Queen Maxima and the Netherlands

Interesting facts about Queen Maxima

LAHORE: Currently on a state visit to Pakistan, the 44-year old Dutch Queen consort Maxima was granted the citizenship of the Netherlands on May 17, 2001 on her 30th birthday soon after engagement to King Willem-Alexander (born April 27, 1967), the son of Queen Beatrix.

Maxima is one of the few members of royal families anywhere in the world to be an open supporter of gay rights and is currently serving as the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development since September 2009.

She is the first Dutch queen consort to have been born as a commoner, and the first to have been born outside Europe.

Born in Buenos Aires to former Agriculture Minister Jorge Zorreguieta and a descendant of King Afonso III of Portugal, Maxima was engaged on March 30, 2001 to Prince Willem-Alexander, who was then the heir apparent to the Dutch throne.

The couple had tied marital knot on February 2, 2002 in Amsterdam, but not before the news had created an uproar in the Netherlands because Maxima's father, Jorge Zorreguieta, had served as a Minister during the Argentinean Dirty War or the Process of National Reorganisation.

During this notorious era, the death squads patronised by the country's successive military regimes had killed at least 7,158 political opponents including trade unionists, lawyers, students and journalists.

Resultantly, Maxima's father was not allowed to attend his daughter's marriage ceremony. Her mother had chosen not to attend the function without her husband.

Research shows that the Argentinean Dirty War had lasted between 1974 and 1983, though atrocities against political opponents were committed since 1969.  From 1969 to 1979, there were 239 kidnappings and 1,020 murders by the guerrillas. During the same period, however, the country's military had kidnapped 7,844 and murdered 7,850 people.

The official number of disappeared people is reported to be 13,000, though some declassified documents of the Chilean secret police had revealed that at least 22,000 Argentineans were killed or had "disappeared" between 1975 and mid-1978 because they were deemed to be political or ideological threats to the then ruling military junta.

An estimated 400 children were stolen during this period, often from mothers who gave birth in prison and who later "disappeared."  In September 2009, the United States had declassified 4,677 pages of testimony and communications while shedding light on military atrocities committed during Argentina's Dirty War.

The US documents had revealed that the then American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other top Ford administration officials had at first supported what Argentinean dictators had branded "a war against Communism." 

The papers also showed that Washington DC knew that people were being kidnapped, taken to far-away places, drugged, tied up and tortured with electrical prods. Many of these were eventually murdered.

Some 11,000 legal heirs of the killed or disappeared Argentineans had later received up to US$200,000 each as monetary compensation for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorship.

General Jorge Videla (who had led the first military government following the 1976 coup and held power until 1981) and Admiral Emilio Massera were sentenced in 1985 to life in prison for killings, tortures and illegal arrests while the military was in power from 1976 to 1983.  After a fresh trial in July 2012, General Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the systematic kidnapping of children during his tenure

General Reynaldo Bignone, who had held power from 1982 until 1983, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2010 for torture and illegal detentions committed while the country was under military rule. 

On December 29, 2011, General Bignone had received a further 15-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity for setting up a secret torture center inside a hospital during the 1976 military coup.

On July 5, 2012, Bignone was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his participation in a scheme to steal babies from parents detained by the military regime.

General Roberto Viola was sentenced to 17 years, Admiral Armando was sent behind bars for eight years and General Agosti was handed over a conviction of four and a half years.

 (References: Thomas Wright's book "State terrorism in Latin America," the April 20, 2010 edition of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and Richard Morrock and William Marchak's book "The psychology of genocide and violent oppression: A study of mass cruelty from Nazi Germany to Rwanda")

By the way, father of Pakistan's Atomic Programme, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, had received his Master’s degree in Metallurgy from the Delft Technology University of Holland in June 1967. 

After completing his Master's, Qadeer Khan had joined the Catholic University of Leuven, Holland, for his doctoral studies.

In 1964, he had married Hendrina Reterink, a British national who had been born to Dutch expatriate parents in South Africa and raised in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) before moving to the Netherlands.

From May 1972 to December1975, Dr. Qadeer was employed by the Amsterdam-based Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory, which was a subcontractor for the URENCO Group, which specialised in the manufacture of nuclear equipment. 

A Dutch-German and British consortium, URENCO, had a primary enrichment facility at the Dutch town of Almelo. On December 15, 1975, Dr. Qadeer had left the Netherlands for Pakistan, accompanied by his wife and two daughters.