s mandate, 496 indigenous reserves, covering 13 percent of the national territory, have been demarcated so far, without taking into account the temporary framework that is now being cited.

And another 238 reserves are in different phases of the demarcation process. Some have already been identified as indigenous lands, while others are still under study, according to the Socio-Environmental Institute, which has a large database on the subject.

In Brazil, according to the 2022 census, there are 1.65 million indigenous people, an increase of 84 percent compared to the 2010 census, although they represent only 0.8 percent of the national population. In this country there are 305 distinct indigenous peoples who speak 174 languages, according to Funai.

Moraes condemned the temporary framework, but his vote worried indigenous leaders because he proposed “full compensation” to “good faith” landowners currently occupying demarcated areas. Until now, only improvements made on property have been compensated and not the land itself, which is considered to have been usurped.

Indigenous people from the metropolitan region of São Paulo block a highway with bonfires, in protest against the temporary framework, which drastically limits the demarcation of territories of native communities. Legislators are trying to give the measure legal status, while the Supreme Court postponed a ruling on the issue for the second time, on Jun. 7. CREDIT: Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil

Reconciliation rejected

“Moraes wants prior compensation, to pay the landowners first and then demarcate the indigenous land, which can take 10 years. They are looking for a broad compromise to satisfy those who have illegally taken over land,” protested Mauricio Terena, legal coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib).

“Why is it always our rights that have to be chipped away at? Our rights are always compromised, we’re always the ones who lose out,” he said while speaking to the indigenous people present in Brasilia to follow the Supreme Court trial.

Nearly 1,500 indigenous people from all over the country camped out in the capital and there were demonstrations against the temporary framework in dozens of cities and towns and along highways in the country, reported Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of Apib.

Moraes also proposed that, in the event of practically insurmountable difficulties, such as the existence of towns in areas recognized as indigenous land, compensation should be offered – in other words, they should be given land in other areas, if accepted by the indigenous community.

“Our territories are non-negotiable,” Terena said. “Our relationship with them runs deep, it is where our ancestors fell.”

His complaint was also due to the new interruption of the trial. Another judge, André Mendonça, a former justice minister in the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), asked for more time to study the case. He has up to 90 days to issue his vote, which would reactivate the trial, but he promised to do it sooner.

“They need time. We left here without an answer,” Terena complained. The process has been dragging on for more than seven years and the temporary framework serves as a justification for invasions of land and violence against indigenous people.

In any case, “Moraes’s vote was positive” because it recognized the unconstitutionality of the temporary framework, said Megaron Txucarramãe, chief of the Kaiapó people, who live in the Eastern Amazon region.

“We will return to Brasilia when the trial resumes, we will continue the fight to secure our constitutional rights and the land for our grandchildren,” he told IPS by phone from the indigenous camp in Brasilia.

“We will return to Brasilia to hold demonstrations whenever necessary to defend our lands, the constitution and the rights of our grandchildren,” Chief Megaron Txucarramãe, a well-known leader of the Kayapó indigenous people from the Eastern Amazon region, told IPS from the indigenous camp set up near the Supreme Court. CREDIT: Courtesy of Megaron Txucarramãe

Lawmakers against indigenous people

But their battle is not limited to the judicial front. On May 30 the Chamber of Deputies urgently passed a bill that would make the temporary framework law, by a majority of 283 votes against 155. Its final approval now depends on the Senate.

“The processes are moving ahead simultaneously and influence each other,” Oscar Vilhena, director of the Law School at the private Getulio Vargas Foundation, told IPS from São Paulo. “If the Supreme Court declares the temporary framework unconstitutional, the bill loses its purpose, but that would increase the costs for the Supreme Court.”

By costs he was referring to increased political pressure from right-wing and landowner-linked legislators, known as the ruralists, who have long attacked the Supreme Court for allegedly meddling in legislative affairs.

In addition, if the proposed rule is declared unconstitutional, “the Chamber of Deputies could resume deliberations on a constitutional amendment already approved in the Senate,” Santilli warned by telephone from Brasilia.

This bill, which has languished in the lower house since 2015, when it was received from the Senate, would precisely establish the payment of compensation for land ownership, not only for improvements to property, to landowners affected by indigenous territories demarcated since the current constitution went into effect in October 1988.

