De Zwaagwesteinder stille tocht en het Kollumer oproer. Mobilisatie rond een slachtoffer

Samenvatting

The mobilizing capacity of victimhood and the Kollum revolt. In and around the small Dutch village of Kollum, a few events took place that may tell us a great deal on the future of social movements. The first was the raping and killing of a sixteen year-old girl named Marianne Vaatstra, which led to a mourning procession in which 15.000 people took part. While no evidence of the killer was found, rumours were spread that the killer could be a resident of the asylum-seekers centre (azc) in Kollum. When a few months later the local government called a public meeting to present its plans for a new, permanent azc, the newly formed com-mittee against the azc managed to mobilize 1000 people to demonstrate outside the hall where the meeting took place. That same day, the public meeting was disturbed by rioting youngsters, who were all friends of Marianne Vaatstra. Soon after this riot more parties and action groups arose, all with one issue leading their motivations: say ‘no’ to the azc. Their success in organizing sustained collective action was relatively brief. The mobilization coarse around Kollum, which leads from the silent procession to the institutionalisation of the hostility against the azc, tells us that mobilization doesn’t need organization, but can occur spontaneously. In fact, in Kollum, most organizations arose only after the events of mobilization. The circumstances that gave the opportunity for these mobilizations were not merely political, as the prevailing social movement theory tells us. Moreover, we saw that the more vaguely the demonstrators put their demands, and the more they were led by their emotions, the bigger their number was. When people saw themselves forced to put their demands more specifically, most of them dropped out.