Colijn's hands 'were not clean'

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.