TERRORISTS: The Commandos Strike at Dawn

As dawn broke, a thick mist rolled across the pastureland around the Dutch hamlet of De Punt, enveloping the motionless yellow train. Inside, nine jittery Moluccan hijackers and 51 exhausted hostages were beginning their 20th day of cold fear together, a grisly endurance record of its kind. At a primary school in the nearby village of Bovensmilde, four other Moluccan terrorists kept four schoolteachers prisoner. Deployed around both the train and the school was an estimated 2,000-man army of crack Dutch commando marines, a special squad of sharpshooters, and armored military-police units.

It was not to be another tense day of stalemate. Apparently convinced that the terrorists were prepared to hold out indefinitely despite the exhausting psychological toll on their unwilling prisoners, the Dutch government decided to end the hostages’ agony. In the most dramatic rescue operation since Entebbe, a Dutch military team mounted a commando-style dawn assault on both train and school. Six of the 13 Moluccan terrorists and two of the hostages were killed. One terrorist, two marines and nine of the prisoners were wounded. It was a heavy toll, but at least the long ordeal had ended.

The marines jumped off at 5 a.m., firing submachine guns as they raced toward the train, scattering panicked cattle in nearby pastures. Six Starfighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, with afterburners roaring, streaked out of the sky and dropped smoke bombs to give the troops cover. The air attack was meant to confuse and intimidate the terrorists; clearly, no strafing or bombing was possible while the hostages were inside the train. TIME’S Peter Kronenberg, who witnessed the operation, reported that “the howling of the planes was terrifying. They came back five times and then there was only the shooting—then silence, then the sound of terrified people inside the train shouting, yelling—unbelievable.”

Plastic Charges. As they charged, the marines concentrated much of their fire on the first-class front of the train, where the Moluccans had established their command post. Demolition experts with plastic charges blasted down the doors, and the marines ducked inside, shooting as they went. As the assault began, 13 armored cars in nearby Bovensmilde started racing toward the school building. One of them burst through the main doors while three others took up positions around the building.

At the school, the troops used satchel charges to widen the gap made by the armored car, causing thunderous explosions that awoke sleeping villagers and brought them running into the street. Soldiers shouted, “Give up! Give up! You are surrounded!” Some of the onlookers clasped their hands in front of their eyes, afraid to look at the scene of battle. Cried one woman: “Dear God, they’re all dead!” One by one, the soldiers led the four captured Moluccans from the building and forced them to lie down for a body search. At 6 o’clock the villagers saw teachers waving from an ambulance bus. Realizing that the four schoolteacher hostages were safe, the villagers suddenly began throwing paper streamers in joyous relief.

There was little rejoicing by the Dutch government. Looking somber and tired, Prime Minister Joop den Uyl appeared on television to explain that “violence proved necessary to put an end to the hostage seizure” because weeks of negotiations with the hijackers had reached an impasse. Justice Minister Andreas van Agt, who with the prime Minister headed the crisis team dealing with the terrorists, made his own appeal for understanding of the difficult decision. “I beseech you to believe there was no other way,” he said at a press conference. “We tried everything—every path of dialogue that there might be, we took it, but we found them all closed.”

Indeed, the 13 Moluccan terrorists —all members of leftist-radical youth organizations—never wavered from their key blackmail demands. They wanted the release of 21 other young Moluccans now in Dutch prisons for previous acts of terrorism, safe conduct and a 747 jet to carry them to an undisclosed destination outside The Netherlands. In addition, they insisted that the Dutch government cut all links with the Indonesian government.

“From the beginning,” Prime Minister Den Uyl explained, “we made it clear there was no question of the hostages being transported somewhere else. And the demand for safe conduct, if granted, is an invitation to renewed blackmail actions.” As for the political demands, Den Uyl said, “we have seen from earlier experience in the relationship between the Dutch society and the Moluccan community that the awakening of illusions, the making of concessions, punishes itself, leading to bitterness and disappointment.”

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 a train for 13 days in December 1975, killing three people. At the same time, another terrorist squad occupied the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam for 15 days.

In a grim replay of that incident, nine young Moluccans hijacked a Utrecht-Groningen express train near De Punt on May 23, while five others seized the primary school at Bovensmilde, where there were 105 children and five teachers. There was no doubt that the Moluccans intended to terrify the country. The children were forced to the windows to chant to the waiting troops and parents, “Van Agt, we want to live!” On several occasions hostages were displayed outside the train with ropes around their necks. But after an influenza-type epidemic broke out at the school, the terrorists freed all the children as well as one ailing teacher.

