Poncke Princen

In February 2009 the documentary '"The White Guerrilla" made by the Dutch research-journalist Bart Nijpels appeared on Dutch television (Katholieke Radio Omroep), reconstructing his life and giving an impartial opinion about his political choices. The documentary was received positively in general by the Dutch public.

Only after Princen's death in 2002 did a Dutch cabinet minister, Jan Pronk, officially pay a cautious tribute to him. "Poncke Princen was no hero, martyr or saint, but first and foremost a human rights activist," the minister told Radio Netherlands

On 22 February 2002, Princen suffered his final stroke and died at the age of 76, in his home on Jl. Arjuna III No. 24 in Pisangan Baru, Utan Kayu Selatan in East Jakarta. He is survived by his wife, Sri Mulyati, and four children – two sons and two daughters (some of them residing in the Netherlands).

As it turned out, this visit took place at nearly the last moment when Princen's fast-failing health could still stand the long trip. A planned second visit in 1998, which again aroused protests by war veterans, was prevented by his stroke that year.

In March 1998, the 73-year-old Princen – on a wheelchair and undergoing what was described as "mutilating surgery" for his skin cancer – was among some 150 activists who openly violated a ban on political protests in the capital Jakarta, demonstrating against the undemocratic re-election of Suharto and defying the police to arrest them. As it turned out, that was a last effort in the long struggle, and Suharto finally fell from power two months later.

Among many other Indonesian collections, Poncke Princen's archives were deposited in the institute in 1998, the year when a stroke left him bedridden for his remaining years. They include:

In 1996 he was involved in protests against Suharto's crackdown on the Indonesian Democratic Party (PRD). Visiting delegations of international human rights organizations at the time found him "a source of accurate information about those who were attacked at the PRD headquarters".

In 1994 Princen flew to Geneva to testify before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights about the use of torture by Indonesian forces in East Timor and Aceh – one of the peak moments of his involvement in the brutal struggle going on in both places.

In 1994, then Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo finally overruled the officials at the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta and personally authorised the issuing of a visa to Princen "on humanitarian grounds" – on condition (which was kept) that he maintain "a low profile" during his visit to the Netherlands and devote it mainly to meeting family members who he had not seen for many decades.

Not quite all veterans were mobilized against him. In 1993 the journalist and former colonial soldier Ger Vaders [nl] cordially toured together with Princen the battlefields where they had fought on opposing sides, and made a documentary. However, Vader's attempt to secure Princen a visa to visit the Netherlands failed, the government claiming that war veterans had threatened to kill him if he tried to enter the Netherlands.

In 1992 he won the prestigious Yap Thiam Hien Human Rights Award – named for the Chinese Indonesian lawyer Yap Thiam Hien, a fellow human rights activist.

Princen had some contact with the Timorese leader Xanana Gusmão (later president of independent East Timor) even when Gusmão was still leading the guerilla struggle in East Timor's mountains. After Gusmão's capture by the Indonesian forces in 1992 and his transfer to a Jakarta Prison, the two embarked on a regular correspondence and developed a friendship, though being able to have a (highly emotional) face-to-face meeting only after Reformasi movement gained force in 1998. Thereafter, they continued to meet regularly, discussing the evolution of the democratic struggle in Indonesia.

"After the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre in the Timorese capital Dili, Princen gave sanctuary in his home to five young Timorese who had fled their homeland. A stand-off with the Indonesian military followed, but he successfully negotiated with the Jakarta military commander, General Hendro-priono (then perceived as a liberal harbinger of reform) for their safe passage to Jakarta airport, from whence they travelled to freedom in Portugal".

In early 1990 Princen had a major role in founding the Merdeka Labor Union (Serikat Buruh Merdeka – "Merdeka" literally means "Independence") – together with Dita Indah Sari, a noted Indonesian labor activist and Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience. He conducted extensive correspondence with the International Labour Organization (ILO) regarding the conditions of Indonesian workers. Max White, Princen's friend and coworker, stated that "Poncke believed that 'Labor rights are human rights', he saw no distinction".

In the early 1990s he was also a founding member of the Petition of Fifty, a movement for democratic reform which included conservative military figures who had fallen out with Suharto and which for the first time in decades raised a real challenge to his rule. Along with other members of the group including Ali Sadikin and Hoegeng, Princen again found himself persona non-grata with the regime, although he joked to his visitors that by that time he was "too old to put in jail again".

The Timorese leader's Australian wife, Kirsty Sword, also knew Princen from her work with the Timorese underground after 1990. After his death, she recalled Princen telling her: "In 1949 Sukarno refused to hand me over to the Dutch, but now Suharto would be happy to do it and get rid of me." She remarked, however: "Despite being a vocal critic, Princen had enormous respect in Indonesia, and was considered almost untouchable."

