SP International :: Representatives

SP Senator Anja Meulenbelt

Anja Meulenbelt was born in January 1945 in Utrecht, where her parents were in hiding owing to resistance activities against the German occupation. She didn't finish high school, but after marriage, child and separation attended the Sociale Akademie and later studied social sciences (andragology, or adult self-development) in Amsterdam.

In the sixties she took part in the "sexual revolution" and in leftist groups such as "Solidarity with the Black Panthers". Involved almost from the start with the women's movement, she was as an insider one of the founders of the so-called "fem-soc" political current. Stimulated by the women's movement, she began to write and received a job as a staff teacher for a continuing-education program that later became part of an Amsterdam university. Twenty years of classes for social workers taught her much about class colour and other forms of diversity among people. She has written around forty books in addition to many articles.

Following cutbacks in vocational education (which became privatized and thus financially beyond the means of "ordinary" students), she became active abroad, in South Africa and countries of the former Yugoslavia, giving courses on and working with perpetrators of domestic violence. Since 1994 she has been active in the Gaza Strip with her Kifaia Foundation, giving support to handicapped persons, among others many victims of intifada, and with training and fundraising.m
On the Palestine question she has written, among other works, Het beroofde land (The Robbed Country) and De tweede intifada (The Second Intifada). She is a relative newcomer to the SP.

For more information go to her website: www.anjameulenbelt.com

Or read (in Dutch) her first and second interview in De Tribune.