Anne-Lot Hoek
Anne-Lot Hoek is a Dutch historian, independent researcher and author. She writes historical non-fiction, articles and academic publications, with a focus on colonial history and the independence struggle in South-Africa, Namibia and Indonesia.
Biography
Anne-Lot Hoek was born in The Hague and attended the Adelbert College gymnasium from 1991 to 1997.Studies
Hoek studied history at the University of Amsterdam and political history at the University of Perugia in Italy. She obtained her master's degree at the faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam and went on to earn a PhD in 2023 for her dissertation De strijd om Bali. Geweld, verzet en koloniale staatsvorming 1846–1950.Career
Hoek has lived and worked in Amsterdam, Windhoek and Cape Town. In 2021 she launched her debut De strijd om Bali. Imperialisme, verzet en onafhankelijkheid 1846–1950, for which she had interviewed 128 people involved on Bali and in the Netherlands in addition to extensive archival research.During her seven years of research she discovered, for example, that the Dutch army built a tangsi-system of 50 prison camps on Bali in which torture and executions were a systematic phenomenon. Her account shows how the battle for the island should be understood within a long tradition of anti-colonial violence and reveals how after World War II the island, as part of the federal state of East-Indonesia, played a key role in Dutch decolonization policy. Up until that point the focus of historians had mainly been on Java. Hoek's book also addresses the more general aspects of the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies.
De strijd om Bali resulted in a set of questions from the House of Representatives in the Netherlands, and articles in Dutch national newspapers like NRC Handelsblad, the Trouw, Nederlands Dagblad and de Volkskrant. It became national news on television and radio with subsequently RTL Nieuws and NPO Radio 1. TV channel Omroep West made a special. She received book reviews in Dutch national newspapers such as NRC Handelsblad and Nederlands Dagblad as well as in history-related media such as Historiek and Historisch Nieuwsblad, and in Belgium in De lage landen. Preview publications appeared in NRC Handelsblad and De Groene Amsterdammer, and she was interviewed in Dutch national and regional newspapers such as Algemeen Dagblad and Den Haag Centraal, and on national radio in Nieuwsweekend, and OVT as she appeared on Buitenhof.
From 2005 to 2007 Hoek worked at the African Studies Centre Leiden and performed research in Bolivia, Zambia, Cameroon and Mali. In 2012 she again carried out research in Zambia. At that point she was working as a freelance journalist contributing to Vrij Nederland, and later NRC Handelsblad and De Groene Amsterdammer. Since 2012 she has written more than 32 articles on Indonesia's colonial past.
In her first article on Indonesia she contributed to the request for rehabilitation for three marines who had refused to set fire to a kampong in reprisal. A few months later, a motion to this effect was submitted in the House of Representatives. In 2013, Hoek conducted archival research which revealed for the first time that the Netherlands had committed war crimes in Bali. She also interviewed several veterans who were willing to confirm these findings. This was picked up by national and international media outlets, and other authors since.
In 2014, she discovered archive documents showing that the Dutch authorities ran Bali as their private kingdom during the Indonesian War of Independence. A damning official investigation report into corruption and intimidation in Bali was suppressed, as was the man who wrote it.
In 2015, she stated that historical institutes in the Netherlands had neglected their task for 65 years. She also made headlines in NRC Handelsblad with an article about a Swiss dissertation that refuted the excessive violence research from 1969. In 2016, Hoek delved deeper into the question of why Dutch historians of the previous generation, such as the head of the excessive violence research Cees Fasseur, had taken an evasive attitude towards the actual violence in Indonesia. According to two-fold Libris History Prize winner Martin Bossenbroek the article contributed to a paradigm shift, a historiographical regime change. Since then, Hoek has been seen as one of the persons at the base of a new generation of historians who confront the Netherlands and its politicians with the truth.
Early 2016, Hoek traveled to Indonesia for research in Rengat on Sumatra to investigate an attack on the city in January 1949. In the Netherlands the official death toll since the Excessive Violence nota of 1969 was 80, while in Rengat there was a statue to 1,500 victims with the names of 186. In addition to interviewing witnesses, she performed research in the Dutch National Archive and discovered a range of previously unknown sources from 1949; a list with the names of 120 'fallen civilians', a statement by the Dutch Resident that the death toll was 400, and an article in a Chinese newspaper referring to more than 1,000 victims. By comparing these with sources from the Netherlands and Indonesia a new absolute minimal death count of 270 individuals emerged.
The research resulted in two articles for NRC Handelsblad and a radio report, The Rengat Massacre, on NPO Radio 1. It was subsequently picked up by national media such as Algemeen Dagblad, de Volkskrant, Trouw, the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting and RTL Nieuws. Human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld calls the events in the research of Hoek in a reaction 'from the same size and severity as the Rawagede massacre and the massacre on South-Sulawesi'. It was one of the deadliest Dutch military operations in Sumatra, possibly the largest individual war crime in the entire war according to David Van Reybrouck. Hoek also made a two-part series about Rengat for Inside Indonesia.
One of the widows from kampong Skip in Rengat, whose police office husband was executed, was compensated in 2017 by the Dutch state with an amount of Euro20,000, which was only to be granted if it could be proved that the person was executed by the Dutch military during an action "of comparable severity and nature as the Rawagede massacre and South-Sulawesi". The BBC in Indonesia dedicated an extensive article to her research on Sumatra and Bali and it was picked up further.
