Back to Basics for the Dutch military?

The Dutch involvement in the Libyan rebellion has been one crazy escapade, from the still bizarre attempted rescue mission of a Royal Haskoning engineer (who will be forever known as ‘Paul’)  on 27 February, to the departure of six F-16s from Leeuwarden Air Base to join the NATO operation on 24 March, to this week’s long-feared announcement on drastic cuts in the defence budget (with around 10,000 jobs to be sliced). There is a strong sense that the Dutch intent in foreign affairs – returning to NATO’s war in Afghanistan with a police training mission in Kunduz, contributing to NATO’s other war in the Mediterranean, all in the name of a strong transatlantic alliance, its interests and values - is rapidly going to come apart at the seams. Because of stringent cuts by a right-wing government that pledges itself to the Atlantic alliance. Square pegs and round holes, anyone?

The rescue mission to Sirte – Gaddafi’s home town – on 27 February remains obscure and stinks of cover-up. HB covered it when the story broke (‘In Gaddafi’s Den’, 7 March) and thereafter it probably generated the most parliamentary activity in March as a whole. ‘Paul’ still remains incognito so we lack his version (despite the best efforts of the Jakhalzen to track him down), but we’ve had his boss Eric Oostwegel (“as far as I know we have no spies at Haskoning”), and we’ve had the Swedish teacher Rose Eriksson who suddenly turned up to be evacuated as well (“coordinated via the EU”), and we’ve had the desperate attempts by both Defence Minister Hans Hillen and Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal to explain themselves to a rampantly curious parliament. 124 questions were tabled, and Hillen and Rosenthal blamed each other in a show of true political back-stabbing. In the end the three captured Dutch naval officers were released on 11 March not thanks to presumed backdoor arbitration through Mabel Wisse Smit (member, along with Gaddafi’s son Saif – he of LSE fame – of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum) or even Queen Beatrix (why did she finally go to Oman and Qatar at such an inopportune moment? Apparently to sell some naval vessels), but thanks to the input of Greek diplomatic troubleshooter Dimitris Dollis.

But the questions kept coming: why was a helicopter mission to get ‘Paul’ out, very risky because unauthorised by the Libyans, actually pushed through? In the end Hillen and Rosenthal got out of jail not by answering this obvious question (no way!) but first by directing attention toawards a scapegoat, the MIVD (military intelligence). The MIVD had not responded to a request for a swift analysis of the situation in Sirte, causing the mission to go ahead without it. Slack intelligence services! They screwed up on Iraq, and they are still useless! Only they didn’t screw up on Iraq, and the attempt again to blame the intel crowd for not doing there job drew a furious rejoinder from the MIVD’s former boss Joop van Reijn - if Defence had been following correct procedure for such an operation, the MIVD would have been fully involved in providing what was necessary when it was required. No scapegoats here, thank you.

Instead another escape hatch was quickly found – a civilised government does not leave its citizens in distress. As Rosenthal collapsed into absurdity (parliamentary debate on 29 March, referring to Sirte: “It is a terrible pity that afterwards it appeared that one of Gaddafi’s palaces was just up the road.” Wha..? Can Rosenthal pronounce ‘intelligence service’?), Rutte came to save Hillen’s bacon by turning the whole affair into a populist triumph. The government didn’t have to do this, but it was obliged to seize the opportunity and try. Nice. Unless, of course, you happen to be the family of Dutch passport holder Zahra Bahrami, who certainly did not receive the combined efforts of Defence and Foreign Affairs to try and secure her release from a death sentence in Tehran, a point well made by independent journalist Herman Vuijsje. So either ’Paul’ has very important friends (highly likely), or Royal Haskoning is more than just an engineering firm (possibly), or the government made a real mess of the whole business (definitely).

