Rawagede: Holland’s very own Srebrenica

Survivors of the Dutch massacre in Rawagede, Indonesia, have gotten some justice from the Dutch courts as the Den Haag civil court ruled the statue of limitations did not apply to them:

A Dutch court has ordered the government to compensate the widows of seven villagers who were summarily executed and a man shot and wounded in a notorious massacre during Indonesia’s bloody battle for independence from colonial rule.

The Hague Civil Court ruled on Wednesday it was “unreasonable” for the government to argue that the widows were not entitled to compensation because the statute of limitations had expired.

According to Indonesian researchers, Dutch troops wiped out almost the entire male population of Rawagede, a village in West Java, two years before the former colony declared independence in 1949.

[…]

The only living witnesses are now in their 80s, and illiterate, after having to fend for themselves following the deaths of their husbands.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, many of which we found in the river after the shooting stopped,” said Cawi, a survivor.

[…]

The court’s judgement paves the way for a case to establish the level of indemnities to be paid to the relatives.

However, Zegveld said its narrow focus on widows of massacre victims means it is unclear whether it will expose the Dutch state to a flood of compensation claims from other relatives of people killed during the Dutch fight to retain control over the Dutch East Indies, which became Indonesia in 1949.

Authorities in the Netherlands say 150 people died while a victims’ association claims 431 lost their lives during an operation to root out a suspected independence fighter hiding in the village, known today as Balongsari.

Every western colonial power has skeletons like this in its closet and would rather they stay there. Yet I can’t help that the Dutch are particularly good at only remembering the history they want to remember. While World War II, in which the Netherlands was a victim of German and Japanese aggression is now an integral part of the Dutch self image, the dirty colonial wars that took place in Indonesia almost from the moment the Japanese had left have been largely erased from our collective memory. In fact, in some respect WWII offers cover for what we did in Indonesia afterwards. It’s only now, when many of the people directly involved (including the victims) are dead that we’re finally getting some recognition of what we did there. We were outraged at what Bosnian Serbs did in Srebrenica and justifiably so, but this means that we should recognise our own atrocities as well.

100 years of Fokker airplanes



Last Wednesday it was exactly 100 years ago that Anthony Fokker flew his first self build aircraft, De Spin or Spider around the St. Bavo church. A modest start, but a few years later Fokker would be the scourge of the Allied fighter pilots in World War I, the first to find out how to synchronise a machinegun with the engine to enable it to shoot through the propellor in the Fokker Eindecker. A slew of other fighter planes followed, including the famous triple decker Fokker Dr. I as used by the Red Baron.

After World War I Fokker would become one of the biggest manufacturers of civil airplanes, leading the way for companies like Boeing or Douglas who’d ultimately take over. The Fokker Trimotor, as used by Richard Byrd to fly over the North Pole, is probably the best known. Fokkers were often used in record attempts, including various races from Europe to Asia. On the military side of things, Fokker had modest successes building aircraft for the Dutch airforce, as well as various other European forces. The DXXI’s equiping the Finnish Airforce in the Winter War against the Soviet Union did the best out of all Fokker fighters, gaining impressive victories over planes both superior in number and capabilities…

Postwar Fokker was specialised in providing intermediate range transport planes and airliners, the turboprop F27 Friendship and jet powered F28 Fellowship, both very succesfull, followed a few decades later by the F50 and F100 respectively. However, too small to survive on its own and unlucky in having been taken over by DASA/Daimler Benz, Fokker declared bankrupcy in 1996. There are still quite a few Fokker planes flying however and plans to start production again and it all started with those three rounds around the church in Haarlem by Anthony Fokker in his Spin one hundred years ago.

That was the mother Fokker.

Can’t see this happen for any Dutch politician

messages of tribute to Jack Layton

The tribute Jack Layton got, with hundreds of people chalking down enough messages of support and remembrance to cover a whole square, is not something that I’ll ever suspect to see for a Dutch politician. There are no Jack Laytons in Holland, nobody on the left with the charisma and honesty to inspire such outbursts of solidarity. The closest who had was Jan Marijnissen, but he retired from active politics a few years ago. Instead we mostly seem to generate third rate Blair clones, media trained non-entities with no soul and no ideology fully bought into capitalist realism.

Comic strips on strike

Blast, the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics

As I posted about a week ago, the current rightwing supported by racists Dutch government is putting through radical cuts on the arts. Though these measures have already gone through parliament, resistance against them hasn’t ended. And although comics in general barely get any government support anyway, that doesn’t mean cartoonists aren’t engaged with this struggle. Which is why today a dozen or so odd comic strips in as many daily newspapers had the same message.

Shit! The spending cuts on arts are also hitting us! Ehh... I see no difference

Each participating comic drew its regular cast as stick figures, with some variant on the slogan “the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics”. Participants include Peter de Wit’s incredibly popular sarky psychiatrist Sigmund (top), as well as Fokke & Sukke (bottom), Mark Retera’s Dirkjan and many others. It’s of course unrealistic to expect this protest to change many people’s minds, but it is a good way to show the disastrous consequences of the slashing of art funding even to people with little use for art. Everybody reads the funnies after all.