Listening to the silent majority

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I am not the sole Dutch journalist confronted with this wall of ignorance in the Netherlands. Just a few weeks ago, in Hillbrow, I received a telephone call from my respected colleague, Sibolt van Ketel, the South African correspondent for the popular Dutch morning tabloid, De Telegraaf. He expressed his annoyance over a broadcast via Radio Nederland Wêreldomroep from Windhoek, South West Africa by another Dutch journalist, who had stated that South Africa was the guilty party in Sam Nujoma's SWAPO invasion, because the Pretoria government had purposely lured the Namibian freedom-fighters into a prearranged trap. Now, when The Sowetan reveals in its editorial that it does not understand what on earth could have motivated SWAPO to launch an attack in violation of all agreements concluded by the United Na-

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tions, Angola, Cuba and South Africa, it looks really odd for a Dutch journalist to be broadcasting a report in which SWAPO was right and South Africa the guilty party. Obviously the reporter had realised that that was what the vast majority of Dutch Radio listeners wanted to hear since it reinforced their conditioned minds' perception of the situation.

So, I replied to Sibolt as a matter of course, that now he could at least report in his paper - incidentally, the largest circulation newspaper in Holland - what had really happened in South West Africa. ‘I wish this were true,’ replied colleague Van Ketel, ‘my editors would never publish my report.’ I realised he was telling the simple truth. Holland is placing itself in the forefront of anti-apartheid actions both in the world and in relation to the EEC countries. South Africans will read in their morning papers that thousands of demonstrators clashed in Amsterdam streets with police and security forces in protests over the presence of Royal Dutch Shell in South Africa. Activist groups in Holland are made up of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Netherlands (AABN), Southern Africa Committee (KOZA) and some radical offshoots like Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action (RARA). They organized hundreds of acts of vandalism and arson against Shell at an estimated cost in damage of 180 million rands. Plain hooliganism.