Overview:

In 1975, members of the South Moluccan community (Indonesia) in the Netherlands drew attention to their desire for an independent state through hijackings and kidnappings.
Tactic/ Type: Kidnapping, murder.

Where: A municipal building in Assen, a town in the Netherlands.

When: December, 1975.

The Story:

On December 2, 1975, six men boarded a train in the Dutch town of Assen. Armed with machine guns and hunting rifles, they took the entire four-car train hostage, killing the train's engineer at some point in the process.

There were about 50 passengers on board. The Moluccans, threatening to kill their hostages if their demands were not met, requested a plane from Dutch authorities. A standoff between the Dutch military and the kidnappers ensued for the next several days. Some of the hostages escaped on their own, but others—including a passenger shot in the neck by the kidnappers—remained in captivity.

Several days later, members of this same group stormed the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam, taking 41 people were taken hostage. Four people were injured attempting to escape from a third floor window.

At the time of the kidnapping, there was little knowledge beyond the Netherlands of the Dutch South Moluccan community or their discontent. Their presence in Holland was the end of a story that began in the 17th century, when the Dutch East India company was granted permission by the Dutch government to conduct colonial activities. The South Moluccan islands were highly desirable "Spice Islands" where cloves and nutmeg grew, and they became essential crossroads of colonial trade network.

By the late 19th century, a special relationship between the Dutch and the South Moluccan Christians, who had been converted by the Dutch, or the Portuguese before them, developed. Those who were Christian became civil servants, or members of the military, and received special privileges and pay. The others on the island were Muslims; Islam had come to the islands in the 13th through 15 centuries.

Indonesia became an independent state in 1949. The Christian minority were concerned about their loss of power, now that the Dutch were no longer their rulers, and had reason to expect that the Dutch would support their claims to autonomy from the government in Jakarta.

Unwilling to be absorbed into the new Indonesian state, South Moluccan military members declared an independent Republic of the South Moluccas, or Republic Maluku Selatan (RMS) on April 25, 1950. The Indonesia army put the movement down and several years later, the RMS relocated to the Netherlands as a government-in-exile. They believed that the Dutch would help them gain independence, but by the 1970s, after a generation of living in relatively poor conditions—including in one former Nazi concentration camp, Lunetten--many felt that they had been abandoned. Suspended between a home country, Indonesia, where they had never lived, and a home country, Holland, where they felt like guests, South Moluccans began forming extremist groups and using terrorist tactics to draw attention to their discontent.