During one of the hearings in Buenos Aires, the court trying a 1924 indigenous massacre in the Chaco heard the testimony of historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera, from the University of Buenos Aires, who has been studying indigenous history in Argentina for decades. The expert witness described in detail the conditions in the Napalpí indigenous “reducción” or camp where the massacre took place. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 13 2022 (IPS)

It’s a strange trial, with no defendants. The purpose is not to hand down a conviction, but to bring visibility to an atrocious event that occurred almost a hundred years ago in northern Argentina and was concealed by the State for decades with singular success: the massacre by security forces of hundreds of indigenous people who were protesting labor mistreatment and discrimination.

“We are seeking to heal the wounds and vindicate the memory of the (indigenous) peoples,” explained federal judge Zunilda Niremperger, as she opened the first hearing in Buenos Aires on May 10 in the trial for the truth of the so-called Napalpí Massacre, in which an undetermined number of indigenous people were shot to death on the morning of Jul. 19, 1924.

The trial began on Apr. 19 in the northern province of Chaco, one of the country’s poorest, near the border with Paraguay. But it was moved momentarily to the capital, home to approximately one third of the 45 million inhabitants of this South American country, to give it greater visibility.

In a highly symbolic decision, the venue chosen in Buenos Aires was the Space for Memory and Human Rights, created in the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), where the most notorious clandestine torture and extermination center operated during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which kidnapped and murdered as many as 30,000 people for political reasons."What we hope is that the sentence will bring out the truth about an event that needs to be understood so that racism and xenophobia do not take hold in Argentina. People need to know about all the blood that has flowed because of contempt for indigenous people." -- Duilio Ramírez

The hearings in Buenos Aires ended Thursday May 12, and the court will reconvene in Resistencia, the capital of Chaco, on May 19, when the prosecutor’s office and the plaintiffs are to present their arguments before the sentence is handed down at an unspecified date.

“This trial is aimed at bringing out the truth that we need, and that I come to support, in the place where they brought my daughter when they kidnapped her. This shows that genocides are repeated in history,” Vera Vigevani de Jarach, seated in the front row of the courtroom, her head covered by the white scarf that identifies the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group, told IPS.

Vera, 94, is Jewish and emigrated with her family to Argentina when she was 11 years old from Italy, due to the racial persecution unleashed by fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1939. In 1976 her only daughter, Franca Jarach, then 18 years old, was forcibly disappeared.

“Truth trials” are not a novelty in Argentina. The term was used to refer to investigations of the crimes committed by the dictatorship, carried out after 1999, when amnesty laws passed after the conviction of the military regime’s top leaders blocked the prosecution of the rest of the perpetrators.

A petition filed by a member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (made up of mothers of victims of forced disappearance) before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) led later to an agreement with the Argentine State, which recognized the woman’s right to have the judiciary investigate the fate of her disappeared daughter, even though the amnesty laws made it impossible to punish those responsible.

Eventually, the amnesty laws were repealed, the trials resumed, and defendants were convicted and sent to prison.

Indigenous communities and human rights organizations held an Apr. 19, 2022 demonstration in Resistencia, capital of the Argentine province of Chaco, at the beginning of the trial for the truth about the Napalpí massacre. CREDIT: Chaco Secretariat of Human Rights and Gender

Historic reparations

“My grandmother was a survivor of the massacre and I grew up listening to the stories of labor exploitation in Napalpí and about what happened that day. For us this trial is a historic reparation,” Miguel Iya Gómez, a bilingual multicultural teacher who today presides over the Chaco Aboriginal Institute, a provincial agency whose mission is to improve the living conditions of native communities, told IPS.

The trial is built on the basis of official documents and journalistic coverage of the time and the videotaped testimonies of survivors of the massacre and their descendants, and of researchers of indigenous history in the Chaco.

The Argentine province of Chaco forms part of the ecoregion from which it takes its name: a vast, hot, dry, sparsely forested plain that was largely unsettled during the Spanish Conquest. Only at the end of the 19th century did the modern Argentine State launch military campaigns to subdue the indigenous people in the Chaco and impose its authority there.

Once the Chaco was conquered, many indigenous families were forced to settle in camps called “reducciones”, where they had to carry out agricultural work.

