Short News

Searchlight - September 2007

Demise of a fascist party that never really took off
The fascist National Alliance (NA) decided - after a poorly attended congress - to throw the sponge in at the end of July. Two years after the party's launch in 2003, its chairman Jan Teijn lost his seat on the Feijenoord borough council in Rotterdam but the NA still grew and was able to organise street actions on various issues in Utrecht, Leeuwarden, Eindhoven, The Hague and Rotterdam.

At its height, though, the NA remained a groupuscule counting at most 60 members with an active hardcore of about ten. Their demonstrations also remained small, attracting an average of about 40 people, mainly boneheads. Last year, however, the NA suffered a split and the Nationalist People's Movement (NVB) emerged into the twilight, bringing a number of the NA's organisers with it.

One of the party's great achievements was its mud slinging against the Dutch People's Union (NVU) and, in particular, the latter's boss Constant Kusters. This warfare culminated in a lawsuit by Teijn against Kusters for libel. Kusters who had called Teijn a paedophile at an NVU demonstration in Arnhem in September 2006, was fined € 500, given 50 hours of community work and had to spend a week in prison on remand. Enraged, Kusters struck back with a complaint against Teijn for his "hate campaign" against the NVU and himself. This case is due to be heard in court in December this year.

These events signalled the beginning of the end for the NA whose last two public events, both in Rotterdam this year, ended in fiasco. Firstly, a party demonstration was stopped in its tracks because hostile fellow nazis like Youth Storm Nederland (JSN) wanted to attack the NA and a group of anti-racist Feyenoord supporters turned up to steam into the JSN. When the NA hit the streets again some weeks later, only seven people turned up despite a massive police operation. Teijn's call to his bonehead followers to dress up differently was rejected and no one showed up.

Teijn's trumpeted dream of leading a Vlaams Belang-style party in the Netherlands, meanwhile, never even looked like materializing and now he is languishing on his own running a website called "Culture Defence".

Demonstration reveals nazi-splits

Three weeks later, on 4 August, the NVU finally managed to hold its demonstration, showing up with about 60 people, opposed by AFA with 170 people. Though the NVU still could not reach the US-embassy because the AFA demonstration stole its pitch, it was able to fight successfully in court to overturn a Hague city council ban on the Celtic Cross, the internationally known White Power symbol. Top nazi Eite Homan and his RVF/JSN group, however, were furious because, on the day, Kusters exchanged the White Power flag for 16 separate flagpoles which Homan and his pals had wanted to take along to defend themselves. Also, they deemed the White Power flag inappropriate for a demonstration in support of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Jeroen Bosch for Alert! and Antifa-Net