donderdag 8 mei 2014

The Jean McConville killing: I'm completely innocent. But what were my accusers' motives?

Four days of interrogation produced not a scrap of evidence. This was an assault by sinister forces on the peace process itself

- Gerry Adams
- The Guardian, Wednesday 7 May 2014 21.04 BST

Gerry Adams on euro campaign trial, Belfast

Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin president, at a European election campaign rally in south Belfast on 5 May. Photograph: Paul Mcerlane/EPA

My recent detention and interrogation was a serious attempt to bring charges against me. It was conducted by the retrospective major investigation team (Remit) of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is based at Carrickfergus, County Antrim.

I had contacted the PSNI in March to tell them I was available to meet them. This followed another intense round of the media speculation that has tried to link me to the killing in 1972 of Jean McConville. It is part of a sustained malicious, untruthful and sinister campaign going back many years.

Last Monday the PSNI said it wanted to speak to me. I was concerned about the timing. Sinn Féin is currently involved in very important EU and local government elections. Notwithstanding this, I travelled to the Antrim serious crime suite where I arrived at 8.05pm.

En route I talked to the senior investigating officer. He was insisting that I meet him in the car park opposite the PSNI barracks. He told me that I must get into a squad car and that he would then arrest me and drive me into the barracks. He said he couldn't arrest me inside the barracks under the legislation.

I told him I was going directly to the station of my own accord, voluntarily. As it turned out there is no legislative bar on me being arrested within the station. And subsequently that's exactly what happened.

My solicitor was present. I was escorted by two detectives from Remit to the serious crime suite. A custody sergeant took me through all of the processes and protocols. My belt, tie, comb, watch, Fáinne and Easter Lily pins were removed. My solicitor made representations that I be allowed to keep my pen and notebook given that the offence that I was accused of occurred 42 years ago. After some toing and froing, I was eventually granted this request by the custody superintendent.

Shortly before the first of 33 taped interviews, I was served with a pre-interview brief. This accused me of IRA membership and conspiracy in the murder of Jean McConville. It also claimed that the PSNI had new evidential material to put to me. The interview commenced at 10.55pm. Two interrogators – a man and a woman – conducted all the interrogations. All of this was recorded and videotaped. My private consultations with my solicitor may also have been covertly recorded.

I was told that the interrogations were an evidence-gathering process, and that the police would be making the case that I was a member of the IRA; that I had a senior IRA managerial role in Belfast at the time of Jean McConville's abduction; and that I was therefore bound to know about her killing. I challenged my interrogators to produce the new evidential material. They said that this would happen at a later interview but they wanted to take me through my childhood, family history and so on. Over the following four days it became clear that the objective of the interviews was to get to the point where they could charge me with IRA membership and thereby link me to the McConville case. The membership charge was clearly their principal goal. The interrogators made no secret of this. At one point the male detective described their plan as "a stage-managed approach". It later transpired that it was a phased strategy, with nine different phases.

The first phases dealt with my family history of republican activism. My own early involvement in Sinn Féin as a teenager – when it was a banned organisation. My time in the 1960s in the civil rights movement and various housing action groups in west Belfast, the pogroms of 1969 and the start of the Troubles.

It was asserted that I was guilty of IRA membership through association because of my family background – my friends. They referred to countless pieces of "open source" material that, they said, linked me to the IRA. These were anonymous newspaper articles from 1971 and 1972, photographs of Martin McGuinness and me at republican funerals, and books about the period.

If any of these claimed I was in the IRA, then that was, according to my interrogators, evidence. They consistently cast up my habit of referring to friends as "comrades". This, they said, was evidence of IRA membership. They claimed I was turned by special branch during interrogations in Belfast's Palace Barracks in 1972 and that I became an MI5 agent! They also spoke about the peace talks in 1972, and my periods of internment and imprisonment in Long Kesh. This was presented as "bad-character evidence".