“The ‘reducciones’ operated in the Chaco between 1911 and 1956 and were concentration camps for indigenous people, who were disciplined through work,” said sociologist Marcelo Musante, a member of the Network of Researchers on Genocide and Indigenous Policies in Argentina, which brings together academics from different disciplines, at the hearing.

“When indigenous people entered the ‘reducción’, they were given clothes and farming tools, and this generated a debt that put them under great pressure. And they were not allowed to make purchases outside the stores of the ‘reducción’,” he explained.

David García, a member of the Napalpí Foundation, created in 2006 to gather information about and bring visibility to the 1924 massacre, took part in the trial in Buenos Aires. His organization was one of the driving forces behind the historic trial in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Invaded by cotton

Historian Nicolás Iñigo Carrera said it was common for indigenous people in the Chaco to go to work temporarily in sugar mills in the neighboring provinces of Salta and Jujuy, but the scenario changed in the 1920s, when the Argentine government introduced cotton in the Chaco, to tap into the textile industry’s growing global demand.

“Then the criollo (white) settlers, who often had no laborers, demanded the guaranteed availability of indigenous labor to harvest the cotton crop, and in 1924 the government prohibited indigenous people, who refused to work on the cotton plantations, from leaving the Chaco, declaring any who left subversives,” Carrera said.

Anthropologist Lena Dávila Da Rosa said the Jul. 19, 1924 protest involved between 800 and 1000 indigenous people from Napalpí, and some 130 police officers who opened fired on them, with the support of an airplane that dropped candy so the children would go out to look for it and thus reveal the location of the protesters they were tracking down.

“It’s impossible to know exactly how many indigenous people were killed, but there were several hundred victims,” Alejandro Jasinski, a researcher with the Truth and Justice Program of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, told IPS.

“The official report mentioned four people killed in confrontations among themselves, and there was a judicial investigation that was quickly closed. All that was left were the buried memories of the communities,” he added.

The memories were revived and made public in recent years thanks in large part to the efforts of Juan Chico, an indigenous writer and researcher from the Chaco who died of COVID-19 in 2021.

“Juan started collecting oral accounts almost 20 years ago,” David García, a translator and interpreter of the language of the Qom, one of the main indigenous nations of the Chaco, told IPS. “I worked alongside him to bring the indigenous genocide to light, and in 2006 we founded an NGO that today is the Napalpí Foundation. It was a long struggle to reach this trial.”

Vera Vigevani de Jarach, a member of the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, attended the hearing in Buenos Aires for the Napalpí indigenous massacre, held in the most notorious clandestine detention and torture center used by the 1976-1983 military dictatorship in Argentina. CREDIT: National Secretariat of Human Rights

Indigenous people in the Chaco today

Of the population of Chaco province, 3.9 percent, or 41,304 people, identified as indigenous in the last national census conducted in Argentina in 2010, which is higher than the national average of 2.4 percent.

Census data reflects the harsh living conditions of indigenous people in the Chaco and the disadvantages they face in relation to the rest of the population. More than 80 percent live in deficient housing while more than 25 percent live in critically overcrowded conditions, with more than three people per room. In addition, more than half of the households cook with firewood or charcoal.

Today, the site of the Napalpí massacre is called Colonia Aborigen Chaco and is a 20,000-hectare plot of land owned by the indigenous community where, according to official data, some 1,300 indigenous people live, from the Qom and Moqoit communities, the most numerous native groups in the Chaco along with the Wichi.

In 2019, mass graves were found there by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a prestigious organization that emerged in 1984 to identify remains of victims of the military dictatorship and that has worked all over the world.

“What we hope is that the sentence will bring out the truth about an event that needs to be understood so that racism and xenophobia do not take hold in Argentina,” Duilio Ramírez, a lawyer with the Chaco government’s Human Rights Secretariat, which is acting as plaintiff, told IPS. “People need to know about all the blood that has flowed because of contempt for indigenous people.”

“We hope that with the ruling, the Argentine State will take responsibility for what happened and that this will translate into public policies of reparations for the indigenous communities,” he said.

