It will not solve racism in modern society, prime minister Mark Rutte has told reporters.
“Pulling down statues is not the answer. Our history is one of pluses and minuses. And if there are parts of our history which we are no longer proud of, then we should be able to talk about them… but you cannot make history disappear.”
Instead, Rutte said, the pros and cons attached to controversial figures should be debated and explained. JP Coen, a seafarer whose statue was damaged on Friday was, Rutte said, “a visionary, but he also led punishment expeditions against on the Banda Islands, in which thousands of people died”.
The town council in Hoorn, where the statue is located, placed a explanatory text next to it in 2012 outlining what Coen did. Such a move is a good idea, according to the prime minister, but not something that should be made compulsory.
Meanwhile the Witte de With arts centre in Rotterdam, which was also vandalized on Friday, has said it will now press ahead with choosing a new name, three years after it first mooted the idea. The centre was named after a famous vice-admiral in the Dutch navy who played a pivotal role in several major sea battles, but also laid waste to the city of Jakarta in 1618.
The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, was also vandalized, but it said in a statement that it had no plans to make a formal complaint. The museum is part of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen [Museum of World Cultures], a combination of three ethnographic museums in the Netherlands.
“We see what is happening in society at large and it would not be appropriate,” director Stijn Schoonderwoerd told the leftist Amsterdam daily Parool. Amsterdam city council announced that it will carry out an inventory of statues, buildings and street names with a link the city’s colonial past, with a view to placing explanatory texts next to them.
“It is not up to politicians to say what is controversial, it should be part of a wider discussion in society,” the council said in a statement. “But we do not accept vandalism and we will take action against it.”
The attacks against the monuments and museums are the work of a collective calling themselves Helden van Nooit [Never heroes].