Netherlands: software conspiracy
01 May 1995
In the aftermath of the "Opstand" affair, in which journalist/activists Jan Muter and Hans Krikke were arrested on 28 March and released on 3 April this year, more details have become available on the trail that led police investigators to them and the "evidence" that was produced to obtain the arrest warrants (see Statewatch vol 4 nos 5 & 6).
The police team with some assistance from the BVD security service has attempted to unravel the history of the Dutch radical left since the early 1980s in order to be able to reconstruct the origins of the "Rara" group and the backgrounds of its supposed members. Specially developed "Octopus" analytical computer software enabled the detectives to weed through many tens of thousands of seemingly insignificant details that had been fed into a massive database to come up with those elements that appeared to be related. While the public prosecutor approved the house searches and arrests, the police team were ridiculed for its far-fetched reasoning once details of the "evidence" became known among lawyers and journalists.
The case against the two suspects was based on the following "suspicious" facts. First, there was an anonymous tip in the form of a letter stating that one of the suspects had been present at a party where money for the Rara was said to be collected. Second, during earlier raids against suspected Rara members in a squatted house in 1988 a paper was confiscated mentioning the "Opstand working group", years before the Opstand Foundation was established. Third, someone had written a letter to one of the suspects in the mid-1980s which ended with the slogan "No pasaran". Rara in one of its communiques later used the same words (originally a Spanish Republican battle cry during the Civil War). Fourth, an "illegal" Turkish tomato picker had been arrested who was believed to be a Dev Sol sympathizer. In his address book, the telephone number of Mr Krikke's girlfriend was found. Fifth, the "Octopus" analysis came up with a list of several dozen words the police deemed to be unusual, which figured both in Rara press statements and in pieces written by the two journalists. Most of this concerned jargon related to racism, exploitation of illegal immigrants and an assortment of current radical left terms and concepts. Lastly, there were some articles written by Telegraaf daily journalist Joost de Haas in 1993 in which he exposed the alleged links between radical leftists, Kurdish activists and respectable NGOs working on Third World issues that had inspired the Hague police team.
It seems that De Haas obtained a good deal of his information from police sources. According to Mrs Ties Prakken, a lawyer defending Muter and Krikke, after the release of her clients De Haas reproached her for not giving the whole story at the press conference. He proceeded by mentioning details regarding the "Dev Sol link" referred to above that he could only have obtained from dossiers, access to which was restricted to the police and the public prosecutor.
According to the dossier presented to support the arrests in March, police suspicion was even further aroused when telephone taps after the house searches at the Opstand premises in September 1994 recorded Muter and Krikke discussing the possibility that the police action against them, which had been executed with no specific reason given, could be related to the Rara investigations.
While the Opstand staff were held in custody, their offices were burgled on 31 March and office equipment, including a computer, were stolen. The offices of the Amsterdams Steun Komitee Vluchtelingen (ASKV), an organization that provides practical support for "illegal aliens" and those that have exhausted all legal asylum procedures, also had its offices broken into during the soccer match Ajax-Bayern Muenchen on 19 April. When an ASKV worker unexpectedly came by to pick up something at eleven in the evening, he found the files the ASKV had assembled on the Ops