It's much more complex than that of course. First of all it is practically impossible to determine what percentage of Dutch prosperity is due to slave trade, how much of it was due to income from selling natural gas and how much came from the Dutch people being clever merchants and light-bulb-builders and chip-machine-designers and whatnot. Not to mention that putting a definite price on the enslavement of your ancestors is likely to be pretty insulting. "Sorry we enslaved your great-grandfather, here is 5000 euros and let's call it even" is probably not going over well, even if that was the inflation-adjusted profit realized.
Secondly of all the damage to local institutions we've done has often caused corruption to be normalized so much that reparations payments would merely enrich the ruling elite further. We can't just send over a few billion to soothe our conscience and hope everything will be OK. It's not really like everyone in the victim countries were innocent either, many tribes were all to happy to sell some of their rival to the westerners.
Not everyone has documentation to prove anything either, precisely because their ancestors were slaves.
Finally, how far are we going back? Do the Dutch have the right to claim reparations from German occupation? From Napoleonic occupation? From the descendants of the Romans?
I don't dispute that there is a debt of honor to help everyone on earth towards a more prosperous state, but reparation payments have so many issues that they might create more problems than they solve.
This is such an ignorant question. It completely erases the living people who are victims of colonialism right now. But whatever, apparently there were also atrocities hundreds of years ago that we can ignore too.
Secondly of all the damage to local institutions we've done has often caused corruption to be normalized so much that reparations payments would merely enrich the ruling elite further. We can't just send over a few billion to soothe our conscience and hope everything will be OK. It's not really like everyone in the victim countries were innocent either, many tribes were all to happy to sell some of their rival to the westerners.
Not everyone has documentation to prove anything either, precisely because their ancestors were slaves.
Finally, how far are we going back? Do the Dutch have the right to claim reparations from German occupation? From Napoleonic occupation? From the descendants of the Romans?
I don't dispute that there is a debt of honor to help everyone on earth towards a more prosperous state, but reparation payments have so many issues that they might create more problems than they solve.