Interest and controversy over "The Poncke Princen Affair" were re-ignited in the Netherlands by the 1989 publication of Princen's autobiographical book Poncke Princen: Een kwestie van kiezen ("Poncke Princen, a Matter of Choice"), which had been narrated to Joyce van Fenema.

"(...) Like thousands of Timorese students and activists, I lived and studied in Indonesia for some years since 1980s. In the course of those darkest years of our history, we came to know this great but humble human being, full of humour and compassion, who later became a very good friend of the East Timorese People. He was HJC Princen but known popularly among friends as Poncke.

In January 1974, the visit of the Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei sparked rioting by students and urban poor in Jakarta. Ostensibly fuelled by resentment of Japanese exploitation of Indonesia's economy, and to start with possibly encouraged tacitly by some Army commanders, this so-called "Malari Affair" soon "got out of hand" and came to express hitherto repressed popular resentment about the growing gap between rich and poor in Indonesian society and the bureaucratic capitalists connected with the regime.

Involved as an outspoken human rights activist, Princen was among those who found themselves behind bars in the aftermath, and spent the next two years (1974–1976) in prison. Many other dissidents, such as Marsillam Simanjuntak, who would emerge as the 'Mr. Clean' of post-Suharto Indonesian politics, had the same fate.

Soon after the war Princen got married again – this time to a Dutch woman named Janneke Marckmann (until 1971) and later to Sri Mulyati, who was to remain his companion until his death. All together he had four children: Ratnawati, Iwan Hamid, Nicolaas and Wilanda.

This was followed in the early 1970s by Princen's prominent role in creating a larger organization, the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (LBHI), where he rubbed shoulders with many other human rights figures including Adnan Buyung Nasution, Frans Winarta, Besar Mertokusumo, Yap Thiam Hien, Victor D. Sibarani, Mochtar Lubis, Albert Hasibuan and members of the younger generation of activists.

By one account, he did briefly and unobtrusively visit the Netherlands in the 1970s, while in Europe on a human rights mission. By other accounts, he met with family members just across the German border, and on a later date a TV crew took footage of him standing over the border itself, one foot daringly extended on to Dutch soil.

Among the earlier campaigns which Princen conducted was on behalf of the left-wing writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, imprisoned and tortured by the Suharto regime. At the end of 1969 he published, jointly with the journalist Jopie Lasut, an extensive report on the mass murder of Communist sympathizers at Purwodadi in Middle Java – for which Princen and Lasut were promptly arrested and interrogated.

In 1966 Princen founded and headed Lembaga Pembela Hak-Hak Azasi Manusia (Indonesian Institute for the Defence of Human Rights). It was the first specifically HR organization to be created in the country, and which was to handle many high-profile human rights cases during the years of the Suharto dictatorship and provide a reliable alternate source of news to Western journalists in Jakarta.

Having come to strongly oppose Sukarno, Princen – like quite a few other dissidents – initially placed some hopes in Suharto, who overthrew him following the 1965 attempted coup d'état and whose coming to power had the incidental effect of getting Princen released from prison after four years.

In the late 1960s Princen was a correspondent for Netherlands Radio and several Dutch newspapers. This was directly connected with his work as a human rights activist, in which he was to spend most of his time and energy for the remainder of his life and through which he was to gain fame (and in government and army circles, notoriety).

As a parliamentarian he repeatedly posed uncomfortable questions to the Sukarno Government, on such issues as the unequal division of national resources and income between the central island of Java and the outlying islands. He was apparently one of the "obstructing parliamentarians" whom Sukarno found annoying and whose activity was among the factors which finally led the President to replace the Western-type parliamentary system with "guided democracy" in 1959.

Even before then, Princen's outspoken criticism caused him to be arrested and imprisoned in 1957–58. And he spent Sukarno's final years, characterized by increasingly violent power struggles in Indonesia, again serving a prison term 1962–66.

In 1956 he became a Member of the Indonesian Parliament on behalf of the League of Upholders of Indonesian Independence [id] (IPKI), and was considered a representative of the foreign minority in Indonesia.

Between 1950 and 1953 Princen was an official at the Indonesian Immigration Office. In his free time, he toured Java by motor-bike, earning for himself a case of skin cancer that disfigured him in later life until friends got the money together for skin grafts.

On one occasion in the beginning of August 1949, Dutch troops shot Princen's wife Odah, with Princen himself narrowly avoiding being killed. When asked in a press interview many years later "Did you actually shoot at Dutch soldiers? Did you kill some of them?" he answered forthrightly "Yes, I did".