Much of the interrogations concerned Boston College's so-called Belfast Project conceived by Paul Bew – a university lecturer and a former adviser to the former unionist leader David Trimble – and run by Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre.

Both Moloney and McIntyre are opponents of the Sinn Féin leadership and our strategy, and have interviewed former republicans who are also hostile. These former republicans have accused us of betrayal and have said we should be shot because of our support for the Good Friday agreement and policing.

The allegation of conspiracy in the killing of Mrs McConville is based almost exclusively on hearsay from unnamed alleged Boston College interviewees but mainly from the late Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. Other alleged interviewees were identified only by a letter of the alphabet, eg interviewee R or Y. It has been claimed by prosecutors in court that one of these is Ivor Bell, although the interrogators told me he has denied the allegations.

I rejected all allegations made about me in the Boston tapes, which have now been totally discredited. Historians from the college have made it clear that this "never was a Boston College History Department project". A spokesman for the college has confirmed that it would be prepared tohand back interviews to those involved.

I am innocent of any involvement in the abduction, killing or burial of Mrs McConville, or of IRA membership. I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will, but I am not uncritical of IRA actions and particularly the terrible injustice inflicted on Mrs McConville and her family. I very much regret what happened to them and their mother and understand the antipathy they feel towards republicans.

This case raises in a stark way the need for the legacy issues of the past to be addressed in a victim-centred way. Sinn Féin is committed to dealing with the past, including the issue of victims and their families. We have put forward our own proposals for an independent international truth recovery process, which both governments have rejected. We have also signed up for the compromise proposals presented by US envoys Richard Haass and Meghan O'Sullivan. The two unionist parties and the British government have not.

Sinn Féin is for policing. There is no doubt about this. Civic, accountable, public service policing. It has not been achieved yet.

During my interrogation, no new evidential material, indeed no evidence of any kind, was produced. When I was being released I made a formal complaint about aspects of my interrogation. My arrest and the very serious attempt to charge me with IRA membership is damaging to the peace process and the political institutions.

There is only one way for our society to go, and that is forward. I am a united Irelander. I want to live in a citizen-centred, rights-based society. There is now a peaceful and democratic way to achieve this. The two governments are guarantors of the Good Friday agreement. They have failed in this responsibility. The future belongs to everyone. So, as well as the British and Irish governments, civic society, church leaders, trade unions, the media, academia and private citizens must find a way to provide positive leadership.

The Good Friday agreement is the people's agreement. It does not belong to the elites. It must be defended, implemented and promoted.

Yes, deal with the past. Yes, deal with victims. But the focus needs to be on the future. There will be bumps on that road. There will be diversions. There are powerful vested interests who have not bought into the peace process. Obstacles will be erected, but we must build the peace and see off sinister forces against equality and justice for everyone.

For legal reasons, comments will not be switched on on this article

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/07/jean-mcconville-killing-gerry-adams-innocent-accusers

zaterdag 3 mei 2014

Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map....

Zochrot aims to educate Israeli Jews – through tours and a new phone app – about a history obscured by enmity and denial

- Ian Black in Tel Aviv
- The Guardian, Friday 2 May 2014 16.26 BST

A Palestinian flag is raised during a Nakba Day march by Palestinians last year. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

In a run-down office in the busy centre of Tel Aviv, a group of Israelis are finalising preparations for this year's independence day holiday. But their conversation – switching between Arabic and Hebrew – centres not on celebrating the historic realisation of the Zionist dream in May 1948, but on the other side of the coin: the flight, expulsion and dispossession that Palestinians call their catastrophe – the Nakba.

Maps, leaflets and posters explain the work of Zochrot – Hebrew for "Remembering". The organisation's mission is to educate Israeli Jews about a history that has been obscured by enmity, propaganda and denial for much of the last 66 years.

Next week, Zochrot, whose activists include Jews and Palestinians, will connect the bitterly contested past with the hi-tech present. Its I-Nakba phone app will allow users to locate any Arab village that was abandoned during the 1948 war on an interactive map, learn about its history (including, in many cases, the Jewish presence that replaced it), and add photos, comments and data.

