Dutch Minister of Defense, Henk Kamp, refused answering if he informed the Romanian governmental officials about the complaints regarding the cancer appeared at the army men that used the Hawk missile systems, which Romania bought. This way, the lie told by the representative of the Dutch Defense to his colleagues in the Parliament proves to be premeditated.
On the 19th of July 2005, Jurnalul National sent a set of questions to the Dutch ministry of Defense, to Minister Henk Kamp especially. Three weeks later, we received a laconic answer. We received it in the same day we published the interview with Krista van Veltzen, member of the Dutch Parliament. The Ministry of Defense presents the technical data of the systems, but goes around the questions regarding the diseases, as well as the ones through which we wanted to know if they informed the Romanian officials about the cases, as State Secretary Cornelis (Cees) van der Knaap was stating in front of the Dutch Parliament.
PROS AND CONS "The systems are modernized and they are in good condition", says the answer of the Dutch Minister of Defense. On the other hand, the President of the military Unions in Holland, states that "Holland is selling these systems, because they are outdated and limited". In his turn, Dutch member of the Parliament Krista van Veltzen stated in the interview for Jurnalul National that "at the end of this year, the systems reach the end of their operational and technical resources. In the same time, some of the missiles are outdated. And the truth is that all the costs of the exploitations increase since they are less and less used by the state". "The Hawk missile systems have been used by the Dutch Air Forces until the end of 2004", continues the official letter from the Defense Ministry from Hague and reasons their selling by "budget adjustments and change of priorities". But how