Residents of La Hacienda, in the central department of La Paz in El Salvador, are holding pictures of the four American nuns murdered in 1980 by members of the National Guard, as they attend the commemorations held to mark 35 years of the crime, in December 2015, at the site where it was perpetrated. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 23 2016 (IPS)

The ruling of the highest court to repeal the amnesty law places El Salvador in the dilemma of deciding whether the country should prosecute those who committed serious violations to human rights during the civil war.

It also evidences that, more than two decades after the end of the conflict in 1992, reconciliation is proving elusive in this Central American country with 6.3 million inhabitants.

At the heart of the matter is the pressing need to bring justice to the victims of war crimes while, on the other hand, it implies a huge as well as difficult task, since it will entail opening cases that are more than two decades old, involving evidence that has been tampered or lost, if at all available, and witnesses who have already died.“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians...And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”-- Engracia Echeverría.

Those who oppose opening such cases highlight the precarious condition of the judiciary, which has important inadequacies and is cluttered with a plethora of unsentenced cases.

“I believe Salvadorans as a whole, the population and the political forces are not in favour of this (initiating prosecution), they have turned the page”, pointed out left-wing analyst Salvador Samayoa, one of the signatory parties of the Peace Agreements that put an end to 12 years of civil war.

The 12 years of conflict left a toll of 70,000 casualties and more than 8,000 people missing.

Samayoa added that right now El Salvador has too many problems and should not waste its energy on problems pertaining to the past.

For human rights organizations, finding the truth, serving justice and providing redress prevail over the present circumstances and needs.

“Human rights violators can no longer hide behind the amnesty law, so they should be investigated once and for all”, said Miguel Montenegro, director of the El Salvador Commission of Human Rights, a non-governmental organization, told IPS.

The Supreme Court of Justice, in what is deemed to be a historical ruling, on 13 July ruled that the General Amnesty Act for the Consolidation of, passed in 1993, is unconstitutional, thus opening the door to prosecuting those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict.

In its ruling, the Court considered that Articles 2 and 144 of said amnesty law are unconstitutional on the grounds that they violate the rights of the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity to resort to justice and seek redress.

It further ruled that said crimes are not subject to the statute of limitations and can be tried regardless of the date on which they were perpetrated.

“We have been waiting for this for many years; without this ruling no justice could have been done”, told IPS activist Engracia Echeverría, from the Madeleine Lagadec Center for the Promotion of Defence of Human Rights.

This organization is named after the French nun who was raped and murdered by government troops in April 1989, when they attacked a hospital belonging to the guerrilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The activist stressed that, even though it is true that a lot of information relevant to the cases has been lost, some data can still be obtained by the investigators in the District Attorney’s General Office in charge of criminal prosecution, in case some people wish to instigate an investigation.

The law has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations within and outside the country, since its enactment in March 1993.

Its critics have claimed that it promoted impunity by protecting Army and guerrilla members who committed human rights crimes during the conflict.

However, its advocates have been both retired and active Army members, as well as right-wing politicians and businessmen in the country, since it precisely prevented justice being served to these officers –who are seen as responsible for frustrating the victory of the FMLN.

“All the crimes committed were motivated by an attack by the guerrilla”, claimed retired general Humberto Corado, former Defence Minister between 1993 and 1995.

The now repealed act was passed only five days after the Truth Commission, mandated by the United Nations to investigate human rights abuses during the civil war, had published its report with 32 specific cases, 20 of which were perpetrated by the Army and 12 by insurgents.

Among those cases were the murders of archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in March 1980; four American nuns in December of the same year, and hundreds of peasants who were shot in several massacres, like those which took place in El Mozote in December 1981 and in Sumpul in May 1980.

Also, six Jesuit priests and a woman and her daughter were murdered in November 1989, a case already being investigated by a Spanish court.

The Truth Commission has also pointed to some FMLN commanders, holding them accountable for the death of several mayors who were targeted for being considered part of the government’s counter-insurgent strategy.

Some of those insurgents are now government officials, as is the case with director of Civil Protection Jorge Meléndez.

Before taking office in 2009, the FMLN, now turned into a political party, strongly criticized the amnesty law and advocated in favour of its repeal, on the grounds that it promoted impunity.

But, after winning the presidential elections that year with Mauricio Funes, it changed its stance and no longer favoured the repeal of the law. Since 2014, the country has been governed by former FMLN commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén.