It is all part of a highly political and inevitably controversial effort to undo the decades-long erasure of landscape and memory – and, so the hope goes, to build a better future for the two peoples who share a divided land.

"There is an app for everything these days, and this one will show all the places that have been wiped off the map," explains Raneen Jeries, Zochrot's media director. "It means that Palestinians in Ein Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, say, can follow what happened to the village in Galilee that their family came from – and they will get a notification every time there's an update. Its amazing."

In a conflict famous for its irreconcilable national narratives, the basic facts are not disputed, though the figures are. Between November 1947, when the UN voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, and mid-1949, when Israel emerged victorious against its enemies, 400-500 Arab villages and towns were depopulated and destroyed or occupied and renamed. Most of them were left in ruins.

Understanding has deepened since the late 1980s, when Israeli historians used newly opened state archives to revisit that fateful period. Key elements of this new history contradicted the old, official version and partially confirmed what Palestinians had always claimed – that many were expelled by Israeli forces rather than fled at the urging of Arab leaders.

Fierce debate still rages over whether this was done on an ad hoc basis by local military commanders or according to a masterplan for ethnic cleansing. The result either way was disastrous.

Zochrot's focus on the hyper-sensitive question of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees has earned it the hostility of the vast majority of Israeli Jews who flatly reject any Palestinian right of return. Allowing these refugees – now, with their descendants, numbering seven million people – to return to Jaffa, Haifa or Acre, the argument goes, would destroy the Jewish majority, the raison d'etre of the Zionist project. (Israelis often also suggest an equivalence with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who lost homes and property after 1948 in Arab countries such as Iraq and Morocco - although their departure was encouraged and facilitated by the young state in the 1950s.)

"There are a lot of Israeli organisations that deal with the occupation of 1967, but Zochrot is the only one that is dealing with 1948," said Liat Rosenberg, the NGO's director. "It's true that our influence is more or less negligible but nowadays there is no Israeli who does not at least know the word Nakba. It's entered the Hebrew language, and that's progress."

Rosenberg and colleagues hold courses and prepare learning resources for teachers, skirting around attempts to outlaw any kind of Nakba commemoration. But the heart of Zochrot's work is regular guided tours that are designed, like the gimmicky iPhone app, to put Palestine back on the map and to prepare the ground for the refugees' return.

On a recent Saturday morning, a couple of dozen Jews and Arabs met at a petrol station on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and followed a dirt track to al-Walaja, a village of 2,000 inhabitants that was attacked and depopulated in 1948. Zochrot's Omar al-Ghubari pointed out the concrete foundations – all that remains – of a school and marked the spot with a metal sign in Arabic, Hebrew and English, before posing for photographs.

Among those following him was Shireen al-Araj, whose father was born in al-Walaja and fled to Beit Jallah across what until 1967 was the armistice line with Jordan. "I have never given up the idea of going back to al-Walaja," she said. Araj is campaigning against the extension of the West Bank separation wall, part of what she and many Palestinians call a continuing Nakba.

Another participant was Tarik Ramahi, an American surgeon raised in Saudi Arabia by Palestinian refugee parents. Marina, a Jewish social worker, came with her boyfriend Tomer, an IT student. Wandering among the ruins, these unconventional daytrippers attracted some curious glances from Israelis picnicking on the terraces or bathing in the village spring – now named for a Jewish teenager murdered by Palestinians in the 1990s. Claire Oren, a teacher, had a heated argument with two off-duty soldiers who were unaware of al-Walaja's past – or even of the extent of Israel's continuing control of the West Bank.

Nearby Ein Karem – Zochrot's most popular tour – is a different story. Abandoned by the Palestinians in July 1948 (it is near Deir Yassin, the scene of the period's most notorious massacre), it boasts churches, a mosque and fine stone houses clustered around a valley that is choked with wild flowers in the spring. Its first post-war residents were poor Moroccan Jewish immigrants, but it was intensively gentrified in the 1970s and is now one of west Jerusalem's most desirable neighbourhoods.

