‘Incalculable consequences’

Whoever you spoke to, everyone was raving about A porcelain weddingthe four-part TV documentary by Hans Hermans and Martin Maat about the coming about of the marriage of Willem-Alexander and Máxima.

I started with some skepticism, because I’m not much of an Orange watcher, but after half an hour I was convinced: this was TV journalism of the highest category. As far as I’m concerned, the jury of the Silver Nipkow Disc no longer needs to meet this year. A porcelain wedding contained many new, revealing facts and was also a pleasure to view in terms of design.

A pleasant aspect was the attention for a few supporting actors. Without their input it would have been a less interesting film. It seemed to be a handicap for the makers that lead actors such as Wim Kok and Max van der Stoel had died, but in retrospect that has to be a blessing in disguise have been. I suspect that Kok and Van der Stoel, even as ex-politicians, never gave up; their ‘replacers’, Ad Melkert and Van der Stoel’s son Scipio, understandably had less difficulty with this.

Jan Thielen, a correspondent in Argentina at the time, also had such an important supporting role. He turned out to have been a snake in Zorreguieta’s chest—one who won Zorreguieta’s trust and overheard him in many, no doubt, amicable encounters. As a result, we now know what Zorreguieta thought about missing compatriots: all communists and terrorists.

Thielen is also convinced that Zorreguieta must have known about the criminal practices of Videla’s regime. I never doubted that myself. I visited in 1978, a few months before the World Cup, as a reporter for de Volkskrant Argentina and, as an outsider, heard enough in three weeks to make sure it was an unscrupulous, murderous regime. If Zorreguieta did not know, wild he didn’t hear it.

The winged words of 2021 were ‘Position Omtzigt, function elsewhere’, those of 2022 will remain words from 2001 for me: Queen Beatrix to Wim Kok: “Consequences incalculable”. At that time, the Queen seriously considered the possibility that Willem-Alexander would abdicate if the politicians continued to refuse to admit Zorreguieta to the wedding ceremony.

How will the royal couple have looked at this documentary? Presumably with an anxious beating heart, because there was something humiliating about the display. A secret BVD investigation, outside the government, that turns out to be favorable for Zorreguieta; the hostile attitude of Willem-Alexander (“You put me in front of the block”) towards Kok – it exudes an atmosphere of sometimes secret influence from the Royal House. In addition, there was the revelation that the top man of the Public Prosecution Service had single-handedly brushed off a report against Zorreguieta.

A new revelation, Saturday in de Volkskrant by Marcia Luyten, does not make that picture any more favourable. Luyten observes that the TV documentary leaves one aspect unexposed. At the request of Máxima, there was a role for a certain Padre Braun, an important Catholic ideologue of the Videla regime, a man who had always justified the crimes of that regime during the wedding service in the Nieuwe Kerk. Kok ignored the objections against Braun, he apparently thought that Máxima had suffered enough.