Opinion: Interview with Helmin Wiels

The text of the interview of HP/de Tijd with Helmin Wiels was published on Today.com, November 9, 2012

Mr. Helmin Wiels is the winner of the recent elections in Curaccao. He got a podium in the Netherlands when HP/De Tijd magazine interviewed him in 2010. The story gave a candid insight in the way Wiels thinks and in what makes him tick. Columnist Boudewijn Geels interviewed the Pueblo Soberano leader. He concluded afterwards that even Geert Wilders uses woolly language compared to Wiels.

Geels went straight to the heart of matter with his first question: slavery is still a very important issue for you, isn’t it? he asked.

You bet, Wiels answered. “Why are there so many single black mothers? Because the black man was used at the time as a stud. If he was big and strong he had to breed new little slaves with a woman who was also a slave.”

But we are a couple of hundred years further, Geels said, but that did not impress Wiels. “Such a woman still thinks it is cool to get a child from a black man who subsequently leaves her. That is an inheritance of slavery. But nobody talks about it. It is often about women with fat bottoms and big tits. Also an inheritance of slavery.”

Explain, Geels pleaded, and Wiels gave him the whole nine yards. “Previously women were fattened up, so that they brought a higher price on the market, just like horses and goats. That is still the paradigm – that a black woman has to be large and fat. And such a woman is only too happy when she finally manages to get a man in her bed. Then she has become a complete woman, she finds. But do you think that a son whose mother has children from four different men respects her? That is why those mothers have no control over their adolescent children. Not in Curacao and not at all in the Netherlands.”

And now what? Geels wanted to know.

Wiels “I know the weak points of my people: the irresponsibility and the laissez-faire mentality. Young people are unable to learn anything from each other. That is why the parents have to go back to school. Only they will be able to teach their children how they have to behave.”

Geels then turned to Jacob Gelt Dekker, who once called Wiels a black racist. The Pueblo Soberano leader did not let that opportunity go by: “Mister Gelt Dekker is an enormous fool. An ordinary swindler. He earns a lot of money with his slavery Museum and with emotional stories about slavery. But he only tells half the truth. The whole situation on this island is an inheritance of the slavery. Gelt Dekker shows in his museum only the equipment that was used torture blacks, but he never talks about reparation,

Geels does not manage to complete his next question (he wanted to ask if Wiels thinks that the Netherlands should pony up after all those centuries). “Yes! Italy did it with Libya. Sarkozy gave a couple of billion to Algeria. And Gelt Dekker says that Antilleans cannot continue to complain about slavery. But it is okay for the Jews to keep talking about the Holocaust. That was about 6 million Jews. Slavery was about 28 million Africans. And then everybody says: leave the past in peace. But the Jews are not contradicted by anybody. They are able to commemorate Kristallnacht every year. Why are we not able to do that but they are? are we inferior? Yes, according to the Jews we are certainly inferior. They treat the Palestinians in Gaza as if they are inferior.”

Wiels even had a number for reparation payments: 200 billion for the Antilles, of which 120 billion for Curacao.

Towards the end of the interview Geels brings up Hero Brinkman and the way the former Freedom Party MP made mince meat of the governing style in the Antilles. “For fifty percent he is completely right,” Wiels says. “I am not against someone like Brinkman. I also fight against corruption. It’s just that he does not say anything about corruption in the Netherlands, like the construction fraud. Here corruption is about coalitions. Parties tolerate each other’s corruption, to keep the coalition alive. A couple of rich families with a lot of black money are in control here. They are always interfering with politics.”

The text of the interview of HP/de Tijd with Helmin Wiels was published on Today.com, November 9, 2012

Read the original interview HERE (in Dutch)