Colijn's hands 'were not clean'<\/p>\n
By A. Santoso<\/p>\n
AMSTERDAM (JP): A wave of public shock has engulfed the
\nNetherlands after a historian revealed last week that one of the
\nmost prominent Dutch statesmen, a former prime minister, diplomat
\nand popular Christian leader, was directly involved in a
\nbloodbath in the then Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n
Dr. Hendrikus Colijn (1869-1944) was a lieutenant in 1894 when
\nhe led a military expedition in Lombok against forces of the
\nBalinese king, Tjakranegara.<\/p>\n
As fierce local resistance that included Balinese female
\nsoldiers was finally broken, Colijn's unit was confronted with
\nwomen carrying children begging for mercy.<\/p>\n
In a letter to his wife, Colijn described what happened next
\nas follows: \"I saw a woman, with a child of approximately
\none-and-a-half-year-old at her left hand and a long lance in her
\nright hand, who came rushing to us. A bullet killed mother and
\nchild. We could not give mercy anymore.<\/p>\n
\"I had to locate nine women and three children, who asked for
\nmercy, at a site and let them (get) shot until (sic) death. It
\nwas an unpleasant job, but what else could we do? It was a
\nterrible job.\"<\/p>\n
This and other evidence of the tragic bloodbath are revealed
\nby the historian Herman Langeveld in the first part (480 pages)
\nof his biography, Hendrikus Colijn 1869-1944. Dit Leven van
\nkrachtig handelen (This Life of Vigorous Action), which was
\npublished last week here.<\/p>\n
A son of a Harlemmermeer farmer born in 1869, Colijn was a
\nformer aid and an admirer of the Dutch hero in the Acehnese war,
\nGen. Van Heutsz. His career changed from the military to a member
\nof parliament, minister of war affairs (1911-1913), diplomat and
\nbusiness representative of the oil giant Royal Shell.<\/p>\n
He led an important political party, the Anti-Revolutionary
\n(AR), from 1920 until his death, and was prime minister (1933-
\n1939).<\/p>\n
His prominence and popularity among Dutch Protestants, the
\nNederlandse Hervormde Kerk and the Gereformeerde Kerk, the Dutch
\nbranches of Calvinism, was great, second only to the great AR
\nstatesman Dr. Abraham Kuyper.<\/p>\n
Colijn, an authoritarian but charismatic man, is generally
\nconsidered the most important Dutch politician during the
\nantebellum. His stature and greatness to his country and
\nfollowers may be compared to that of the Indonesian prime
\nminister M. Natsir to the Masyumi party or Sutan Syahrir to the
\nIndonesian Socialist Party in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
Little was known, however, about Colijn's military career in
\nwhat is now Indonesia. Consequently, the revelation of the Lombok
\nbloodbath is generally greeted with shock.<\/p>\n
\"Our statue of Colijn will not be pushed from his sokkel
\n(pedestal) because of that, but I was really shocked,\" a former
\nAR leader (1973-1979), Willem Aantjes, said.<\/p>\n
Barend Biesheuvel, another AR leader and prime minister in
\n1971-1973, was \"deeply touched\" by the new information. \"A man
\nwith such (great) service, how could he have done it! He enjoyed
\na formidable trust and an enormous authority.\"<\/p>\n
The shock is even greater as the ex-AR community and the
\ngeneral public now learn that the two biographers who had earlier
\nwritten on Colijn omitted his role in the killings in Lombok.<\/p>\n
Of the two writers, both of whom came from Colijn's political
\nparty, Rudolf van Reests is deceased, and the other, G.