In fact, the governing party has deemed the repeal as “reckless”, with the President stating on July 15 that Court magistrates “were not considering the effects it could have on the already fragile coexistence” and urging to take the ruling “with responsibility and maturity while taking into account the best interests of the country”.

After the law was ruled unconstitutional, the media were saturated with opinions and analyses on the subject, most of them pointing out the risk of the country being destabilized and on the verge of chaos due to the countless number of lawsuits that could pile up in the courts dealing with war cases.

“To those people who fiercely claim that magistrates have turned the country into a hell we must respond that hell is what the victims and their families have gone –and continue to go- through”, reads the release written on July 15 by the officials of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University, where the murdered Jesuits lived and worked in 1989.

Furthermore, the release states that most of the victims demand to be listened to, in order to find out the truth and be able to put a face on those they need to forgive.

In fact, at the heart of the debate lies the idea of restorative justice as a mechanism to find out the truth and heal the victims’ wounds, without necessarily implying taking perpetrators to jail.

“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians”, stressed Echeverría.

“And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”, she added.

In the case of Montenegro, himself a victim of illegal arrest and tortures in 1986, he said that it is necessary to investigate those who committed war crimes in order to find out the truth but, even more importantly, as a way for the country to find the most suitable mechanisms to forgive and provide redress”.

However, general Corado said that restorative justice was “hypocritical, its only aim being to seek revenge”.

The Dutch government has formally apologised for the mass killing of Indonesians during colonial occupation which ended in 1949.

The Dutch ambassador in Indonesia, Tjeerd de Zwaan, officially presented the state’s apology at a Jakarta ceremony on Thursday.

“On behalf of the Dutch government I apologise for these excesses,” De Zwaan said.

The Netherlands had already apologised and paid compensation in certain specific cases, but this was the first general apology for atrocities carried out during the colonial era.

“The Dutch government is aware that it bears a special responsibility in respect of Indonesian widows of victims of summary executions comparable to those carried out by Dutch troops in what was then Celebes (Sulawesi) and Rawa Gede (West Java),” De Zwaan added.

Representatives of the victims welcomed the apology.

“We feel grateful and very happy to be here. Before that we never imagined that it would be like this,” said one, Nurhaeni.

Westerling executions

Special forces from the Netherlands carried out a series of summary executions in its former colony between 1945 and 1949, killing thousands.

In total, about 40,000 people were executed during the colonial era, according to the Indonesian government. However, Dutch figures mention only a few thousand.

South Sulawesi was the site of one of the worst atrocities. On Jan. 28, 1947, Dutch special forces executed 208 men on a field in front of a local government office.

It was one of the many mass murders by notorious captain Raymond Westerling who was long considered a hero in the Netherlands.

Westerling and his troops held summary executions in tens of villages for a period of three months in a bid to wipe out resistance against Dutch colonisation. Neither he nor his men were ever prosecuted.

Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from Jakarta, said the Dutch government suddenly seemed in a hurry to apologise for the atrocities that were committed over 60 years ago.

“In a couple of months from now, the Dutch prime minister is visiting Indonesia and many have said it would actually be much more appropriate to issue the apology then. But suddenly they decided it had to happen today at the Dutch embassy and not in the places where these war crimes have taken place,” Vaessen said.

“They chose the embassy because they want to apologies for a lot more than only what happened in South Sulawesi and other places. They are apologising for all the war crimes, which the Dutch merely call excesses,” Vaessen added.

The Hague had previously apologised and paid out to the widows in individual cases but it had never said sorry or offered compensation for the victims of general summary executions.

Legal action

Two high-profile legal actions have resulted in 20,000 euros being awarded to the widows of some victims and a public apology for summary executions that took place on the island of Sulawesi and in Rawagadeh, on the island of Java.

“When I received the money from the Netherlands I smelled it, I was so happy. But when I was smelling it I could not forget what happened to my husband. I was so sad,” Nani, a 93-year-old widow, told Al Jazeera.

The father of Andi Mondji was one of 208 executed in Sulawesi. He witnessed it when he was still a small child.

“Look what I have lost back then, my grandmother was shot when she was 80 years old and my father was shot and another relative too. All of them shot dead. They should be able to imagine how I as a child suffered because of this,” Mondji told Al Jazeera.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.