appe n d ix 6: the kab o uters (19 70)
On June 3rd, 1 970, a new Dutch anarchist group attract ed international attention when they won five of the 4 5 seats on the Amsterdam City Council, a s well as two seats on the councils in The Hague and Leeuwarden , and one seat on the councils i n Arnhem, Alkmaar, and Leiden. The Kabouters (pronounced Kab-Out-Ers , meaning gnomes or lepre chauns) were an offshoot of Provo . Their parliamentary " leader" in Amsterdam was Roel Van Duyn, who had successfully defended the single seat originally won by the Proves in 1 96 6 . Van Duyn's turn t o occupy the seat for a rotating one-year term, a practice peculiar to the Proves, had finally come in 1 96 9 . At the time he took his seat the Proves had been reincarnated, in a fash ion, in a group called Oranje Vrijstaat (the Orange Free State) , a dou ble pun on the royal Dutch House of Orange and the South African Boer Republic of the 1 9th century. It was the Kabouter name for the " liberated zone " of the new anarchist communes and cooperative businesses that were now operating in the Netherlands . Van Duyn wrote a council memorandum to create the " Volksuniversiteit voor Sabotage Teknieken " (Peoples' University for Sabotage Techniques) . One objective o f the Kabouter group , which had been found ed in January 1 97 0 , was to set up an alternative society based on ideas outlined in Van Duyn's recently published book, De boodschap van een wijze Kabou ter (The Message of a Wise Kabou ter) . In an arti cle discussing the new philosophical position, the Krant van Oranje Vrijstaat Arnhem (Newspaper for the Orange Free State of Arnhem) wrote that Van Duyn's struggles as a Provo had been based on de spair, but that he had changed after reading the work of Peter Kro potkin. The article identifies the Provo movement as " Bakunist, " based on terror and violence, and the Kabouters as " Cooperativist, " based on the work of Kropotkin. The Kabouters were most visible in Amsterdam, but had an active membership in about thirty-five Dutch cities . At the peak of the movement 's activity, around June 1 97 0 , about 500 people at-
132 • richard kempton •••••••