Which eventually brought the Netherlands to the main issue at hand – the debate over NATO involvement in enforcing UN resolution 1973, and what the Dutch might do about it. Predictably, a swift decision was taken to join in, and Operation Unified Protector got underway. But the domestic political circumstances for this mission could not be much worse. Hillen’s impending cuts will prevent the Dutch military from being able to conduct anything like an Uruzgan-scale mission in the future. The minesweeper Haarlem has been sent to the Med – but all minesweepers are slated for the scrap. A report from last November suggested that two-thirds of the 87 F-16s in the Dutch air force were grounded due to a lack of spare parts and repair, suggesting that the six aircraft sent to the Med may not be far off the maximum that could be allowed. And 10,000 of Defence’s 69,000 workforce (military and civilian) could be out of a job within a year or so. The bleak facts will become clear on Friday, which Hillen has already described as “a heavy day for Defence.” If this could be incorporated into the kindsof re-evaluation of Dutch foreign affairs that Ben Knapen has been carrying out, then there could be some value to the whole exercise. But the Sirte fiasco and the token gesture of the six F-16s suggests the opposite: more of the same, only less effective, and more pointless.

The Defence Ministry’s eavesdropping dishes at Burum in Friesland (nothern Netherlands) [Source of photo here]

Interesting recent developments in the world of security, parliamentary regulation and politics in the Netherlands. On 6 April the lower chamber of parliament passed a motion demanding that the current Minister for Home Affairs, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, make public the statistics concerning telephone tapping by the security services. At this moment only the figures from the investigative departments of the police are released.

But those figures alone have themselves raised questions in parliament: 2200 numbers a day being tapped, of which 80% mobile numbers, and this is on the rise. The civilian and military intelligence and security services (AIVD and MIVD) do not fall within this category because they don’t need to receive sanction from a judge. Previous arguments have been raised that releasing these figures will damage the operating methods of the services and so undermine security. But this is no longer satisfying several members of parliament, notably from the Socialist party.

But three days later minister Hirsch Ballin responded with a whole different suggestion. In a letter to parliament he proposed bringing an end to the rule that the AIVD must inform citizens afterwards that their telephone traffic has been tapped. The argument was that this regulation cost the service a lot of time, effort, and of course money, since many of those who have come under the surveillance spotlight are not exactly easy to trace to a residential address (even for the AIVD). The minister’s position is supported by the principal supervisory body, the Review Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD), because citizens have sufficient other opportunities to discover if they are being tracked, for instance with a straight-up request to the AIVD itself.

According to those who want to end this regulation, the AIVD’s effort to notify those it listens in on is not backed up by either the European Convention on Human Rights or the European Court of Human Rights. In other words, the service is already going beyond the call of duty in doing so. And in the current period of looming public spending cuts, it is duly being  targeted.

This has goaded several Socialist MPs into action. Not renowned as the AIVD’s most avid supporters, SP’ers such as Ronald van Raak have hit back by complaining that the AIVD has first failed in its efforts to notify citizens of its activities and will now be rewarded for its failure with the regulation’s removal. In retaliation van Raak calls on all Dutch citizens to enquire whether they have been tapped or not: “I call on all Dutch citizens to phone the AIVD.” Unmoved, the ministry retorted that van Raak was turning the issue into “a caricature”.

But what is the value of all this tapping, and the mountains of information that it produces? Does it enhance security? On a slightly different but related tack, the Davids report and the fall-out from Iraq continue to pop up. Most notably on 11 April, when the former head of the MIVD, Joop van Reijn, went public on the radio programme Argos concerning his view of how things went in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Thanks to the Davids report, van Reijn could now speak openly about those matters, but it is definitely the case that he would not do so unless provoked. And provoked he has certainly been. 

The trigger for van Reijn’s interview on Argos was former Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s declaration in the Volkskrant some weeks ago that he could not recall receiving opinion from the MIVD that was critical of the information coming in from the UK on Iraqi WMD. Van Reijn countered that this was untrue - criticism of the ’45 minute’ claim was offered, and on 15 October 2002 there was an inter-ministerial meeting where this critique was once again brought forward. The advice was ignored. Van Reijn could accept this, because politics is politics – but then don’t blame the intelligence services afterwards if things don’t turn out as you want them to. That is a cheap shot, and it brought van Reijn into the studio to defend his service. Van Reijn’s conclusion went further – if you allow yourself to be led by ‘intelligence’ from another nation, as Balkenende and de Hoop Scheffer were effectively doing, that is “a fairly serious business.” Amen.