Netherlands receives first victims of MH17
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THE bodies of the first victims from a Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine last week arrived back in the Netherlands yesterday amid dignified grief tinged with anger.
Bells pealed and flags flew at half mast in memory of the 298 people killed when flight MH17 crashed in an area of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists, in the first national day of mourning since wartime Queen Wilhelmina died in 1962.
King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte led dignitaries on the tarmac as two military aircraft carrying 40 plain wooden coffins landed at Eindhoven Airport in the southern Netherlands.
A military honor guard stood to attention as a lone trumpeter played The Last Post, the military funeral call for people killed in war.
After a minute’s silence — observed in stations, factories, offices and streets across the stunned nation — soldiers and marines boarded the Dutch Hercules C-130 and Australian Boeing C-17 to carry the coffins to 40 waiting hearses lined up on the runway.
Relatives of some of the victims were present at the airport but were shielded from the media glare, officials said.
Windmills around the Netherlands were set in a mourning position and church bells tolled as the planes carrying the remains arrived from Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, shortly before 4pm.
The remains of an unknown number of victims were transported in refrigerated rail carriages from the rebel-held part of Ukraine on Tuesday. Rutte said that while some of the bodies might be identified immediately, it could take months to complete the grim task.
With 193 of the dead coming from the Netherlands, Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans said almost every family in the country of 15 million knew someone who died or their relatives, contributing to a national mood of shock and sorrow.
“Think of all the people who were flying away on holiday, all the young people who had just finished their final school exams,” said Jikkie van der Giessen from Amsterdam.
“They were looking fully toward the future and then you’re shot down. Whether it was an accident or on purpose, the fact is it’s horrible,” she said.
Many of the passengers on the flight to Kuala Lumpur were tourists, but at least six were AIDS experts on their way to a conference in Melbourne, Australia on the deadly disease.
Representatives of the many countries whose citizens died in the crash were present at the airfield, including the governor-general of Australia, Peter Cosgrove. Their flags lined the airfield at half-mast on a cloudless day.
Trains came to a stop for a minute as the country observed a minute’s silence. No planes took off or landed at Schiphol Airport, from which the Malaysia Airlines flight departed, for 13 minutes around the time the bodies landed.
A silent memorial rally was planned outside the royal palace in Amsterdam’s Dam square last night.
With so many of their countrymen dead, the Dutch have been taking a leading role in the international effort to recover and identify the bodies and investigate the cause of the crash.
Dutch authorities are leading the investigation, with extensive help from other countries.
The plane’s black box flight recorders, handed over by the rebels’ leader, were flown from Ukraine on a Belgian military plane on Tuesday to Britain, where a team of experts will examine them.
From Eindhoven, the bodies were to be driven in a convoy of hearses to a military barracks near the town of Hilversum, where forensics experts will begin the painstaking work of putting names to the remains.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was unclear how many bodies had been transported to Kharkiv and how may have been left at the crash site.
Rutte, thrust into an unaccustomed spotlight, said on Tuesday the disaster had fundamentally changed the way the Dutch view Russia, urging the European Union to unite to force Moscow to cooperate with the probe.
The loss of life has few parallels in Dutch history. More than 200 of its citizens died in the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, when two Boeing 747s collided with the loss of 583 lives, the world’s worst civil aviation disaster.
The nation’s worst post-war disaster occurred in 1953, when the North Sea flooded low-lying eastern areas, killing more than 1,800 people.
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