On the Monday evening when Vladimir Putin launched the attack on Ukraine and Arjen Lubach counted down to the next war in his new Evening Show with an Interbellum bulletin, the VPRO broadcast a documentary in which reporter Danny Ghosen visited the Iraqi city of Hawija for a chilling look back at the previous war.
In the fight against the terror caliphate, a Dutch F16 bombed an Islamic State bomb factory in Hawija in 2015. The relatively light smart bomb detonated an enormous amount of explosive material. 72 civilians were unintentionally killed, many were injured. A result of reckless intelligence, in which the risks of civilian deaths were horribly, perhaps criminally underestimated. Lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld sued the state on behalf of victims on Monday.
For years, the cabinet denied Dutch involvement in the massacre, until revelations from NOS and NRC in 2020 there was no stopping. Now we are two years later and Ghosen found in the disaster area that the Netherlands has done nothing to alleviate the suffering among relatives and the maimed. Upon arrival in Hawija, Ghosen was received by the mayor, who introduced him to fellow townspeople affected by the disaster. Ghosen was surrounded by them as they held up their cell phones with pictures of their dead loved ones. The reporter, overwhelmed, asked for patience, he would listen to all the stories, but not all at once. The scene was the prelude to a series of horror stories that evoke memories of Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five and Mulisch’ The stone bridal bed†
The survivors shared how they believed the day of reckoning had arrived at the time of the explosion. Others made comparisons to an atomic bomb. A man told how his wife and six children were buried in the facade of their house. One daughter lay in the street with a cracked skull, another had been ‘cut in half’. In father’s arms, she asked if her mother and brother had survived, and he lied that they had. Then the daughter had died.
When the bomb falls was viewed as a litany of unimaginable suffering and the systematic avoidance of Dutch political and moral responsibility. A boy whose face had been disfigured by the explosion asked the Netherlands via Ghosen: ‘Do something about my face.’ His schoolmates are afraid of him, he is sent home. Let him not cherish hope: the cabinet does not want to raise expectations among relatives. Well there is four (four) million euros available for Hawija’s reconstruction.
There was one bright spot in this documentary, so embarrassing for the Netherlands. With his mastery of the local language and genuine empathy, Ghosen gave the Iraqi victims a voice like we rarely hear. And so that kid’s simple question still echoes.