Nieuws van de afdeling

27 October 2011

Irrgang: ‘An agreement isn’t a solution’

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.’

27 October 2011

Gesthuizen: ‘What can a Limburger do in Angola?’

SP member of Parliament Sharon Gesthuizen describes herself as ‘extremely disappointed’ in the Christian Democrats and their Immigration and Asylum Minister Gerd Leers, who today utterly failed the 18-year old Mauro, a longstanding resident of Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands. ‘This is a young Dutchman who is the victim of a failing Dutch asylum policy,’ she said. Referring to a well-known local delicacy, Gesthuizen said that Mauro was ‘as Limburgish as vlaai. But he has been sacrificed by the Christian Democrats to their allies in the PVV,’ the anti-immigration party upon whose ‘toleration’ the Christian Democrat-Liberal minority coalition government relies for support.

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.’

International