Suriname needs space from the Netherlands after apology for slavery past, organizations say

If the Dutch government wants to make amends after apologizing for its slavery past, it should give Suriname some space. That's what leaders of several Surinamese organizations say before the commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Deputy Prime Minister Wopke Hoekstra will be in Suriname to give a speech during the national commemoration.

In Suriname, in the run-up to Hoekstra's visit, frequent reference is made to Mark Rutte's statement that the apology in December was "a comma, not a period." "What comes after the comma is dangerous," says Kortensia Sumter-Griffith of the organization Fiti Fu Wini.

Fiti Fu Wini ("fit and measure to win") held a torch relay through the streets of Paramaribo on Friday night. "The torch relay is to shine a light on our ancestors and thank them for fighting," Sumter-Griffith said. "Slavery took place here, not in the Netherlands. They would have touched people's hearts more if the king had been here." She believes the Netherlands should treat Suriname more as an equal interlocutor.

"We think it's a circus of ignorance," said Armand Zunder, chairman of the Suriname National Reparations Commission. In his opinion, there is "nothing to celebrate" on July 1, especially since the enslaved people had to remain on the plantations until 1873. "You don't go to a funeral to celebrate anything either, do you?"

Zunder believes Suriname should highlight the financial damage caused by slavery. In his opinion, the Netherlands should now firmly budget half a billion for Suriname and half a billion for the islands in the Caribbean for (mental) health care and debt relief. Finally, decades of reparations should be paid to compensate for the damage suffered. He will not name the total amount, but it could run into hundreds of billions of euros.

For Iwan Wijngaarde, chairman of the Feydrasi Fu Afrikan Srananman movement, it is important that Suriname itself must think about how it wants to deal with the past of slavery. At the moment, he says, the country is still too divided on the issue.

At best, the Netherlands can "support black institutions" at this stage. However, it is important that this is done "very diplomatically," he said. "You have already made the head sick," he says, referring to the trauma he believes slavery has put "in the genes" of Afro-Surinamese. "Don't do it yourself! There's the colonizer again."