In 1967, Shlomo Abulafia, now a retired agronomist, moved into a two-room hovel that he and his wife, Meira, have transformed beyond recognition into a gracious Arab-style home set in a charming garden. Relatives of the original owners once visited from Jordan. Like other Israeli Jews who yearn for coexistence with the Palestinians, Abulafia believes it is vital to understand how the other side feels. He worries desperately about the future of his fractured homeland and about his children and grandchildren.

"The Nakba is history for us but a catastrophe for them," he says. "What have we got to lose from recognising the Palestinians' suffering? The two sides are moving further and further away from each other. People live in fear. There is a lot of denial here."

Many other Arab villages disappeared without trace under kibbutz fields and orchards, city suburbs or forests planted by the Jewish National Fund. Arab Isdud became Israeli Ashdod. Saffuriya in Galilee is now Zippori, the town's Hebrew name before the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Zochrot's bilingual guide book identifies traces of Arab Palestine all over the country – fragments of stone wall, clumps of prickly pears that served as fences, or the neglected tombs of Muslim holy men. The faculty club of Tel Aviv University used to be the finest house in Sheikh Muwannis, once on the northern edge of the expanding Jewish city. Nothing else is left. Manshiyeh, a suburb of Jaffa, lies beneath the seaside Charles Clore promenade.

Palestinians have long mourned their lost land, eulogising it – and in recent years documenting it – with obsessive care. Politically, the right of return remains a totemic demand even if PLO leaders have often said privately that they do not expect it to be implemented – except for symbolic numbers – if an independent Palestinian state is created alongside Israel and Jewish settlers uprooted from its territory. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, provoked uproar in 2012 when he said he would not expect to be able to return to his home town of Safed.

Older Israeli Jews like Meron Benvenisti, raised in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s, have written nostalgically about the forgotten landscapes of their childhood.

"I also identify with the images of the destroyed villages," said Danny Rubinstein, a Jerusalem-born author and journalist. "I do understand the Palestinians' longing and I empathise with it. But I think that Zochrot is a mistake. The Palestinians know, or their leadership knows, that they have to forget Ramle and Lod and Jaffa. Abbas says he can't go back to Safed. They have to give up the return as a national goal. If I was a Palestinian politician I would say that you don't have to remember. You have to forget."

Hopes for a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are fading after the collapse of the latest US-brokered effort, and mutual empathy and understanding are in short supply. But Claire Oren, resting in a shady grove in what was once the centre of al-Walaja, thinks more knowledge might help. "Even if only one Israeli becomes a bit more aware of the Nakba and the Palestinian refugees, it is important," she reflected. "The more Israelis who understand, the more likely we are to be able to prevent another catastrophe in this land."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/nakba-israel-palestine-zochrot-history

dinsdag 29 april 2014

Ukraine: Hate in Progress

Tim Judah

From the cemetery in Khrestysche we could see for miles across the valley and the rolling green hills. Men from the village militia pointed to the horizon and said that their enemies were “over there,” somewhere. And then the funeral party came walking up the path from the village, bearing the open coffin of twenty-one-year-old Aleksandr Lubenets. “He was very cheerful. He loved life,” his father, Vladimir, told me. “And then some bastard decided to end it. They shot him in the back.”

Krestysche is on the outskirts of Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine. Aleksandr and two of his mates, were part of the local rebel militia, which has been ringed by anti-government barricades for the last few weeks. What exactly happened is unclear. Yevgeniy, the commander of Aleksandr’s group, said, “He wanted to be hero.” On April 24, the three friends ran into Ukrainian soldiers or police and that was the end of it.

