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.