In 1975 and 1977 Dutch Moluccans hijacked trains and a school many people were taken hostage. At the time the hijackers were fighting for their own state. The hijackings ended with shelling by the a special assistance unit, followed by a violent assault by the Dutch marines, supported by the Royal Air Force. This action cost the lives of two hostages and six hijackers.
The Moluccan Islands are still part of Indonesia and in the present time horrific massacres take place every day. Cruel Muslim Jihad fighters butcher the Christian minority. The Dutch Moluccans draw attention to the suffering of their people and the silence from the side of the former colonial power, The Netherlands that keep aloof from the tragedy.
Europe correspondent Edeltraud Remmel travels to the Netherlands for a background reportage for the program Europamagazin from the German public broadcaster ARD about the Moluccan community in the Netherlands, about the train hijackings around 25 years ago and about massacres that take place on the Moluccan Islands.
She meets and interviews the members of the protest group SOS Maluku that asks attention for and keeps track of the acts of violence against the Moluccan population by the Indonesian army and fights for the independence of the islands. She visits a community centre in a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by Dutch Moluccans in the city Moordrecht and interviews the mayor. Edeltraud Remmel also portrays and interviews George Flapper, one of the hostages of one of the hijacked trains that was deeply troubled by the way the hijacking was terminated. ‘The female hijacker was brutally murdered. That is a crime,’ Flapper states. George Flapper also joins a demonstration in Amsterdam against the violence on the Maluku Islands or the Moluccas.
For this background reportage Featurez proposed the idea for the story, did the research, set-up and planning , accompanied the filming, did translations, filmed the demonstration in Amsterdam and organised archive video footage.