The Dutch cabinet has decided to provide compensation to widows and widowers of civil servants and soldiers who served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) during the Second World War. The payment supplements a 2015 scheme under which surviving KNIL personnel and civil servants received €25,000 for unpaid wartime salaries. Many of those entitled to the new compensation have since died, leaving their families to receive it.

Josée van Haaren said her late mother was entitled to the payment because of her husband Bernardus Joseph van Gardingen, who joined the KNIL in 1938. He was captured in the Dutch East Indies, imprisoned in Singapore and forced to work on the Burma railway before returning to the Netherlands after the war. Van Haaren said the compensation felt largely symbolic because both her parents had died and many of the people concerned were no longer alive.