Nieuws van de afdeling

26 October 2011

Van Bommel: ‘Public prosecutor must investigate Rawagede bloodbath’

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.’

25 October 2011

EU Council of Ministers refuses to make details of millions spent public

The European Parliament today declined to approve the accounts of the European Union Council of Ministers for 2009 because the Council refuses to make public the details of its spending. SP Euro-MP Dennis De Jong said that the lack of openness stretched ‘from the failure to go through tendering procedures in a third of the cases to the refusal to give details of spending by foreign affairs coordinator Catherine Ashton,’ adding that ‘there is also a gigantic excess of €17.8 million relating to the purchase of the Residence Palace international press centre in Brussels. In all of these instances and a dozen or so more the European Parliament wants to know what the money was spent on. The Council won’t explain, so we won’t approve the spending.’

24 October 2011

Van Bommel: Turkey must open dialogue with Kurds

In the view of SP Member of Parliament and foreign affairs spokesman Harry van Bommel, Turkey must immediately withdraw its invasion force from Iraq and open a serious dialogue with the Kurdish people. The MP raised these points in parliamentary questions to Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal on the subject of Turkey’s invasion of northern Iraq, a military action involving ten thousand ground troops and a sizable force of aircraft and helicopters. Van Bommel is seeking to exert pressure for a political agreement with the Kurds aimed at putting an end to the Kurdish community’s exclusion. ‘For years I have been demanding the release of elected Kurdish mayors and councillors. Instead, yet another cross-border war is being waged.’

23 October 2011

A thousand and one nightmares

Remi Poppe - ‘My congratulations to Shalit, who has had a terrible time’, says Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal. ‘The Netherlands has sympathised all of this time with him and his family and the government of the Netherlands has, together with other countries and organisations such as the Gilad Shalit Brigade, made every effort for his liberation.’

22 October 2011

Irrgang: ‘Political union no solution for banking and eurocrisis’

SP Member of Parliament Ewout Irrgang today warned the government not to hand over any more powers to Brussels. According to Irrgang, the government, supported by opposition parties Labour, the Green Left and the centrist D66, has embarked upon a slippery slope. ‘They want to rig up a political union for which there is absolutely no support amongst the people. The euro demonstrated that the unification of Europe has gone far too quickly. The people have turned their backs on this en masse and just as this is happening, these parties decide to limit the influence of ordinary men and women still further.’
In the debate, held in preparation for this Sunday’s European summit, Irrgang stressed that the eurocrisis is a direct result of the banking crisis which began in 2008. “This financial crisis can be blamed in its entirety on the bankers who ran crazy risks and on politicians who created the space for this behaviour. Today’s eurocrisis is the consequence of this reckless policy. The bank crisis put the light to the fuse.” In Irrgang’s view it is therefore completely logical that the financial sector should pay for the damage it has caused.

21 October 2011

Fresh chance for Libyan people

SP Member of Parliament Harry van Bommel describes himself as ‘relieved’ that with the fall of Gadhafi the war in Libya appears to be at an end. ‘I congratulate the Libyan people on getting rid of the Gadhafi regime,’ he says. ‘Libya can now begin a new chapter in its history. It is unfortunate that Gadhafi was killed, which makes it impossible for him to be brought to court and for us to find out more about his domestic and foreign policies and all of those who have cooperated with him. It’s of the utmost importance that a day of reckoning between old adversaries be avoided and that things are done according to the rule of law, and that the international war doesn’t continue in the form of a civil war or tribal conflict. That danger has certainly not passed. The EU and the UN must offer support to the development of sound democratic government and the rule of law.'

International