Princen's return reopens old wounds
Princen's return reopens old wounds
AMSTERDAM (Reuter): A Dutch army deserter returned from Indonesia to his former homeland yesterday, reopening old wounds and forcing the liberal Dutch to revisit an ugly chapter of their colonial past.
Johannes ("Poncke") Princen, a conscript who deserted the Dutch army in 1948 to join Indonesian forces fighting for independence, came for a three-week family Christmas after Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo granted him his first-ever official visa for the Netherlands.
"I am very happy to be here again," Princen told reporters at Amsterdam airport. He was last in the Netherlands -- without official permission -- in 1984.
Princen's return has sparked fierce criticism and a major political row -- war veterans threatened to kill him if he set foot on Dutch soil.
Van Mierlo, defying parliamentary opposition, granted the visa on humanitarian grounds and on condition that Princen agreed to refrain from political or sensitive comments.
Princen's entry papers were checked on the aircraft and he was led to a back exit from the airport to avoid reporters.
The Dutch, who ruled Indonesia for over 350 years, sent 120,000 conscripts to the former colony soon after World War II where young men fought a guerrilla war, torching villages, torturing and randomly executing thousands of civilians.
Princen, 69, partly paralyzed and suffering from skin cancer, is now a prominent human rights activist in Indonesia. But veterans of the Dutch colonial war allege he not only stole their weapons after deserting, but also killed former comrades.
"Thanks to the government, this traitor can celebrate Christmas with his children and grandchildren. But nobody talks about the fact that I have never called anyone 'Dad' and my children never could sit on their grandad's knees," Harry van den Boogaard, the son of a Dutch soldier killed in Indonesia in 1949, told one Dutch daily newspaper.
Public resentment of Princen's visit has exposed the dark side of the famously tolerant Dutch.
Ironically, the Netherlands is now an ardent critic of Indonesia on human rights issues, earning rebuke from Indonesians who never ceased to remind their former colonial masters of their own poor human records during their 350 years of colonialism in Indonesia.
In one incident in the Dutch war against Indonesia, 4,000 civilians were slain on the island of Sulawesi by forces under the command of Dutch captain Raymond Westerling -- who was subsequently nominated for high military honors.
"Princen let his conscience speak. He refused to take part in a war which should never have taken place, in which the Netherlands, just freed from the (Nazi occupation), itself became the oppressor," one reader wrote in the Dutch evening paper Het Parool.