In and Out of Uniform

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were some fifty thousand Moluccans living in the Netherlands. ¹ Except for a very few Moluccans who served in the Dutch colonial army and/or their wives who came to the Netherlands in 1951 after the decolonization of Indonesia, they were the descendants of these Moluccan soldiers. During the late colonial era, the Moluccan soldiers had become the most valued ‘ethnic soldiers’ in the colonial army. In the political turmoil of decolonization and its aftermath, the position of—a part of—these Moluccan soldiers became problematic. In 1951, albeit the most unwanted solution, 3,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families (12,500 persons in total) were shipped to the Netherlands, where they were supposed to stay only temporarily. ² More or less upon arrival, the Moluccans were dismissed from the army, making them statusless and jobless people in an alien country. This paper deals with the history of these Moluccans: how they entered the army, how they came to the Netherlands and the long waiting for recognition of their role in the colonial era by the Dutch government.