\nPuchinger, has refused comment.<\/p>\n
Had they not read Colijn's letters that described the events
\nin Lombok? Had they purposely manipulated the evidence for the
\nsake of the greatness of the party and its leader,s who had at
\nthat time successfully struggled to emancipate the Dutch
\nCalvinists from a minor position vis a vis the Catholics and the
\nsocialists?<\/p>\n
Or should, indeed, Dutch history, or histories, \"neatly\"
\nreflect the political interests of the establishment and the
\nsocial structure of the society?<\/p>\n
\"Until recently the Dutch historiography is neatly divided
\nover zuilen (Dutch for contemporary socioreligious groupings); so
\nthe Calvinists wrote on Colijn, the socialists on Troelstra (and
\nso on),\" said Prof. Dr. H.W. van der Dunk, an Utrecht historian
\nfrom outside AR circles.<\/p>\n
Dutch society up to the late 1970s is generally characterized
\nas fundamentally verzuild, functionally divided in social sectors
\nand institutions according to individual socioreligious groupings
\nof the Protestants, Catholics, liberals and socialists.<\/p>\n
Ironically, Langeveld, 49, comes from the same zuil as Colijn,
\nand teaches at the Free University of Amsterdam, the Protestant
\nuniversity which awarded its first doctorate to Colijn.<\/p>\n
Langeveld won the Prince Bernhard Fund award for writing Dutch
\nbiographies and has been unanimously praised for his work.<\/p>\n
His approach, he said, is a \"businesslike\" one. He seems shy,
\nthough, to find himself as the biographer unmasking the ugly
\ntruth of a statesman.<\/p>\n
\"Colijn is a tragic figure,\" he said. Asked whether he finds
\nColijn a nice man, the historian simply said, \"I don't know\".<\/p>\n
Colijn's \"Lombok affair\", meanwhile, has led to another
\ndebate. How great or, perhaps, how evil are historic figures like
\nColijn? Or, should we refrain from asking present day ethical
\nquestions of historians who deal with the past? And, even if we
\nare allowed to raise them as public issues, are we free to
\ncharacterize particular military officers and politicians of
\nwartime as \"war criminals\" or \"criminals against humanity\"?<\/p>\n
Even for his time, Hendrikus Colijn was a contradictory
\nfigure. He was a patriotic warrior, a paternalist gentleman, a
\nself-confident, cigar-smoking capitalist and a self-made man who
\nrose from a farming family to be a distinguished statesman --
\nsuch was, perhaps, the type of man as might normatively be
\nexpected by the mainstream of Dutch society at that time.<\/p>\n
But, on the same grounds, he was also frequently abused and
\nhated in some social circles.<\/p>\n
As for his Dutch East Indies period, he was, as the historian
\nProf. Dr Jan Bank notes, both \"a military and imperialist
\nadministrator\" since the colonial state of his time was about to
\nestablish itself over the whole archipelago, from Bali and Lombok
\nto Aceh.<\/p>\n
When it comes to particular details, however, Colijn's image
\nbecomes, to say the least, critical. Historians like Prof. Dr. M.
\nBossenbroek of Leiden University seem to dislike media focus on
\nColijn's Lombok affair.<\/p>\n
To say that Colijn's act was a war crime is, in Bossenbroek's
\nview, \"an easy application of contemporary moral norms to
\nmistakes of the past\".<\/p>\n
In contrast, Prof. Dr. P.W. Klein, another historian from
\nLeiden, makes a clear judgment. \"Colijn is a war criminal. We
\nheard that we should put Colijn's action in (the context of) his
\ntime\", but why is it, Klein said, that same argument was never
\napplied Nazi official Adolf Eichmann or Bosnian Serb leader
\nRadovan Karadzic? Or, one may add, to the recently deceased Pol
\nPot.<\/p>\n
The facts that matter, i.e. those \"certain details\" of Lombok,
\nare quite clear. Colijn wrote to his wife in 1894 that there were
\n12 Balinese women and children who were shot at his command.<\/p>\n
But he told a slightly different story to his parents: there
\nwere a \"few\" who asked for mercy, \"I believe 13 (and when) I went
\nback to light up my cigar, (I heard) some terrifying cry, and
\nthose 13 were dead\".<\/p>\n
Although it is not clear whether Colijn himself joined the act
\nof mercilessly shooting the surrendering mothers and children, it
\nis evident the killings were enacted on his orders. Either way,
\nhe did not care to count or remember his victims.<\/p>\n
The writer works at Radio Netherlands.<\/p>\n
Window A: \"I saw a woman, with a child of approximately
\none-and-a-half-year-old at her left hand and a long lance in her
\nright hand, who came rushing to us. A bullet killed mother and
\nchild. We could not give mercy anymore...\"<\/p>\n
Window B: The shock is even greater as the ex-AR community and the
\ngeneral public now learn that the two biographers who had earlier
\nwritten on Colijn omitted his role in the killings in Lombok.<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/colijns-hands-were-not-clean-1447893297",
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"sponsor": "Okusi Associates",
"sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com"
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