Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized to the Dutch state on Monday for its role in the slave trade and its consequences, which he said are still being felt today, Reuters reported.

“Today I apologize. For centuries, the Dutch state and its representatives allowed and encouraged slavery and profited from it,” he said during a televised speech at the Dutch National Archives.

“It is true that today no one is personally responsible for slavery, but the Dutch state is responsible for the enormous suffering caused to the enslaved and their descendants,” he added.

His apology came in the broader context of an analysis in the Netherlands of the country’s colonial past and efforts to return art objects taken from former colonies.

In January of this year, King Willem-Alexander gave up the use of the Dutch royal family’s famous carriage amid controversy over its links to slavery.

The apology was received coldly

Some, however, rejected the apology issued by the Dutch prime minister on Monday, saying it should have come on July 1 next year from King Willem-Alexander on the 160th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands.

“It takes two to tango, apologies must be accepted,” said Roy Kaikusi Grunberg, a member of the Honor and Restoration Foundation, an organization with branches in Suriname, a former Dutch colony, and the Netherlands, shortly after the speech.

He said activists who are descendants of slaves had been fighting for years to change the public discourse in the Netherlands and were now not sufficiently consulted before Rutte’s speech.

“The way the government has handled it looks like a neo-colonial burp,” he said.

Rutte admitted that the events leading up to his official comments had been poorly managed and announced that his government would send representatives to Suriname, as well as the Caribbean islands that are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands with varying degrees of autonomy: Curaçao, Sint- Maarten, Aruba, Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius.

A “turning point” in the history of the Netherlands

Evelyn Wever-Cross, Aruba’s prime minister, hailed the Dutch prime minister’s speech on Monday, saying it was a “turning point in the Kingdom’s history”.

Rutte’s comments came as a result of recommendations from a national commission set up after the 2020 police killing of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the Netherlands was one of the countries where demonstrations of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement took place.

Last year, the commission concluded that the Netherlands’ involvement in the slave trade was a crime against humanity and recommended that Rutte’s government issue an official apology and pay reparations.

On Monday, Rutte said his government fully agreed with the commission’s findings, including that slavery was a crime against humanity. But he ruled out paying reparations at a news conference last week, announcing instead that his government would set up an education fund with a budget of 200 million euros.

Historians estimate that Dutch slave traders transported more than half a million Africans to the Americas, mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean islands. At least as many Asians were enslaved in the East Indies, the former Dutch name for modern Indonesia.

Many Dutch people are proud of the country’s glorious naval history and its distinguished trading past, but children are taught in schools about the country’s role in the slave trade.