International

The Senate’s disappointment regarding the answers given by the government to more than a hundred questions on the Iraq war represents a first step towards a parliamentary enquiry. This is the conclusion drawn by SP Senator Arjan Vliegenthart following this afternoon’s deliberations in the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. “The Senate can do nothing with the answers given,” says Vliegenthart. “The government continues to refuse openness. Now that the VVD has ceased to rule out an enquiry this remains a possibility.” The right wing VVD, now after the SP the second biggest party of opposition, was a member of the governing coalition that took the decision to support the war. “The government has only itself to blame, given the contemptuous way it has treated the Senate.”

The SP is extremely disappointed by the government’s responses to its questions regarding Dutch involvement in the war against Iraq. “We have been forced to wait more than six months for these answers,” says SP Senator Arjan Vliegenthart. “That’s a very long time. This gave me high expectations, but what has arrived is worthless: to our hundred questions, a hundred times nothing. A parliamentary enquiry remains therefore an absolute necessity.”