On the same day, in the nearby town of Gorlovka, forty-two-year-old Volodymyr Rybak was buried. A policeman turned local councilman, he remonstrated with the men who had put up a rebel flag in town. A few days later he and a man later identified as a student from Kiev were found in a river near Sloviansk. Rybak’s body, which had been weighted down with a bag of sand, showed signs of torture. As mourners came to pay their respects at his home in Gorlovka, Elena, his widow, sat by his open coffin stroking his face.

If war is coming, which is the way it feels, Aleksandr and Volodymyr will be remembered and not just by their families and friends. When the Balkan conflict began in the early 1990s the names of the very first to die were engraved in everyone’s memory and later in the history books. Soon after, the individual names and faces gave way to the torrent of numbers.

In many ways the beginning of this conflict in eastern Ukraine resembles that of the beginning of the Yugoslav wars. But the similarities are superficial. As the rebels in Khrestysche—who are variously described as “pro-Russian” or “separatists” or, by the Ukrainian authorities, “terrorists”—scanned the horizon before firing their salute over Aleksandr’s grave, I was struck by the crucial difference. In the Balkans, the men would point to the next village and tell you how they had come to kill us in 1941 and how we are not going to let them do it again. In eastern Ukraine there is no ethnic basis for strife, but hate is still being manufactured. Almost everyone speaks Russian, but you can describe yourself as Russian or Ukrainian along a sort of spectrum. Nor, in contrast to the Balkans, do religious differences play a part. Almost everyone is Orthodox.

Talk to people manning the anti-government barricades and taking part in the demonstrations against Kiev here, however, and one thing in particular is scary. After a day or two you realize that they all say more or less the same thing. “We want to be listened to,” people say. The government in Kiev, which took power after the pro-European revolution there, is a “fascist junta” backed by Europe and the US.

Tim Judah

A banner in front of the occupied administration building in Donetsk, now the headquarters of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, April 18, 2014

It is as though the Russian media—which is widely watched and read here—has somehow embedded these messages into the heads of people and they have lost the ability to think for themselves. Those who are angry talk as though they were a long persecuted minority, as if they have forgotten that easterners under former president Viktor Yanukovych ran the country until February. Everyone here has been robbed blind by politicians in a system that was as corrupt as can be, but all that seems to be registering right now is a nationalist and hysterical drumbeat from Russia about the new Nazis of Kiev and their NATO masters.

This is ominously reminiscent of what the Serbian media and other bits of the former Yugoslav media did when Yugoslavia collapsed. Then, Serbs were subjected to endless documentaries about Croatia’s wartime fascists, whom they were told were coming back. Now the Russian media says the fascists have returned. And of course, just as there were indeed then some admirers of Croatia’s wartime fascists, there are some right-wing nationalists in Ukraine now; the big lie is to give them a significance they simply don’t have. Speaking to people in eastern Ukraine makes me recall what Milos Vasic, the great Serbian journalist, used to say in 1991: if the entire mainstream US media were taken over by the Ku Klux Klan it would not take long before Americans too would become crazed.

No big surprise then that on April 27 and 28, in Donetsk, the regional capital, rebels seized control of the local TV building and transmission facilities, turned off the Ukrainian channels, and tuned in to Russian ones. On them people could see Russian journalists, called in the middle of the night to the seized security service building here in Sloviansk, interrogating three captured men said to be from the Ukrainian security services. The men are in their underpants, blindfolded and bloodied. They appear to have been beaten up and to need medical attention. One day this video will almost certainly feature in a war crimes or similar trial, as the local militia commander is present.

Whoever is at the end of the chain of command—and there is little doubt that ultimately it is Vladimir Putin—the vast majority of rebels are locals. They have help from volunteers who have come from elsewhere and a crack mobile team of disciplined and experienced soldiers. In the meantime, the situation throws up all sorts of people who are having the time of their lives. Suddenly what they are doing has meaning and they feel like they are taking part in something great, worthwhile, and historic.