There were a few other merciful concessions to the hostages on the train. After 13 days, the terrorists released two pregnant women, ages 25 and 31. Three days later they wheeled out a 46-year-old sailor suffering from chest pains; he was rushed to Groningen University’s intensive care unit.

Life on the train, according to the released hostages, was indeed a deadly combination of high stress and boredom. Because all the crossword puzzles had been completed, even the men inside the train began to take up embroidery to pass the time. One man plunged into a deep mental depression, and at one point another simply fainted, apparently from tension. The hijackers maintained strict hygiene inside the train. Every morning blankets were hung out of the windows and beaten to remove the dust. In the afternoon, hostages were assigned to remove excrement from under the train’s toilet pipe and bury it in the gravel of the railway bed. Brooms and cleaning materials were brought in, along with games and a daily food delivery from a caterer, paid for by the government. Unable to take any physical exercise, many of the hostages complained of constipation.

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 with a minimilitary parade. The visits proved an extra hardship to the hostages: they were forced to sit motionless during the two meetings, which lasted six and 4½ hours respectively.

During the first two weeks of the drama, Dutch officials made it clear that their first priority was the safety of the hostages. As the mediation attempts collapsed and the sullen mood of Dutch public opinion turned to raw anger, the government began to change its position. Interior Minister Wilhelm Friedrich de Gaay Fortman insisted that the overriding need was for “restoration of law and order—that’s what is No. 1—if in any way possible, without loss of life.” By Friday evening the government decided to attack the train, after the leader of the hijackers, Max Papilaya, 24, refused any further contact with authorities until his demands were met.

The raid was carefully planned by a team of army and air-force experts, summoned to the crisis center in The Hague. It was a challenging assignment. A surprise attack on the train was difficult because it stood in the open, surrounded by soggy pastures that would not carry the weight of armored cars. Knowing that the Moluccans had infrared field glasses, the operation planners decided to use the Starfighters to drop smoke bombs as cover for the marines and to warn the hostages that something was up. Valuable intelligence about the Moluccans’ activities came from listening devices planted by marines who had crawled up to the train a few nights before the attack. When the plan was ready, the troops involved carried out exercise attacks on a duplicate of the hijacked train at a nearby shunting yard.

As a young marine lieutenant explained after the attack, “We had been following the movements of the Moluccans for three weeks and knew exactly where they were at night. We knew the Moluccans did not guard their hostages properly at night. The gunmen and hostages slept separately, with only an occasional guard over the prisoners. We stormed aboard with armor-piercing weapons, then shot a wall of flame to cut off the Moluccans from the hostages. Everything went according to plan.”

Besides providing smoke cover for the troops, the low-flying Starfighters were deliberately used to make the hostages seek cover on the floor—the safest place for them during a gun battle. Authorities theorized that both victims #151;a 40-year-old man from Elst and an Indonesian girl from Groningen who spent her 20th birthday on the train —were shot when they stood up. But so effective were the terrifying roars of the jetcraft that the great majority of the prisoners instinctively dove for the ground. Summed up Air Force Major W.A. Blaauw: “It was a nice operation. You must count on some casualties in operations like this, but they were kept very low, and it was a great success for the men who did it.”

Not to mention those who regained their freedom as the result of it. One of them was Daan Peter Pot, 20, a civil engineering student at the Groningen technical college, who missed his year-end examinations during the ordeal (his dean ordered him advanced anyway). The Moluccans, he said, had treated him reasonably well, and despite low moments, morale among the passengers had remained surprisingly high. The running joke among the group, he said, was that their endless train “ride” must mean that Holland had become a huge country.

Rising Impatience. For Holland, the Moluccan problem is far from over. Though the white sections of Bovensmilde were slowly returning to normal after the rescue operation, the Moluccan quarter was a ghost town. Whether out of anger or fear, few residents ventured out of their homes—and those who did often drove with helmets and billy clubs. Following a minor auto accident involving young Dutchmen and Moluccan youths, police had to intervene to keep the dispute from turning into a brawl. Sensing rising Dutch impatience with the cause of the Moluccan exiles, Prime Minister Den Uyl promised he would place a ban on rifle-drill and knife-fight training for several paramilitary Moluccan groups. He also pleaded with his fellow countrymen not to take revenge on the Moluccan community as a whole. “The Moluccan problem is not a color problem,” Den Uyl said. “It is a problem of history and ideals.” Yet the Dutch government was clearly caught in an age-old dilemma, which officials openly acknowledged. Justice Minister Van Agt, in the course of one press conference, said it all. “To reward terror,” he said, was to “invite renewed terror.”