The Rengat article was published in February 2016. A few months later, in July 2016, the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and The Netherlands Institute of Military History were informed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs they should start to prepare for a possible switch in the stance by the government. Minister Bert Koenders got convinced that a large scale research was needed, and also at General Affairs, headed by prime minister Mark Rutte ‘things were moving’.
In October 2016 the Swiss dissertation was published in Dutch. At the end of 2016, Bert Koenders wrote to the House of Representatives that there is "sufficient reason for a broad-based investigation" into the violence used in Indonesia in the period 1945–1949. Member of the House of Representatives Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, who had been lobbying in favor of the investigation, told Hoek in an interview that the political approval for the government-financed research: Independence, decolonization, violence and war in Indonesia, 1945–1950 in the House was for 75% a result of new facts stemming from journalism and lawsuits against the Dutch state, and for 25% based upon the earlier mentioned Swiss dissertation. After new facts about this period have emerged 'drop by drop', the book publication of the Swiss dissertation in October 2016 was the proverbial 'splash' that made the already full bucket overflow. Hoek responded to the cabinet decision in Nieuwsuur.
In 2016 and 2017 she was a fellow at the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and journalist-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, both institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Between 2017 and 2019 she wrote an article for Revolutionary Worlds as part of the "ODGOI"-research.
According to aforementioned Martin Bossenbroek, a new phenomenon in the Netherlands were articles that explicitly highlighted the Indonesian perspective on the colonial past. Between 2016 and 2019 Hoek advocated for recognition of the political struggle by the leaders of the Indonesian fight for independence, and other dissenting voices that had challenged the colonial system. In addition, she regularly campaigned for Dutch recognition of the date of Indonesian independence. In 2018 she called upon prime minister Mark Rutte and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands in NRC Handelsblad to take responsibility and make a large gesture for the fact that the Netherlands had picked up their weapons against Indonesia and that their long-term desire for independence had been structurally ignored. Early 2020, she and another historian advocated on Dutch national television in Nieuwsuur in favor of an apology by the Dutch king during his state visit to Indonesia. Contrary to expectations, the apology came nevertheless. Hoek responded again in Nieuwsuur.
In October 2020, Hoek received the ASH Valorization Prize from the University of Amsterdam for her contributions to the public debate on Indonesia. The same year she co-published an article in the Groene Amsterdammer revealing that the Netherlands obtained more financial benefits to finance their reconstruction after World War II from the transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia – over 103 billion euros – than the 16 billion euros from the Marshall Plan from the United States. Authors like David Van Reybrouck and Adriaan van Dis and other authors and scientists highlighted this research in their work.
It was picked up in Indonesia as well.
Since 2021 Hoek has been editorial board member of history at the quarterly Flemish-Dutch magazine De lage landen, which has reported on language, the arts, literature, history and society in the Low Countries since 1957. She has also contributed to their book publication Nulpunt 1945 Zero Point 1945. In November 2021 De strijd om Bali was published.
Early February 2022 De Indische Doofpot was published with the main question why Dutch war crimes in Indonesia have never been prosecuted. In the conclusion of this prizewinning book it is stated – that "it is now established – after the groundbreaking publications of Remy Limpach and Anne-Lot Hoek – that the Dutch military apparatus systematically carried out a practice of mass executions and torture in prison camps, all under the ultimate responsibility of the Dutch government in The Hague". A few days later Hoek gave a lecture during the event Freedom and Resistance. The legacy of the revolution is still alive. She was also interviewed on political current affairs television program Buitenhof on her debut, on the opening of Revolusi!: a large exhibition within the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on Indonesia's struggle for independence to which she also made a contribution, and about the possible conclusions of the formerly mentioned "ODGOI"-research on the same war. She was the only Dutch researcher in the "ODGOI"-project, who did not participate in writing those conclusions.
Together with other critics and Indonesia experts, in response to the final conclusion of that investigation, she again advocated in favor of the usage of the term "war crimes" during a special on NPO Radio 1. The investigation leader, Frank van Vree, changed his position during the broadcast and believed that they should have spoken of war crimes after all, which in itself became national news again the same day.
In February 2023 Hoek received her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Since March that year she has been a regular book reviewer at the Historische Boekencast, the podcast of Historisch Nieuwsblad in the Netherlands. In June she published an article in NRC Handelsblad together with Ni Made Frischa Aswarini and Ni Ketut Sudiani, who both had supported Hoek on multiple fronts in her research in Bali, in which they together argued for the return of documents from the National Archives to Indonesia. A week later a motion was submitted in the House of Representatives for the return of archive documents to Indonesia, which was adopted. As a reaction to the political debate in the House of Representatives about the results of the aforementioned ODGOI research, Hoek wrote a critical essay in the De Groene Amsterdammer and she responded in the press to intermediate results. She also made a contribution to the exposition and book for De Grote Indonesië tentoonstelling in the Nieuwe Kerk. Since July she has been in Namibia and South Africa doing research for her new book.
Hoek is currently a fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she continued her research on South-Africa and Namibia.