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Campaigners for the widows of former Japanese prisoners of war have said they will keep fighting for compensation after the Dutch government said only surviving partners would be entitled to receive their spouses’ unpaid wages.
Long-term care minister Mirjam Sterk announced last Friday that the partners of civil servants and servicemen who were held captive following the invasion of Indonesia in 1942 would receive 42 months’ back pay, covering the period until the liberation in May 1945.
But Sterk said only widows who are still alive when the compensation scheme is launched on February 1 next year, all of whom are well into their nineties or older, would receive the payouts because a more extensive ruling would be “too complicated”.
The government has also cut the total size of the fund from the €50 mln announced in its last spring budget statement to €11.5 mln, on the basis that only a few hundred widows of the 40,000 men who were captured by the Japanese still survive.
The decision follows decades of campaigning for victims of the camps to be given the same treatment as Dutch government employees who were forced to work in Germany during World War II.
Moluccans
They include Moluccans who later fought on the side of the Dutch during the Indonesian liberation war and were subsequently persecuted by the independent government, prompting them to flee to the Netherlands.
Earlier this year prime minister Rob Jetten apologised to the Moluccan community for the way they were treated when they arrived in the 1950s.
Peggy Stein, of campaign group Indisch Platform 2.0, called for the ruling to be backdated to include widows who were alive when parliament approved a motion by farmers’ party leader Caroline van der Plas on the issue last April.
“That was when these people heard they were going to get their wages, but some of them have died in the meantime,” she told Dutch News.
Stein added that the cabinet appeared to have pushed through the ruling without waiting for parliament to debate the extent of the compensation scheme first.
“We still had to talk to MPs and had asked for a committee debate, but never had a reply,” she said.
“This isn’t about care or morality, it’s purely and solely about the technical settling of a case for the lowest possible cost.”
No official records
Sterk said it was “practically impossible” to compensate relatives of former camp inmates who had died because the government had no central records, but Stein said her campaign group had compiled its own list of detainees and could provide documentation showing they worked for the colonial administration.
“I have a list, but they say the SVB [Dutch social security bank] is legally not allowed to use it,” she said. “But if they have €50 million to spend, why can’t they find other parties to distribute the money who are able to work with us?”
Stein said she was not calling for the regulation to be scrapped, but it should be backdated to 2025 or 2015, when the government first acknowledged that the POWs were in its service. Prior to that it had argued that the colonial government in Indonesia was a separate entity.
Stein said the campaigners would continue to press the cabinet to compensate all victims of the Japanese occupation, including those who were no longer alive. “We have made a promise to these elderly people, we have signed a petition, and we are going to keep fighting for it,” she said.