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Political activist Sietse Bosgra has passed away at the age of 87. Born in Groningen, he was best known for his fight against colonialism and apartheid.
Bosgra studied physics at the University of Amsterdam and became involved in resistance against colonialism as a student. He became a member of the Pacifist-Socialist Party (PSP) and organized actions related to decolonization conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam.
Bosgra was one of the founders of the Angola Committee in the early 1960s, which fought against the colonial rule of Portugal in Angola. After Angolan independence in 1974, the committee was renamed Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika (KZA) in 1976, which focused attention on the apartheid regime in South Africa.
‘Push through with arguments’
For the past 25 years, Bosgra has mainly focused on conflicts in the Middle East. He drew attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was also one of the leaders of the resistance against the Dutch police mission in Kunduz in Afghanistan, which started in 2011 and lasted a few years.
Rob Bogaerts / Answers via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
Bosgra was known as an influential activist who did not give up easily. One of his employees once characterized his style in NRC Handelsblad as “pushing through with arguments”.
Yet Bosgra also received criticism. For example, according to some, he took an insufficient stand against violence and torture by the Namibian freedom movement Swapo and the Mozambican freedom movement Frelimo.
In a interview in 1996 de Volkskrant Bosgra was asked if he “has kept his mouth shut for too long, covered too much with the cloak of love”. Bosgra responded that after Mozambique’s independence, things had indeed “gone wrong with that country”. But whether that “chaos” could have been avoided or not, he didn’t know. “I’m afraid I’ll go to the grave with that dilemma.”
