The old man and the Dutch

By Ninotchka Rosca

It’s like what Obi Wan Kenobi said to Darth Vader, at the moment of their final confrontation: “the more you strike me down, the stronger I become.” In this case, the more he is persecuted, the stronger he is.

I refer, of course, to Jose Ma. Sison, chair of the International League of Peoples Struggles and chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front’s negotiating panel in peace talks with the Philippine government. He has other accomplishments, among them leading the re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1960s. Before exile in 1987, he had spent nearly a decade imprisoned under the Marcos Dictatorship, in isolation and heavily tortured. When he was elected ILPS chair two years ago, Joma made the side comment that perhaps this would be a last office for him.

The third generation of Filipino activists calls him with affection, in Tagalog, the old man. He will, likely, never forgive me for using the phrase myself. Occasionally, through the years – and lord knows how long I’ve known the man – I’d wondered whether he had had a year, a month, a week even, when he wasn’t under some kind of persecution or threat, whether he had had moments when he could breathe freely, not look over his shoulder as it were, or cease to think of how to respond to a new barrage of verbal and/or possible physical assault on his person. Or even if he had ever wished for such a moment, such an instant.

In the past week, there’s been such a barrage, as enemies, many not even knowing him, gloat over his incarceration. On August 28, 2007, the Dutch police tricked him into going to the police station, ostensibly to discuss an assassination plot against him, and then promptly handcuffed and placed him under arrest, whisked him forthwith to the Scheveningen Penitential Facility. The people of Holland should appreciate the irony; this prison was used by the Nazis to hold and torture Dutch resistance fighters. It kind of boggles the mind how the country of Anne Frank could follow the model of their hated occupiers and keep Joma in isolation, not allowing him his medicine and clothes, nor access to reading materials, radio or television, and incommunicado to family and friends. This, for the Dutch, is “adherence to international standards” of imprisonment.

We tend to think of the Dutch as mild-mannered liberals but the histories of the Dutch East Indies Company and of Dutch colonialism refute that image. The Dutch waged war for 17 years against the natives of Padri, Indonesia; five years against the Javanese; 30 years against the people of Aceh. In Bali, Dutch invasion caused nearly 300 of the royal family and retainers to commit suicide, since Hinduism would not allow them to kill. Then there are the Boers, later Afrikaners, who held South Africa for centuries and perfected the apartheid policy, so they may continue to own diamond mines and other treasures of the country. The Dutch also maintained slave trade hubs in both East Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The Asian slave trade under the Dutch East Indies Company has been overshadowed by the African slave trade, but in 1659-1661 alone, the Company bought and sold between 8,000-10,000 “slaves” from India.