LEEUWARDEN, 02/12/00 - Is Jorge Zorreguieta, as Argentina's former Agriculture Minister, responsible for the oppression of his country's farmers and their leaders? This is what former missionary W. Hoekstra would like to know from the father of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander's girlfriend Maxima. The emeritus preacher directs this and other questions to Zorreguieta in the Centraal Weekblad weekly.

"Is it true that the names of the farmers' leaders, who attempted to organize peasants and to protect their rights, were passed on to the secret police by your ministry," asks Hoekstra, a former missionary and global representative of the Dutch Reformed Churches. "And is it true that many of these leaders were taken into custody and that a number of them have disappeared?"

Hoekstra, who helped Argentine farmers and human rights groups during the military dictatorship of General Videla, condemns the agriculture policies of the junta in his questions to Zorreguieta. "Is it true that peasants saw their debts to landlords grow to such an extent that they were forced to sell their land for a mere song to these very same landlords, of whom you are one?"

Hoekstra has doubts about whether Willem-Alexander should marry Maxima if his future father-in-law's answers to all these questions are "yes". In addition, the emeritus preacher wipes the floor with statements Cardinal Simonis made in the beginning of November about the Argentine military regime. The junta tried to create order in the chaos, according to Simonis. "Perfect? Probably not. Something was going on, obviously", said he.

"Does the Cardinal refer with his "something" to the torture and disappearance of thousands, to the way the regime's opponents were dropped alive from planes over the ocean, or to the unremitting suffering of many", Hoekstra wonders in the weekly.