Busloads full of people from Groningen came to The Hague after the Huizinge earthquake in 2012. To express their anger, worries and fears. And also “because they had hope that the House of Representatives could make a difference”, former deputy William Moorlag (PvdA) told the parliamentary inquiry committee in The Hague on Wednesday. “But they have lost that hope.”
In previous interrogation weeks, the focus was mainly on the role of Henk Kamp (VVD), as Minister of Economic Affairs responsible for the gas file for many years. Oil companies Shell and ExxonMobil and their subsidiary NAM were also thoroughly overhauled by the committee. This week the role of the House itself was discussed.
According to Moorlag, the Chamber has failed to “make a difference for the benefit of the people of Groningen”. That is no small matter, because the House of Representatives is “the highest power in this country”, he emphasized. “There is no minister who is allowed to spend a euro without the permission of the House.”
Moorlag was not the only one this week to testify in public interrogations that the parliament has not done enough for the people of Groningen. Jan Emmo Hut, former director of structural reinforcement at the Centrum Veilig Woningen – the organization that for years dealt with damage and reinforced buildings on behalf of the NAM – said on Monday that MPs came to Groningen quite often, and that they were very interested “in the moment the cameras rolled”. But when the cameras stopped “the watch was checked and it was found that it was already quite late to travel back. They left for The Hague again, and you never heard from them again”.
gloomy story
It must be confronting for the seven members of the committee of inquiry, all members of parliament themselves, the deep disappointment of the people of Groningen in the House. Last week, they listened excitedly to the gloomy account of Jelle van der Knoop, former chairman of the Groninger Soil Movement, who represented affected residents.
He did not understand why the Chamber did not intervene when it knew that a ‘disaster’ was taking place in Groningen. “You can blame the ministers for everything, of course, but a House of Representatives should check the minister.”
Only GroenLinks and PvdD wanted Kamp to intervene in gas extraction in 2013
After that, he was so overcome with emotions that he couldn’t speak for a while. Once repackaged: “You can expect the House of Representatives to stand next to the citizen.”
Because the House also wants to put its own mind to this survey, the committee questioned three former MPs this week about their role after the earthquake in Huizinge. Liesbeth van Tongeren (GroenLinks) was the only one of them who had tried in early 2013 to force Minister Kamp to turn back the gas tap, as the State Supervision of Mines had strongly advised. She only received support from the Party for the Animals. “I was just not laughed hard, but it was close.” She concluded that the House, including herself, had failed. “We have not been able to bring about sufficient change in time as the highest body in our democratic constitutional state.”
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Van Tongeren certainly did not have to expect any support from Jan Vos (PvdA) and René Leegte (VVD) at the time. Their parties formed a coalition (the Rutte II cabinet) and the MPs had resolved to loyally support the cabinet policy. Vos told the committee of inquiry that he was fine with Kamp’s decision at the beginning of 2013, to first await the results of fourteen studies, before taking a decision on gas extraction a year later. When it became clear afterwards that a historic amount of gas had been extracted in 2013, despite the earthquake in Huizinge, the PvdA consciously chose not to cause a cabinet crisis. There had been an ‘exciting’ debate about it, which Vos had also said that he found ‘outrageous’, but we were not prepared to take the ‘extra step that you can take, sending the minister home’. After a series of cabinets that fell prematurely, PvdA and VVD wanted to ‘sit out together’.
It became clear from the interrogations this week that after ‘Huizinge’ the coalition interests were considered more important than the interests of the people of Groningen. A conclusion that the people of Groningen had already drawn: during debates about Groningen, the stands in the House of Representatives have been empty for years.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 17, 2022