In a heated debate that continued into the early morning hours, a slim majority of MPs voted for the minority government's proposal to send 545 men and women to Afghanistan until 2014.
The rightist governing coalition of the liberal VVD party and the Christian Democrats, which have a joint 52 seats of 150 in parliament, had to make several major concessions to win over opposition parties. Notably, it swayed the liberal greens, GroenLinks with 10 seats, by agreeing to seek a written guarantee from Kabul that police trained by the Dutch would not be used in any military action."We need to be sure that if we train people as police members, they are indeed deployed as police members," Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the MPs in a debate broadcast live on national television. "We want a letter from the government (in Kabul). If it transpires that people are not keeping to the agreement, there will be a system of sanctions," he said, adding that if this also failed, "I will propose to end the mission."
The parliamentary agreement on Afghanistan certainly was a success for the new Dutch Prime-Minister Mark Rutte and a set-back for the right-wing nationalist PVV party of Mr. Geert Wilders, Rutte's coalition "support" party, which voted against the mission and obviously had hoped to show its grip over the minority government, if the motion had not passed. During the debate Jolande Sap, the new leader of the Greens showed exceptional negotiating skills by putting the minority government of Mark Rutte with its back against the wall and extracting major changes and concessions from the Government related to this controversial mission. The Netherlands lost 24 soldiers killed in its previous deployment in Afghanistan. It was one of the first NATO countries to send its troops to the dangerous south.
For more go to: EU-Digest
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