Parliament to publicly discuss
its position on Hero Brinkman
WILLEMSTAD--Parliament of the Netherlands Antilles will discuss today, Monday, its participation in the tripartite meeting with the Members of Parliament of Aruba and the Netherlands. The discussions will take place before the scheduled start of today’s meeting on Kingdom Relations POK.
Political faction leader of the PAR party Glenn Sulvaran and Member of Parliament for the PNP party Dudley Lucia confirmed for The Daily Herald on Sunday that the meeting had been convened for 9:15am. In that meeting the political factions will openly state their position on participating in the POK.
The POK has become a loaded issue because of controversial statements made by Dutch Parliamentarian for the PPV Hero Brinkman. He called the Netherlands a corrupt thieves’ nest and proposed that the islands be auctioned on the Internet.
In response to Brinkman’s statements, the Antillean Parliament sent him a letter on December 29, 2007, informing him that he would not be welcome in the Netherlands Antilles if he didn’t apologise to the Antillean public.
Brinkman refused to apologise and travelled to the Netherlands Antilles with the Dutch delegation on January 2. The delegation visited St. Maarten on January 3 and attended an extraordinary meeting of the Island Council convened to discuss matters pertaining to the island territory’s constitutional change process.
However, the National Alliance (NA) members of the Island Council boycotted the meeting. NA leader William Marlin demanded an apology from Brinkman at the start of that meeting and when the Dutch MP again refused to apologise, the NA political faction walked out of the meeting. The Dutch delegation returned to Curaçao to participate in the POK scheduled for today, Monday.
All members of the Antillean Parliamentary Committee for Kingdom Relations, who are the political faction leaders in Parliament, met late Sunday night to discuss the position of each political faction concerning Brinkman’s presence.
Most of the political parties – NA and Curaçao-based parties MAN, FOL, PNP and Forsa Kòrsou – after supporting the December 29 letter, have already stated publicly that their representatives will not attend any meeting at which Brinkman is present as long as he does not apologise.
The Daily Herald was unable to learn the results of yesterday’s closed meeting of the Parliamentary Committee of Kingdom Relations, but the views of the various political parties on the matter will be voiced publicly during the scheduled public meeting of Parliament this morning.
The POK is scheduled to meet over three days to discuss several topics in plenary sessions. The future of the POK, the proposed database for Antillean troubled youth in the Netherlands VIA, the Financial Supervision for islands of the Netherlands Antilles and standards detailing how parliaments in the Kingdom should deal with each other, are among the topics scheduled for discussion.
The opening statements of the meeting are scheduled to start at 11:00am, giving Parliament almost two hours time to discuss the matter.
Dutch delegation leader Willibrord van Beek of the VVD party has already stated that it came to the Netherlands Antilles as one delegation consisting of individual members of political factions in the Dutch Second Chamber.
