JUSTICE DENIED: Honoured in Constantia, reviled in Liberia — fugitive war criminal Guus Kouwenhoven dies free

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Dutch war criminal Guus Kouwenhoven recently died. Some honoured his life at a church service in Cape Town, where he lived opulently while fighting extradition to the Netherlands.

He was a generous individual who valued friendship, hard work and loyalty.

This is how Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, better known as Guus Kouwenhoven, was described at a memorial mass in the upmarket Cape Town suburb of Constantia held last Wednesday, 16 September, to celebrate his life.

During Kouwenhoven’s send-off (Daily Maverick has watched a video of it), a relative who eulogised him created the impression that he was a workaholic who always put others above himself.

Kouwenhoven was a convicted war criminal accused of providing camps for Liberian militia who “decapitated civilians” and “threw living babies into wells”.

For his part, as News24 reported , he countered that he was the target of a Dutch witch-hunt.

Kouwenhoven seemed super wealthy – he could afford lawyers to steer his lengthy international legal battles, and he was spotted driving luxury cars around Cape Town.

In the years leading up to his death, he was based in opulent suburbs in the city while fighting extradition to the Netherlands, where he had been sentenced to 19 years of imprisonment.

Originally from the Netherlands, scandals tied to him have featured in news articles across the globe.

Take, for example, a 1977 news article from a US Napa Valley newspaper. It said a Dutch “art salesman”, Augustinus Petrus Maria Kouwenhoven, had pleaded guilty to trying to dispose of or sell seven stolen paintings “by 17 th and 18 th century masters”, including a Rembrandt , and was facing two years in jail or deportation.

Roughly 40 years later, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre cited that precedent in a legal affidavit, questioning why South African authorities allowed Kouwenhoven to remain in the country .

The scandals he was involved in stretched from artworks to trees... and civil war.

In 2002, the Mail & Guardian reported that timber used to make lock gates at a canal in Britain had “come from controversial logging in Africa’s rainforests ” and that environmental activists were angry about the pillaging of west Africa’s natural resources.

It added: “The firm at the centre of the row, Oriental Timber Company (OTC), has been accused by the United Nations of corruption, illegal activity and using money raised by its logging activities to help fund the civil war in Sierra Leone that has killed thousands of civilians and left countless more maimed.”