SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Indonesia (Dialogue)

Dutch state to apologise for Indonesian excesses

• The Dutch government will pay compensation and apologise to relatives of men killed by Dutch troops in a notorious 1947 massacre of villagers during Indonesia's bitter struggle for independence
• the apology “does justice to the gravity of what happened in Rawagedeh,” the village on Java island where up to 430 men were rounded up and summarily executed.
  
• The Dutch government has never prosecuted any soldiers for the massacre, despite a United Nations report condemning the attack as “deliberate and ruthless” as early as 1948.