International

SP Member of Parliament Ewout Irrgang does not believe that the agreement sealed during the night represents a solution to the problem with which the eurocrisis began in May, 2010: the problem of Greece. According to Irrgang the annulation of 50% of Greece’s debt to the banks will not prove sufficient to enable the country to bounce back. He notes that ‘The total Greek debt will fall by less than 28%. Even in 2020 the debt will remain about as high as it was at the beginning of the crisis in Greece.’

SP Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel is urging the Openbaar Ministerie (OM) – literally the ‘Public Ministry’, in reality the equivalent of Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions or the United States Attorney General – to launch an investigation into the bloodbath perpetrated on the island of Java by Dutch soldiers in 1947. Now part of an independent Indonesia, Java was at the time a colony of the Netherlands. The massacre has long been the subject of a campaign for justice, but this weekend a television documentary revealed that a single Dutch soldier was responsible for the execution of 120 Indonesian men. The man had confessed his crime to a doctor at an advice centre. ‘After all these years the silence has been broken,’ says Van Bommel, who has for many years worked in solidarity with the surviving relatives of the victims. ‘An investigation is the least that we can promise the relatives.’