So the Dutch army runs into Taliban insurgents pretty often. These encounters are often violent… and sometimes the Dutch capture some of the militants.
Which got me curious… were there detainees on the base? While we were there? There must have been… but we never saw any “detainment center”… and nobody ever talked about any detainees… very mysterious.
I wanted to know more… but it got a little tricky. The army wouldn’t let us see any detainees. Ok, fine, that makes sense - the Geneva convention says that you can’t parade your prisoners in front of the press. But we couldn’t even see the holding facilities. In fact, the army wouldn’t say how many detainees they have, how often they hold people, or even if there were people being held while we were on the base.
After a lot of talking they finally let me have an interview with Major Gerrit, the legal advisor. But I could only ask him questions that he would answer…
Listen to the interview here.
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