The inquiry committee of the House of Representatives, which is trying to map out how the interests of the Groningers have been dealt with, immediately took victims to the interrogation room on Monday. Baker’s son Herman de Muinck, for example. As a boy he saw how the first gas drilling was a fact, while in fact oil was being sought.
Although gas extraction was seen as a ‘wonder of the world’ in the 1960s, the people of Groningen soon noticed more and more problems: farmers who saw their stables tearing and houses became unsafe. Until 2012, when the ground shook violently at Huizinge, the complaints were hardly taken seriously. And in the years that follow he also sees how people are mangled.
For example, when De Muinck was present as a spectator at a lawsuit of a lady whose house was a ‘total loss’. He outlines how difficult it is as an individual against highly paid lawyers of the NAM. “One said during the session: who does not tell me that a grenade left behind from the Second World War has gone off?”
Years of struggle against injustice
Retired horse owner Sijbrand Nijhoff also took the investigative committee along in his years of struggle against injustice. It was Nijhoff who obtained secret documents in 2018 that showed that the government had a much greater interest in gas extraction than had been previously thought.
Nijhoff says that the government always hid behind the NAM, even during lawsuits. Until his lawyers went to the National Archives and found documents that show that the State does have a big finger in the pie. “I received a summons from NAM to destroy those documents. Of course I didn’t,” says the Groninger.
He has since reached a settlement. “I’m doing this for the people of Groningen,” he says. The 81-year-old acknowledges that the years of legal battle has not left him in the dark, for example when he saw his wife standing white in the destroyed bathroom after a major earthquake. Or that time the judge in court asked, “Do you want justice or happiness?”
Tired
Susan Top of the Groninger Gasberaad, who sat at kitchen tables for years to discuss the problem and to find solutions with officials and ‘professionals’, is now tired of fighting.
She describes how she was on a ‘completely different track’ with the government. “I assumed that we were working on the question: how do we make amends with the Groningers? But in practice it was about a legal liability statement.”
In his own words, Top saw people becoming bitter and suspicious. “In Groningen people have stopped hoping, the least is an acknowledgment of the fact that ‘they were not crazy'”, she explains at the end of her interrogation.