The 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer ignited a global movement for racial justice that reached as far as the Netherlands. It started a conversation among the Dutch about abolishing its longstanding Black Pete tradition in which white people parade in blackface and afro wigs. Floyd’s murder also compeled the Dutch bank ABN Amro, one of the world’s wealthiest commercial banks, to apologize for its role in the slave trade.

Now, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has apologized for his nation’s historical role in slavery and the consequences that continue today.

But reparations are not on the table for the the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which reaped great wealth from its slave colonies in the Caribbean and South America.

"Today I apologize," Rutte said Monday (Dec. 19) in a nationally televised speech at the Dutch National Archives, Reuters reported.

"For centuries the Dutch state and its representatives have enabled and stimulated slavery and have profited from it," he added. "It is true that nobody alive today bears any personal guilt for slavery...(however) the Dutch state bears responsibility for the immense suffering that has been done to those that were enslaved and their descendants."

Activists said Rutte fumbled the apology, which they argue would be more appropriate coming from the Dutch King Willem-Alexander.

"This state of affairs is causing a lot of turmoil in Afro-Caribbean Dutch society,” Roy Kaikusi Groenberg, chair of the Foundation for Honor and Reparations to the Victims of Slavery in Suriname, told the NLTimes, an English language Dutch news outlet.

The foundation wants the king to apologize "to the descendants of the indigenous and African victims" when he visits Suriname on July 1, 2023, which marks the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies. "Suriname is where the Netherlands has practiced slavery on a large scale," Kaikusi Groenberg noted.

However, others welcomed Rutte’s apology. Aruba Prime Minister Evelyn Wever-Croes called it a "turning point in history within the kingdom," according to Reuters.

Racism is a problem across the Netherlands, which once held a global network of colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and South America. The Netherlands also enslaved Asians in modern Indonesia. Historians estimate that Dutch traders transported more than 500,000 Africans to the Americas.

Rutte and his government commissioned an independent advisory panel in the aftermath of Floyd’s death to come up with ideas on how to address discrimination in the country, as people of color immigrate from its former colonies, according to US News & World Reports. In 2021, the panel said that Dutch participation in the trans-Atlantic slavery trade amounted to a crime against humanity.

The prime minister agreed on Monday that slavery was a crime but said there will be no reparations. He previously rejected the idea of reparations for slavery, opting instead to spend 200 million euro to promote awareness about the Netherlands’ past role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and 27 million euros to open a slavery museum.

Armand Zunder, chairman of Suriname's National Reparations Commission, told Reuters that the apology was a move in the right direction but lacks “responsibility and accountability.”

"If you recognize that crimes against humanity were committed then the next step is you say I'm responsible for it, we're liable for it .... Indeed I'm talking about reparations," Zunder added.