He was mockingly called the Bijlmerboy by his colleagues because he kept asking parliamentary questions. Rob van Gijzel from Eindhoven, as a member of parliament for the PvdA, got stuck in the file of the Bijlmer disaster in the 1990s. “It was unclear what had been on the plane and people got sick.”
On October 4, 1992, an EL AL cargo plane that had just taken off from Schiphol crashed. After the Boeing 747 lost two engines, it crashed into two apartment buildings in Amsterdam. 43 people died in the disaster.
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Soon there were all kinds of rumors after the crash of the device. The plane would have flown an unusual route. The day after the crash, men in white suits were seen loading things into a van at the crash site. Were they men from the Israeli secret service Mossad who wanted to cover up those traces? Also, the cockpit voice recorder with sound recordings of the crew has never been found. That is very unusual.
Van Gijzel still remembers that the then Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management said that there was nothing wrong with the freight. “It was perfume, flowers and computer parts. Only I heard that there were also completely different things between the wreckage.”
“Weird that two ministers say something completely different.”
Against all protocols, he again asked the then Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment what the charge was. “There were dangerous substances in the device and he couldn’t say more about it. It’s strange that two ministers say something completely different,” says Van Gijzel.
For Van Gijzel, all those strange stories and the health complaints of the residents of the apartment buildings were reason to continue to bombard the government with questions. In the end, he managed to have a parliamentary inquiry into the circumstances and aftermath of the disaster.
“The government simply left the people in the Bijlmer to their fate.”
The survey found that there was no evidence of weapons or hazardous materials. “It was about the cause of the accident and the cargo could not be the cause and was not the cause. That is why the cargo was not properly investigated. The government simply left the people in the Bijlmer to their fate,” says Van Gijzel fiercely. . It still affects him thirty years later.
Furthermore, according to the survey, many mistakes had been made during the salvage, ministers had often incorrectly informed parliament, a health examination came much too late and it was not often on the agenda of the cabinet meeting.
“The secrecy on many pieces was supposed to end, but has just been extended.”
It bothers Van Gijzel that we still do not know all the details about the Bijlmer disaster. “Much was kept under secrecy and more evidence has been destroyed.” According to the Eindhoven resident, all kinds of sound and film recordings have been thrown in the trash. “And the secrecy on many pieces was supposed to expire, but has just been extended. Why?”
The government rejected the committee’s conclusions, but adopted almost all recommendations for improvement. Ultimately, Van Gijzel was one of the few MPs in the coalition to vote in favor of a motion of censure against the responsible ministers Annemarie Jorritsma, Els Borst and Prime Minister Wim Kok. “I got little support in my search for answers then.”
“If the government is co-responsible, it will fail.”
According to Van Gijzel, the government should in the first instance stand for the victims and that has not happened. “Every time the government is partly responsible for a disaster, it fails. You still see that pattern in the allowance affair, for example,” says Van Gijzel. “We should not want such a government. It should be there for its citizens if mistakes have been made.”
The Bijlmer disaster has made the former mayor of Eindhoven very critical of the government. He feels that little has been learned thirty years later. “My wife sometimes said that things would have turned out differently if the plane had fallen on Wassenaar. Now it was all about the underclass. That feeling still lives in the Bijlmer to this day.”