Word: moluccans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have been really good to us." He was struggling with the syndrome, says Ochberg. "He's trying hard not to feel positive about the captors, who are giving him his life. Everyone should understand that this is natural. One of the hostages on a Dutch train taken by Moluccan terrorists told me, 'You have to fight feelings of compassion for them all the time...
...Moluccan Terrorists...
...hardly know what a Moluccan [June 20] is. I do not know why the Moluccans in Holland are unhappy. I suppose that the recent hijackings by the small band of thugs in Holland were intended in part to attract my attention, to make me curious enough to learn of their complaints and to elicit my support for their cause. However, the repulsiveness of their actions has merely served to reduce to insignificance their cause, no matter how noble it might otherwise be. It is probably unjust, but 1 am certain that a majority of us will never hear the word...
Reprisal Fear. Still, the impossible Moluccan illusion is unlikely to fade, even in defeat. The terrorists are children or grandchildren of 4,000 Moluccan soldiers and their dependents who left their Indonesian archipelago in 1951 out of fear of reprisals for supporting the Dutch against the Indonesian independence movement. The Moluccan exiles in The Netherlands (they now number 40,000) cling fanatically to the dream of a future free "Republic of the South Moluccas" in the Indonesian archipelago. Angered by the refusal of the Hague government to support their cause, seven of the young Moluccans now in prison hijacked...
Meanwhile, the Dutch government's crisis team was getting nowhere in its attempts to negotiate the hostages' release. A government psychiatrist, Dick Mulder, made daily contacts with the Moluccans; increasingly, he found himself being either mocked or scolded by the tough young terrorists. Two mediation attempts by respected leaders of the Moluccan community failed completely. Mrs. Josephine Soumokil, 64-year-old widow of the resistance hero executed by the Indonesians, visited the train along with Hassan Tan, 56, a former education and welfare minister in the Moluccan government in exile. Their presence encouraged the terrorists, who greeted them...