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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Flight from the truth
By Mouin RabbaniOn 4 October 1992, an Israeli El-Al Boeing 747 leaving Schiphol Airport on a routine cargo flight crashed into the Bijlmermeer residential suburb of Amsterdam. On 27 January this year, the most powerful investigative mechanism available under Dutch law was deployed, when a parliamentary inquiry into the accident opened for its first session. The inquiry's mandate was to clarify a long list of questions concerning the accident and its aftermath which more than six years on remain unresolved.
The decision to hold this inquiry had been taken in late 1998, amidst public outcry following press revelations that flight LY 1862 had been transporting three of the four ingredients required for the production of Sarin nerve gas, and that the Dutch authorities had possessed this information but failed to make a proper disclosure to parliament.
For almost six weeks, a committee of seven Second Chamber deputies questioned dozens of witnesses, including the current and former prime ministers, under oath. The entire proceedings were broadcast live on both radio and television. Intensive press and media attention ensured they were closely followed and debated by the majority of Dutch citizens. The main issues dealt with were the doomed flight's cargo, the persistent health complaints of some 800 survivors and emergency workers, who reported symptoms bearing a marked resemblance to those associated with Gulf War Syndrome, the responsibility of El-Al and the Israeli authorities (several Israeli officials were interviewed in camera), and the behaviour of the Dutch government and senior civil servants immediately after and since the accident.
The level of public interest in the inquiry, which completed its hearings on 12 March, reflects the widespread perception that Israel and its state-owned airline have consistently withheld basic information about the cargo of flight LY 1862 and other crucial matters from the Dutch authorities, and that the latter have themselves taken a rather lackadaisical attitude towards the entire affair. Chronically-ill survivors and emergency workers, whose complaints have never been properly investigated, have come to symbolise the entire fiasco and their plight has elicited tremendous sympathy among the people of the Netherlands.
Although the committee which conducted the inquiry was generally viewed as second-rate in composition and lacking in investigative professionalism, its hearings provided banner headlines almost from the outset. During its first week, the committee unearthed recordings of telephone conversations between El-Al and Dutch airport staff in the immediate aftermath of the crash, in which the former revealed that LY 1862's cargo contained munitions, cartridges, poisons and gas, asked the latter to keep this information secret, and received a positive response to their request. Within hours, three Dutch airport officials were suspended from their functions.
Shortly thereafter, El-Al's woeful maintenance record was highlighted by airline employees who testified that LY 1862 had been due for 25 pages worth of repairs, and that technical staff had been coerced into declaring El-Al aircraft airworthy against their better judgement. The suggestion that the crash could and should have been prevented soon gained wide currency.
Additional testimony revealed that four rather than three persons had been aboard LY 1862, and that contrary to previous claims Israeli representatives had in fact visited the crash site within hours of the accident. This last piece of evidence may be related to the mysterious affair of the "men in white suits" seen collecting debris from the crash site (and whose existence has finally been confirmed), and to the disappearance of LY 1862's flight data recorder (which former Mossad operative Victor Ostrovsky claimed was not stolen, since recorders were routinely removed by El-Al from "sensitive" flights).
Throughout the hearings, the functional extraterritoriality enjoyed by Israel, its intelligence services and El-Al at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport was brought to the fore, and details of the systematic abuse of these privileges provided. Schiphol's role as the main conduit for the transfer of "strategic military goods" from the US to Israel and as a key Mossad station was also confirmed. And, as if to highlight all that is wrong with Israeli aviation in the Netherlands, an El-Al cargo flight with serious maintenance defects skidded off the runway after landing at Schiphol on the first day of the inquiry, narrowly averting a major accident. Aware that they were under intense public scrutiny, the airport authorities on this occasion acted quickly to confiscate several missile parts the flight had been illegally transporting.
More positive from Israel's point of view was the dramatic success of Avner Yarkoni, head of the Israel Airports Authority, in obtaining 290 pages of missing freight documents concerning 20 tons of cargo only hours before his testimony began. This satisfaction was, however, short-lived; on the final day of the hearings committee chairman Theo Meijer disclosed that the "American company" which had furnished Yarkoni with the documents was in fact an El-Al subsidiary, had provided Israel with the documents immediately after the crash rather than just before Yarkoni's testimony, as claimed, and was refusing any further cooperation with the inquiry. Hot on the heels of previous revelations that El-Al regularly provided fraudulent freight documents to mislead various airport authorities, came the news, released by the panel, that documentation concerning an additional four tons of LY 1862's cargo had proved to be far from kosher.
Israel's conduct over the last six years, which has received massive and concentrated media coverage, appears to have irrevocably shattered its sacred status in the Netherlands. Its behaviour during the inquiry only added insult to injury. Early on, Israel's fundamentalist transportation minister, Shaul Yahalom, predictably claimed the inquiry was fomenting anti-Semitism. "It begins with things like this," he stated, "and no one knows where it will lead to."
The implicit comparison of the committee members to the operators of the Auschwitz gas chambers was not particularly well received, and only the Dutch media's Israeli Israel correspondents, who have traditionally determined Dutch perceptions of the Middle East, gave such statements any credence. El-Al's subsequent threats to move its European operations away from Schiphol, accompanied by laughable claims that the airline is vital to the Dutch economy, also backfired. Now the airline may yet be forced to make good on its promise. On 23 March, as if intent on destroying its last shred of credibility in the Netherlands, El-Al announced that, rather than providing compensation to the victims, it would be suing the inquiry committee for damages resulting from the latter's "misrepresentation" of the airline's activities.
The Dutch aspect of the inquiry proved no less interesting. Witness after witness testified to the lack of interest, if not outright hostility, of both the government and individual ministries when it came to investigating the many issues resulting from the crash. Rob van Gijzel, the most persistent parliamentary deputy throughout the entire affair, recounted how he was derisively addressed as "Bijlmerboy" by his colleagues. Prime Minister Wim Kok, for his part, stated that he never got involved with the investigation because the matter was never raised with him by either ministerial or coalition colleagues -- an allegation whose truth has since been contested by former senior officials.
The government and bureaucracy's disgraceful conduct over the past six years, which has deeply shaken public confidence in the state, will be minutely detailed in the committee's final report due out in late April. It is widely expected that the inquiry will result in findings of gross negligence and mismanagement, and perhaps of deliberate concealment as well. Heads are certain to roll, and the current coalition government may well begin to unravel as a result.
Unfortunately, the reasons behind such conduct, which may well involve active collusion between the Dutch and Israeli authorities at the highest levels to keep vital information related to the crash under wraps, were not seriously probed by the investigation. The potential conclusion that the elected government of the Netherlands considered the protection of Israel's chemical warfare programme more important than the health and security of its own citizens was evidently too explosive to merit consideration.
Notwithstanding this display of discretion, Israel's systematic misconduct throughout the affair has severely undermined the special relationship between the two countries at the popular level, as well as its ability to operate what amounts to a state within a state in the Netherlands. Additional measures on the Dutch and wider European levels are expected to follow.
During his testimony, Prime Minister Kok was visibly angry at Israel, stating that his government was only able to obtain Israeli cooperation when it was made clear to Tel Aviv that the affair was "bloody serious". Quite true -- but then, the same could equally be said of Kok and his colleagues' refusal to cooperate with the Dutch people.
