Colijn's hands 'were not clean'
By A. Santoso
AMSTERDAM (JP): A wave of public shock has engulfed the Netherlands after a historian revealed last week that one of the most prominent Dutch statesmen, a former prime minister, diplomat and popular Christian leader, was directly involved in a bloodbath in the then Dutch East Indies.
Dr. Hendrikus Colijn (1869-1944) was a lieutenant in 1894 when he led a military expedition in Lombok against forces of the Balinese king, Tjakranegara.
As fierce local resistance that included Balinese female soldiers was finally broken, Colijn's unit was confronted with women carrying children begging for mercy.
In a letter to his wife, Colijn described what happened next as follows: "I saw a woman, with a child of approximately one-and-a-half-year-old at her left hand and a long lance in her right hand, who came rushing to us. A bullet killed mother and child. We could not give mercy anymore.
"I had to locate nine women and three children, who asked for mercy, at a site and let them (get) shot until (sic) death. It was an unpleasant job, but what else could we do? It was a terrible job."
This and other evidence of the tragic bloodbath are revealed by the historian Herman Langeveld in the first part (480 pages) of his biography, Hendrikus Colijn 1869-1944. Dit Leven van krachtig handelen (This Life of Vigorous Action), which was published last week here.
A son of a Harlemmermeer farmer born in 1869, Colijn was a former aid and an admirer of the Dutch hero in the Acehnese war, Gen. Van Heutsz. His career changed from the military to a member of parliament, minister of war affairs (1911-1913), diplomat and business representative of the oil giant Royal Shell.
He led an important political party, the Anti-Revolutionary (AR), from 1920 until his death, and was prime minister (1933- 1939).
His prominence and popularity among Dutch Protestants, the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk and the Gereformeerde Kerk, the Dutch branches of Calvinism, was great, second only to the great AR statesman Dr. Abraham Kuyper.
Colijn, an authoritarian but charismatic man, is generally considered the most important Dutch politician during the antebellum. His stature and greatness to his country and followers may be compared to that of the Indonesian prime minister M. Natsir to the Masyumi party or Sutan Syahrir to the Indonesian Socialist Party in the 1950s.
Little was known, however, about Colijn's military career in what is now Indonesia. Consequently, the revelation of the Lombok bloodbath is generally greeted with shock.
"Our statue of Colijn will not be pushed from his sokkel (pedestal) because of that, but I was really shocked," a former AR leader (1973-1979), Willem Aantjes, said.
Barend Biesheuvel, another AR leader and prime minister in 1971-1973, was "deeply touched" by the new information. "A man with such (great) service, how could he have done it! He enjoyed a formidable trust and an enormous authority."
The shock is even greater as the ex-AR community and the general public now learn that the two biographers who had earlier written on Colijn omitted his role in the killings in Lombok.
Of the two writers, both of whom came from Colijn's political party, Rudolf van Reests is deceased, and the other, G. Puchinger, has refused comment.
Had they not read Colijn's letters that described the events in Lombok? Had they purposely manipulated the evidence for the sake of the greatness of the party and its leader,s who had at that time successfully struggled to emancipate the Dutch Calvinists from a minor position vis a vis the Catholics and the socialists?
Or should, indeed, Dutch history, or histories, "neatly" reflect the political interests of the establishment and the social structure of the society?
"Until recently the Dutch historiography is neatly divided over zuilen (Dutch for contemporary socioreligious groupings); so the Calvinists wrote on Colijn, the socialists on Troelstra (and so on)," said Prof. Dr. H.W. van der Dunk, an Utrecht historian from outside AR circles.
Dutch society up to the late 1970s is generally characterized as fundamentally verzuild, functionally divided in social sectors and institutions according to individual socioreligious groupings of the Protestants, Catholics, liberals and socialists.
Ironically, Langeveld, 49, comes from the same zuil as Colijn, and teaches at the Free University of Amsterdam, the Protestant university which awarded its first doctorate to Colijn.
Langeveld won the Prince Bernhard Fund award for writing Dutch biographies and has been unanimously praised for his work.
His approach, he said, is a "businesslike" one. He seems shy, though, to find himself as the biographer unmasking the ugly truth of a statesman.
"Colijn is a tragic figure," he said. Asked whether he finds Colijn a nice man, the historian simply said, "I don't know".
Colijn's "Lombok affair", meanwhile, has led to another debate. How great or, perhaps, how evil are historic figures like Colijn? Or, should we refrain from asking present day ethical questions of historians who deal with the past? And, even if we are allowed to raise them as public issues, are we free to characterize particular military officers and politicians of wartime as "war criminals" or "criminals against humanity"?
Even for his time, Hendrikus Colijn was a contradictory figure. He was a patriotic warrior, a paternalist gentleman, a self-confident, cigar-smoking capitalist and a self-made man who rose from a farming family to be a distinguished statesman -- such was, perhaps, the type of man as might normatively be expected by the mainstream of Dutch society at that time.
But, on the same grounds, he was also frequently abused and hated in some social circles.
As for his Dutch East Indies period, he was, as the historian Prof. Dr Jan Bank notes, both "a military and imperialist administrator" since the colonial state of his time was about to establish itself over the whole archipelago, from Bali and Lombok to Aceh.
When it comes to particular details, however, Colijn's image becomes, to say the least, critical. Historians like Prof. Dr. M. Bossenbroek of Leiden University seem to dislike media focus on Colijn's Lombok affair.
To say that Colijn's act was a war crime is, in Bossenbroek's view, "an easy application of contemporary moral norms to mistakes of the past".
In contrast, Prof. Dr. P.W. Klein, another historian from Leiden, makes a clear judgment. "Colijn is a war criminal. We heard that we should put Colijn's action in (the context of) his time", but why is it, Klein said, that same argument was never applied Nazi official Adolf Eichmann or Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic? Or, one may add, to the recently deceased Pol Pot.
The facts that matter, i.e. those "certain details" of Lombok, are quite clear. Colijn wrote to his wife in 1894 that there were 12 Balinese women and children who were shot at his command.
But he told a slightly different story to his parents: there were a "few" who asked for mercy, "I believe 13 (and when) I went back to light up my cigar, (I heard) some terrifying cry, and those 13 were dead".
Although it is not clear whether Colijn himself joined the act of mercilessly shooting the surrendering mothers and children, it is evident the killings were enacted on his orders. Either way, he did not care to count or remember his victims.
The writer works at Radio Netherlands.
Window A: "I saw a woman, with a child of approximately one-and-a-half-year-old at her left hand and a long lance in her right hand, who came rushing to us. A bullet killed mother and child. We could not give mercy anymore..."
Window B: The shock is even greater as the ex-AR community and the general public now learn that the two biographers who had earlier written on Colijn omitted his role in the killings in Lombok.