Animal rights activist blamed for Dutch murder, polls to go ahead
Agence France Presse
May 7, 2002 Tuesday 1:19 PM Eastern Time
LENGTH: 753 words

BYLINE: STEPHANIE VAN DEN BERG
DATELINE: THE HAGUE, May 7

The assassination of Dutch firebrand far-rightist Pim Fortuyn was blamed on a disgruntled animal rights activist Tuesday as authorities in the Netherlands decided to push ahead with next week's general elections despite the killing.

Fortuyn's anti-immigrant party, though barely three months old, had been expected to fare well in next week's poll, which the government briefly considered postponing after Monday's murder, a bombshell in a country proud of its long legacy of tolerance.

But as hundreds of shocked, tearful supporters congregated outside the tall gates of the slain politician's elegant and leafy Rotterdam residence, Prime Minister Wim Kok announced that the May 15 polls, only nine days away, would go ahead as scheduled.

"Democracy and the memory of Pim Fortuyn would be best served by giving democracy free reign," Kok said. Fortuyn, a well-to-do 54-year-old sociology professor, was gunned down in broad daylight on Monday in a car park where he was about to step into a limousine after appearing on a radio show.

A new star on the Dutch political scene, the dandyish politician last March propelled his month-old far-right group -- Pim Fortuyn's List -- from nowhere to win more than a third of the seats on Rotterdam's city council.

In next week's poll, his anti-immigrant platform had been expected to win 20 of the 150 seats up for election, an unprecedented showing for an extremist right-wing platform in this traditionally open-minded country.

"Emotions are running so high that it could skewer the election," said political analyst Paul Scheffer.

The murder has sent shockwaves across Europe. "No matter what feelings political figures arouse, the ballot box is the place to express them," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, summing up condemnations from across the continent.

Fortuyn's death leaves the party in a mad scramble to appoint a new leader, who could be his deputy Joao Varela, a black 27-year-old African immigrant and successful Rotterdam businessman, but with little experience in politics.

Minutes after the murder police arrested the suspected killer, a 32-year-old militant animal rights activist who may have taken issue with the politician's proposal to revive fur farming.

The suspect was a militant animal rights activist who had problems with one of the dead politician's associates, a spokesman for his party said Tuesday.

Jim Janssen van Raaij, number three of the "Pim Fortuyn List" party, told AFP that the suspect had had trouble with a party member and pig farmer, Wien van den Brink. He identified the detainee as Volkert van der Graaf.

A spokesman for the Ecology Offensive group, based in the eastern city of  Wageningen, said the man was active in the struggle against bioindustry, animal testing, and for animal rights. Fortuyn favoured lifting a ban that outlawed the farming of animals for fur if his party came to power.

The man had no police record but was known to Dutch internal intelligence services, a justice ministry official said.

Fortuyn, elegant, bald-headed and openly gay, won wide support with his fiery calls to end immigration in a supposedly liberal country where one of every eight people -- two of 16 million -- are not of Dutch origin.

And his attacks on Islam -- which he described as "a backward culture" -- in a country where Muslims account for nearly one million also struck a chord.

But despite his favoured slogans such as "The Netherlands is full", he distanced himself from other European far-right leaders such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria's Joerg Haider, maintaining he was neither racist nor anti-Semitic.

He and his grass roots followers saw him as a pragmatic populist who offered blunt solutions for the Netherlands real or imagined ills such as creeping unemployment, asylum seekers and deteriorating healthcare.

His Pim Fortuyn's List party had been expected to break into parliament with another strong showing in the upcoming election, the next test for the far right in Europe after the surprise 18 percent score won by Le Pen in France's presidential vote.

Late on Monday hundreds of angry demonstrators, some wearing swastikas, took to the streets outside the Dutch parliament and threw bottles and stones at riot police who were called in to disperse them.

The last recorded political assassination in The Netherlands was in 1672 when Cornelis and Johan de Witt, brothers who opposed the ruling House of Orange, were lynched by a violent mob.
 

http://www.reuters.co.uk/news_article.jhtml?type=worldnews&StoryID=928293

Fortuyn's party says his killer was animal rights activist
By Abigail Levene
Reuters, May 7, 2002

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The suspected killer of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is a vegan animal rights activist who declares on the Internet that "protecting animals is civilising people", according to a source close to Fortuyn's party.
A 32-year-old man from the staunchly religious central Dutch town of Harderwijk is being held for Monday's shooting, and justice officials said bullets and environmentalist material were found during a search of his home.
The man, in custody but not identified by police, says on the Internet he is a member of a small, little-known animal welfare group fighting to stop the expansion of factory farming in a country which boasts a big intensive agriculture industry.
"Many animal protectors act from the assumption that 'nature is good', but every dark side of humans can also be found in nature," the suspected gunman writes on the Web.
"Protecting animals is civilising people, as they say."
He says his actions -- using legal procedures to fight permits for factory farms and fur farms -- stem from a belief that what happens to animals in factory farming is wrong, adding: "For the rest, I just act rationally, I don't have to be an animal friend to protect animals."
Fortuyn, who was openly gay and traveled by chauffeur-driven Daimler with two small lapdogs, was well known for his anti-immigration stance but had a less than fully rounded policy on agriculture.
"We don't have a very developed policy on animal rights. We were busy developing it," Joost Eerdmans, a candidate for Fortuyn's party in the May 15 general election, told Reuters on Tuesday.

FORTUYN "LOVED ANIMALS"
"(Fortuyn) had two dogs. They were his life since he didn't have a partner. He loved animals. There is no mistake about that," said Eerdmans. Eerdmans said Fortuyn wanted to restructure the Dutch department of agriculture, making it more animal-friendly to help limit diseases such as BSE. He wanted to make farming less intensive.
Fortuyn had no 24-hour bodyguard -- he was unprotected when the gunman fired on him on Monday as he left a radio station after giving an interview -- but he made use of private security guards at his home and at some public events, colleagues said.
Fortuyn beefed up his security after a "pie" of feces and vomit was hurled at him in March at a book presentation. Police said a group calling itself "The Bakery Brigade" claimed responsibility for that but nobody was arrested or charged.
Chief public prosecutor Theo Hofstee said on Tuesday a search of the suspect's home found "he was in possession of material that indicates involvement in environmental activism", though he said he made no link between that and the murder.
Hofstee told reporters the unnamed suspect was calm and "in possession of his senses" when he was arrested shortly after the killing around 5 p.m. on Monday.
The suspect made no statement, meaning officials had no clue as to possible motive, Hofstee said.
Though green issues were not high on Fortuyn's taboo-breaking agenda, the outspoken would-be premier lashed out late last year at Dutch environmental policy and activism.
"The whole environmental policy in the Netherlands has no substance any more. And I'm sick to death of your environmental movement," Fortuyn was quoted as telling established Dutch green organisation "Milieu Defensie"
("Environmental Defence").

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