GREAT BAY, ST. MARTIN (November 5, 2003) — Dr. Maria van Enckevort returned here recently from the Netherlands where she delivered a paper on Surinamese revolutionary Otto Huiswoud.
Enckevort’s paper, “The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud: Professional Revolutionary and Internationalist 1893-1961,” was presented on October 26 at a lecture organized by Ons Suriname (Our Suriname).
The foundation invited Van Enckevort as a Huiswoud scholar in light of her doctoral studies on his life and work during the first half of the last century. Huiswoud was the chairman of Ons Suriname from 1952 until his death in 1961.
In fact, it was Huiswoud who “changed the club from a complacent bourgeois club into the vanguard of young Surinamese in the Netherlands who were willing to fight for national independence and against colonialism and imperialism,” said van Enckevort.
Ons Suriname took a very strong stand against the post WWII “Statuut,” which The Hague established as the constitutional relationship between the Dutch kingdom and its colonies in the Americas. The Statuut is about to enter its 50th year in 2004.
Van Enckevort said that the early Surinamese nationalists headed by Huiswoud “rejected and considered the Statuut a continuation of colonialism.”
Huiswoud’s history is not limited to activities in the Netherlands, however. “He was one of the co-founders of the American Communist Party and had worked for the Communist International in the 1930s,” van Enckevort pointed out in her address. “Because of that he was considered an enemy of the state in the US and had moved to Holland after the war.
“His importance today lies in the fact that Holland finally seems to be acknowledging that the Statuut, and the constitutional system that was a consequence of it, is a continuation of colonialism and needs to be changed.”
Van Enckevort is the director of the Division for Research and Publication at the University of St. Martin and obtained her PhD. in history at the University of the West Indies.