Hans van Heijningen

Hans van Heijningen
Hans van Heijningen (2012)
Personal details
Born	15 March 1953 Naaldwijk
Nationality	Dutch politician
Political party	Socialist Party (Netherlands)

Dutch

J.G.C. (Hans) van Heijningen (born 15 March 1953) is a Dutch politician. He is party secretary of the Socialist Party (SP), a position comparable to the post of chairman in other parties. Before holding this office, Van Heijningen was a foreign policy advisor to the SP whose areas of responsibility included European politics, and development cooperation.

Van Heijningen attended high school at the Stanislas College in Delft and from 1972 to 1979 studied sociology at the University of Amsterdam. During his military service he was active in the national servicemen’s union, the VVDM, serving for a year as a member of the national executive. From 1984 to 1992 Van Heijningen lived in Nicaragua, where his then girlfriend – she is now his wife – worked as a general practitioner in the mountain village of Comalapa in the Department of Chontales. Initially he was employed as a journalist and consultant, in addition to which he was a volunteer in education, took part in vaccination campaigns in settlements in the mountains and organised support for farmers’ cooperatives, which were being attacked by the Contras. As a result of these activities he was asked by the Nicaraguan authorities to help in establishing contacts with western development organisations. In 1988, on the basis of a contract with the Dutch Volunteers’ Foundation, he became a policy advisor to the Sandinista government as a policy advisor. Following the Sandinistas’ defeat in the 1990 elections Van Heijningen led a research project into the peasantry’s involvement both in the Sandinista revolution and with the US-backed armed Contra rebels. This research project and the political education programme which grew out of it formed part of the successful efforts on the part of the Sandinista Party (FSLN) to put an end to war-related violence and move towards the normalisation of social and political relations.

Following his return to the Netherlands Van Heijningen worked on a dissertation on peasant resistance to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. On 5 December 1994 he was awarded his doctorate after a successful defence before Professor Gerrit Huizer at the Catholic University of Nijmegen.