Still: The Promise - Daan Veldhuizen

It’s an ongoing conflict that few in the Netherlands acknowledge or even know about  - in 1962, the Dutch transferred control of their former colony West Papua to Indonesia. They thereby set in motion years of genocidal violence against the West Papuan people. Dutch director Daan Veldhuizen’s new feature documentary The Promise** (a German premiere at DOK.fest Munich) tells the grim story of how and why such violence has been unleashed in a country where the indigenous population was long ago promised its independence.  

“It has been a challenging task to reconstruct this forgotten story because if a history is forgotten, nobody knows about it, so you have to do justice to all these historical facts, perspectives and nuances,” Veldhuizen explains the scale of the challenge he faced. He himself discovered the subject from Australian filmmaker Jono van Hest’s documentary, Pride Of Warriors, made for Al Jazeera almost two decades ago with footage filmed on smuggled cameras used by Papuan resistance fighters. He had watched it by chance and was startled to see “the Dutch flag being raised in a guerrilla war I was not aware of.”

Why wasn’t the plight of the West Papuan people discussed by the Dutch? “I’ve always felt that Dutch culture is not completely honest about its own role in the world and about its historical relevance. The Dutch always say ‘oh, we were just traders. The Spanish, the English were horrible as colonisers [but] we were just traders,’” he observes wryly.

Veldhuizen regards the reticence about acknowledging the persecution in West Papua to be “typically Dutch…and that makes me personally very angry being a Dutch man.”

The director doesn’t want to lecture his audience. He describes his documentary as “a retelling of history in which the truth still needs to be found…I wanted to make a film where history again becomes fluid and becomes an arena in which you can discover your own truth.”

Veldhuizen had access to very rich archive material, much of it never seen before. The Dutch had exhaustively chronicled their time in West Papua on film. This was the only part of the Dutch East Indies “left over” after 1949, an era when Dutch politicians like Joseph Luns claimed that the Netherlands would turn into “nothing but a farm on the North Sea” without its colonies.

“The footage was shot by the Dutch state itself as propaganda to show the people in the Netherlands that we still have something in the east and that we were not completely wiped out by [Indonesian President] Sukarno.”

The films were also intended to demonstrate that the Dutch were “good colonisers.” After all, as we see, they even taught the locals how to ride bicycles.

Much of the material used in the film is kept in the Sound & Vision archive. Some of it had never been edited. The director talks of finding rolls of forgotten 35mm film. He and his team re-scanned all of the material in high res.

“I wanted to make an experience where you could forget that you were looking at a historical film.”

One of the interviewees in the film is Julia Jouwe, a Dutch-based journalist whose father and grandfather are political refugees from West Papua. She questions the story told by the Dutch in their propaganda films and offers another very different perspective on the events portrayed. 

The West Papuans have been betrayed by the Dutch and by the UN - and now they are persecuted by the Indonesians who have control of their lands. It’s 4500 kilometres from West Papua to Java and there are no strong links between the Indonesians and the West Papuans. “They [the Indonesians] have nothing ethnically, culturally or religiously in common with the Papuan people. That’s where a lot of the hate comes from.” 

It doesn’t help either that West Papua “is one of the most militarised places on earth because of all the minerals that need to be protected.”

Just as the Dutch are unaware of what is happening in West Papua, so are most Indonesians. This is a conflict that has somehow passed under the radar almost everywhere. Those young Indonesians who do know about the conflict are shocked that their country has been “going along with these human rights violations for so many decades.”

Anyone who speaks out is liable to be targeted. Veldhuizen says his social media accounts are being targeted and hacked. Investigative website Bellingcat has reported extensively about ongoing Indonesian attempts to influence debates on West Papuan independence in the Netherlands.

“That shows to me that this is a very urgent and relevant story. It is just being kept away from the world.”

The Promise was produced by Witfilm and is being distributed in the Netherlands by Cinema Delicatessen in late May.

“It is very important to get the Dutch audience and Dutch politicians behind this issue because it is our own history, so people understand it more easily here. But I really hope that the film lands internationally. It is more than a Dutch historical film. It is about huge human rights issues in a country that most people haven’t even heard about,” the director reflects. 

The Promise, he adds, is also about how the mid-20th Century world transitioned from a colonial era into a neo-colonial era in which economic incentives drive exploitation both of raw materials and populations. “This is a system that has huge parallels with what is happening now in Ukraine, or the dispute around Greenland or what has been happening for decades in the Congo…for me this is a much bigger story showing how the world works today.” 

Find out more about DOK.fest München here.

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*film supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Netherlands Production Incentive