Netherlands Terrorism began with Moluccan Separatism

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In response to my posting about the Netherlands' new program to prevent terrorism through social programs aimed at disenfranchised youth, a reader writes to correct my claim that Holland has never been the target of terrorist attack. Bernd writes:

"Sorry, Amy, but there have been several quite spectacular terrorist incidents in the Netherlands. In the 1970s Moluccan separatists had the rather original idea to hijack complete commuter trains and take the passengers hostage. Rescue attempts by Dutch authorities at that time included the mock bombing of the train by F-104 “Starfighter” jets, hence these incidents stayed in my memory quite vividly."

I stand corrected. Like a number of the conflicts today that have terrorism or the label terrorism attached to them, the Maluccan attacks on the Dutch are rooted in colonial relations between them hundreds of years earlier. In the 1950s, when the Moluccan islands were folded into the new state of Indonesia, Moluccans had reason to believe the Dutch would support their desire for independence. They had, after all, fought on behalf of the Dutch against the Japanese in World War II. However, their declaration of independence in 1950 was quickly throttled by the Indonesian army.

The Dutch brought the Moluccan separatists, about 12,500 of them, to Holland, where they were housed in refugee conditions on the fringes of Dutch cities, and society. The marginalized children of these immigrants, whose spectacular hijackings Bernd remembers so vividly, were raised in an era suffused with radical hopes, and radical violence:

Leiden University Professor A. Köbben, a member of the Advisory Commission on South-Moluccans in the Netherlands during the 1970 relates that "the second generation Moluccans in the Netherlands admired Che Guevara, the Black Panthers and Yasser Arafat. They saw that using violence to get the attention of the international community was working".

Read on, for a profile of a 1975 kidnapping by Moluccan separatists.