In 2010, Dutch soldiers reported a possible war crime committed by Australian military elite units in Uruzgan. The report concerned the torture and murder of an Afghan citizen. The report in which this is stated was distributed digitally and physically within the armed forces at the time, but did not lead to action. According to the Ministry of Defense, it is now untraceable.
This is shown by research by NRC based on documents and discussions with stakeholders in recent months. The Australian troops were convinced that the Afghan man was involved in the deadly attack on two Dutch marines on April 17, 2010: he would be the bomb maker. They told the Dutch marines where the man was and they picked him up.
Read the research story here: A report on the torture and death of a civilian from Uruzgan has been lost to the Ministry of Defense
Dutch intelligence officers interrogated him, but released him again. There was no proof and they even became convinced of his innocence. According to them, the man was a young local farmer with possibly the same name as the alleged bomb maker.
Not long after, the Australian troops killed the man. He was tortured and killed in the process, several local sources told the Dutch intelligence officers. The Australians are said to have taken the man from his home in front of his family, cut the corners of his mouth open, and took his tongue out of his mouth. A bullet went through the back of his head.
A Dutch intelligence officer made a report about it, a so-called Special Report. According to several sources, a paper version went to the office of the commander of the Task Force Uruzgan (TFU), Kees van den Heuvel, and one went to the head of Intelligence. In addition, it ended up in a digital system to which the military Intelligence Service MIVD also has access. At the end of the mission, it ended up on a hard drive that went into the archive.
In the Netherlands, attention was only given to it again when the so-called Brereton report was published in Australia in November 2020. It states that there is very strong evidence that Australian military personnel have executed at least 39 Afghans and committed other war crimes. Members of Parliament wanted to know what Dutch soldiers knew about the possible crimes committed by their allies. The then ministers Blok (Foreign Affairs, VVD) and Bijleveld (Defence, CDA) promised a thorough investigation.
Report was never found
At that time, the ministry also received a report about the Special Report of the time. The Director of Evaluation at the ministry took the report seriously, went in search of the report, but stopped his arduous search about three months later. Hard drives turned out to be untraceable or incomplete, documents were missing, and those involved could no longer remember anything. The report was never found.
“How is it possible that such a report cannot be found,” says Member of Parliament Jasper van Dijk (SP), who will ask written questions. Van Dijk also wants to know what has become of the research that has been promised by Blok and Bijleveld in 2020.
The Ministry of Defense says in a response that the investigation into the report is formally still ongoing. When asked, the then TFU commander Van den Heuvel now says: “I have never seen such a report, I don’t even know whether it exists.” If he had seen the report, he would have “certainly taken action.” The intelligence chief at the time declined to comment. The Australian Ministry of Defense says after questions from NRC “Having found no reports of allegations of violations of international humanitarian law.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 27, 2022