‘I looked at this mound of metal scrap and I had to say it out loud to myself, that this was the plane in which they all perished,’ said Silene Fredriksz-Hoogzand, whose only son, Bryce, together with his girlfriend, Daisy Oehlers, had been on their way to a Malaysian holiday. ‘At first sight, all of it was hard to comprehend.’ Some relatives were so upset that they did not even enter the hangar; they just could not handle it.
Although the debris of the misshapen metal and parts of the destroyed plane were located in three hangars, only two of them were actually available for viewings. At the prosecutors’ request the most important section of the plane, the cockpit parts, were not revealed to the press just yet. Those pieces were potentially vital as evidence to help establish the truth in the future. After the experts had assembled the parts and drawn their conclusions, the press would be called in.
Dutch Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra said: ‘The great majority of the next of kin were pleased to have been offered the opportunity to visit the wreckage. To actually see the pieces of wreckage is important.’ In the hangar where the investigation took place, the families could view the sections deemed the most relevant from a platform and were offered the opportunity to lay flowers.
The fragments of the aircraft considered important to the criminal and aviation investigators were soon to form part of an enormous 3D reconstruction. The three-dimensional reconstruction of the aircraft would begin later that month, with its focus mainly on the areas of the plane that appeared to have suffered the most damage, the cockpit and business class section.
The JIT launched a media appeal, urging witnesses who could shed light on what had happened on the day of the crash to come forward. This witness call was posted on the websites and social media outlets of police and justice systems at the end of March, via news websites and television broadcasts. The appeal was posted as a video that included pictures of a Buk missile system being transported through eastern Ukraine on a flatbed truck. Intercepted and recorded telephone conversations were also put online, and within a week 300 witnesses had come forward, 170 emails were received and 135 telephone calls were made to the Dutch justice department. One person contacted the authorities through Skype and another through the Russian social media platform VKontakte. But although this proved helpful, vital evidence pointing to the actual offenders did not surface.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government was coming under increasing pressure from the public to reveal all it knew about the risks of allowing passenger planes to fly over conflict-torn eastern Ukraine. Although families of victims trusted the investigators and patiently awaited the final report, they were also aware that the truth could turn out to be politically uncomfortable.
During the first months of 2015 the Dutch government released some six hundred documents concerning the aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. This release of documents appeared to do little to cast new light on what the government knew, mainly because much of the information had been severely redacted. The readable pages included agendas of crisis meetings to discuss the disaster and plans for the repatriation of bodies found among the wreckage. A covering letter from the government explained that the retraction of 147 pages was in order to protect the privacy of individuals, the interests of the Netherlands’ relationship with other states and had been implemented to conceal details of security around Dutch personnel working near the crash site. The released documents did, however, show that in the weeks immediately after the plane was shot down in eastern Ukraine, authorities relied heavily on media reports for many details.
A few months after the disaster, in September 2014, a ceasefire protocol had been established in Minsk, but although this did significantly reduce fighting in the conflict zone for many months, minor skirmishes continued. At the start of January 2015, the separatist forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic began a new offensive against the Ukrainian-controlled areas, resulting in the complete collapse of the Minsk ceasefire. Successive attempts to resolve the ongoing war in the Donbas region had seen no result by the start of February 2015.
Because the renewed heavy fighting caused significant concern in the international community, a new Minsk agreement was finalised after negotiations between German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Hollande, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. The agreement was signed by the Trilateral (Minsk) Contact Group, which included representatives from Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Minsk talks did not go as far as negotiators had wanted or intended, but an agreement of a ceasefire and withdrawal of weapons between all parties was signed and it assured special status for the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
But for the relatives the agreement contained one disturbing element. When translated, it included a sentence reading ‘Providing pardon and amnesty by way of enacting a law forbidding persecution and punishment of persons in relation to events that took place in specific parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine’. This was the area where the MH17 had been downed. Because the MH17 wasn’t specifically mentioned as an exception in the agreement, relatives were now concerned that the perpetrators, those responsible for the disaster, might benefit from the amnesty and be able to avoid punishment.
‘It goes without saying that the survivors of the MH17 disaster demand that those responsible for taking down flight MH17 and the murder of 298 innocent passengers be identified, prosecuted and punished,’ the next of kin wrote in a letter to the new Dutch foreign minister, Bert Koenders. The relatives also asked for clarification of the agreement. The Dutch government suddenly realised the mistake that had been made. The first Minsk agreement in 2014 had contained an additional clause when it came to amnesty: ‘Responsibility, however, will not be waived in a wide range of cases. These include: … and persons who committed a crime connected with the crash of the “Malaysia Airlines” flight MH17.’
As part of the OSCE the Dutch had indirectly signed the new agreement but had ‘forgotten’ to demand that the clause be included. Prime Minister Mark Rutte now scrambled to make assurances, guaranteeing the public and relatives that it went without saying that the perpetrators would be persecuted despite any pardon bargain made.
German prime minister Angela Merkel said that there was ‘no general obligation’ that the amnesty ‘included everyone’, and added that in any case the investigation of Flight MH17 had not yet produced results. The Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, believed the Minsk deal would have ‘no impact on the ability to bring the perpetrators of the downing of MH17 to justice’.
Ukrainian president Poroshenko, at a meeting in Brussels, assured the Dutch prime minister that the amnesty to which the Minsk agreement referred would not apply to possible perpetrators, or to persons responsible for the downing of Flight MH17. His promise did not set the families’ minds at rest: if anything, it fuelled their increasing doubts. There was nothing in black and white to back Poroshenko’s words and, if push came to shove, a lawyer would look at the text of the agreement and not at subsequent verbal commitments. How could such an important matter have been overlooked?
However one looked at it, the MH17 tragedy presented a hornet’s nest of conflicting legal implications. The case, if ever brought to trial, would be very difficult. If a suspect was accused right at this moment, the country where he was living would have to be willing to extradite one of its nationals to a foreign tribunal that had not yet been established or acknowledged. This could become a diplomatic nightmare. Far more challenging was the prospect of actually identifying individuals to prosecute as perpetrators. For an individual to be considered a suspect, the investigators would need more information about the chain of command in order to determine who gave the order. But releasing the names of suspects prematurely would impede the ongoing investigation by alerting persons of interest.