However, by then freed Sukarno, the founding father and the first president of Indonesia, would not hear of it. Instead, on October 5, 1949, he awarded Princen the Guerilla Star [id], the highest decoration of the new nation whose citizen the former Dutch soldier perforce became.

In January 1948, the United Nations brokered a fragile cease-fire, but almost immediately both sides violated the truce in multiple incidents and the Dutch forces made preparations for a new operation against the rebel forces.

It was at this time, while being on leave at Sukabumi, that Princen took on 25 September 1948, the irrevocable step which shaped the rest of his life. He crossed the Line of Demarcation into rebel-held territory, and via Semarang reached Yogyakarta, the provisional capital of the self-proclaimed Indonesian Republic – where the suspicious Indonesian nationalists promptly threw him into their own prison.

In December 1948, the Dutch army launched Operation Kraai (Dutch for "Crow"), swiftly captured Yogyakarta, and imprisoned Sukarno and other most nationalist leaders (see Politionele acties and Operation Kraai).

When he arrived in the Indies, Princen was charged with desertion. On 22 October 1947, he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for desertion, but he was returned to active service after four months at the Tjisaroea Prison Camp, the remainder of his sentence being suspended.

In March 1946, Princen, like other young Dutchmen at the time, got a call-up order. He was to join the ranks of the Royal Netherlands Army and take part in what Dutch official histories still sometimes call "Police Actions" (politionele acties) but which became better known as the Indonesian National Revolution.

Reluctant to take part in that war, Princen fled to France – but upon hearing that his mother was ill, came back and was arrested by the Marechaussee and detained at Schoonhoven. On December 28, 1946, he was put on board the troop ship Sloterdijk – the last he would see of his homeland, except for a brief visit many decades later.

In 1945, he also worked for the newly founded Bureau voor Nationale Veiligheid (Bureau of National Security nl:Bureau Nationale Veiligheid), forerunner of the present Dutch Security Service – at the time mainly involved in hunting down collaborators and war criminals, but also keeping under surveillance those natives of the Dutch Indies, resident in the Netherlands, who were sympathetic with the rebellion against Dutch rule that was spreading in their homeland.

Like the American Vietnam War veterans in a later generation, the Dutch veterans felt neglected. They felt their sacrifice was ignored and forgotten by the country for which they had fought – and they felt any rehabilitation of Princen to be the ultimate insult. Princen himself expressed understanding for the veterans' anger; however, he stated that he considered being granted a visa to be an admission by the Netherlands of having been in the wrong in 1945–49.

Many friends from the years of his struggle against the excesses of successive Indonesian governments attended his funeral – "from the movements of 1945 [Indonesian Independence struggle], 1966 [Fall of Sukarno] and 1974 [Malari Affair]". There were noted activists and human rights lawyers such as Luhut Pangaribuan, Muchtar Pakpahan, Hariman Siregar, Jopy Lasut and Gurmilang Kartasasmita.

Later, he was transferred to the prison camp at Amersfoort and from there to Beckum, Germany. Altogether, before being finally liberated by the arrival of Allied forces, he had passed through no less than seven Nazi prisons and camps. Princen had to be in Nazi prison from 1944 to 1945.

In 1943, Princen was arrested by the German occupation authorities in Maastricht, while trying to get to Spain – from where he intended to travel to Britain and enlist in an Allied army fighting the Nazis. He was convicted by the occupation authorities of "attempting to aid the enemy" and in early 1944 was sent to the notorious Vught Camp.

Princen did not become a priest. In 1942, being only 17 years old, he was accepted as an economic councillor at Teppemaand Vargroup Groothandel voor Chemische Producten, a chemical company based at The Hague. However, he did not keep this position for long, either, being determined to take up arms against the occupiers of his country.

Throughout the years Princen maintained correspondence with his younger brother Kees, as well as with his mother, who in the 1940s had tried to intercede for him with the Dutch military authorities – a correspondence eventually deposited, together with many of his other papers, at the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History (IISH).

Despite his upbringing, the young Princen conceived an interest in Catholicism under the influence of the parents of his mother, Theresia Princen-Van der Lee. In 1939, he entered the Holy Ghost Seminary at Weert – where he was followed by his younger brother Kees Princen, with whom he was to maintain correspondence throughout all the vicissitudes of his life. It was while he was at the seminary that Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands in 1940.

Johannes Cornelis Princen (21 November 1925 – 2 February 2002), also known as Poncke Princen, was a Dutch anti-Nazi fighter and activist. In 1948, he deserted, joining the pro-independence guerrillas in what was then the Dutch Indies.