Yekaterina Mihaylova runs the press office of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk. She used to be a journalist. I asked her why the rebels used so many Soviet-era flags and posters. Echoing Putin, she said that the collapse of the USSR was a geopolitical catastrophe and that it had resulted in an artificial border between Ukraine and Russia. When our conversation turned to Soviet history, she said that Ukrainians should be grateful for Stalin because he had created the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this had subsequently become the first Ukrainian state in history. I asked her about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, in which some 3.3 million people are estimated to have died. “The legend of the Holodomor,” she said, using the name given to it here, was created in Canada by fascist Ukrainian exiles. On Stalin’s Gulags she said, “that story is like Snow White, or…”—and at this point Ludmila, who was translating for me, stumbled, looking something up on her iPhone translator—“‘Thumbelina?’ Do you know what that is?”

I got the impression that some in Mihaylova’s office thought that maybe she had gone a bit far. Viktor Priss, a twenty-eight-year old IT systems administrator, was not a famine-denier. He said that the issue was whether one believed it was created on purpose to target Ukrainians as a nation, or whether Ukrainians were simply its biggest victims which is a respectable argument to have. But Stalin, he went on to say, came to power because it had been “the will of the people to create a dictator.”

Tim Judah

A rebel propaganda poster in the occupied administration building in Donetsk, April 18, 2014

At a pro-Ukrainian rally across town I met an artist called Olena Yemchenko, aged forty-two. A few days later she showed me some of her canvasses including ones of busty, headless women adorned with the old election catchphrases of the now deposed president Yanukovych: “prosperity” and “stability.” She said that the women in her picture represented her view that in Ukraine only 10 to 15 percent of people actually think, while everyone else “just exists.” She added however that maybe this was the same in the rest of the world.

Yemchenko showed me photos from exhibitions she had organized, and complained of corruption. She and her colleagues received a grant from the ministry of culture last year for an exhibition but most of the money never arrived because it was stolen. However, Yemchenko explained how she had dealt with this problem. She had a “fatcat” client, who she implied was making his money in some corrupt way. “My task is to take his money and use it wisely,” she said. Some of these funds she used to live off, but the rest was put into supporting the exhibition. In that way she was part of a money-laundering chain, but in her case the cash went back to where it was supposed to have gone in the first place. “For my whole life,” she said, “people have been robbing us.”

One way or another, most of the people in the towns and villages around Donetsk that I have met over the past few weeks feel that way. Rebel or artist, pensioner or miner, everyone feels cheated. So, when someone decides it is in their interest to exploit this resentment, to stir up hatred among people who are angry and often confused by garbled, nationalistic historical narratives of whatever side, then people like Aleksandr and Volodymyr start to die. Families are ripped apart and the violence takes on a logic of its own. That is what is happening in eastern Ukraine today.

woensdag 23 april 2014

NZa NRC

Het NZa-dossier: wanorde bij de toezichthouder

Foto Hollandse Hoogte / Flip Franssen. Bewerking NRC

Gegevens van patiënten, personeel en ziekenhuizen waren voor alle medewerkers van zorgautoriteit NZa in te zien. Van ontslagbrieven tot intieme verslagen over een patiënt. Een klokkenluider werd genegeerd.

Door Joep Dohmen en Jeroen Wester

Arthur Gotlieb levert het dossier 10 januari af bij de NZa, zijn werkgever. “Grijp het aan als bruikbaar organisatieadvies. Zie het als een cadeaubon. Sterker nog: zie het als een godsgeschenk, bedoeld om de Nederlandse Zorgautoriteit te behoeden voor een diepe val.”

Het 600 pagina’s dikke dossier dat Gotlieb, beleidsmedewerker, afgelopen jaar samenstelde, is niet geschreven uit rancune. Het stuk leest als een welgemeend advies aan zijn hoogste baas, de raad van bestuur van de Nederlandse Zorgautoriteit (NZa). De inhoud getuigt van schrijftalent maar de aanleiding om zoveel pagina’s vol te schrijven is alles behalve een vrolijke. Gotlieb luidt jarenlang intern de noodklok, zonder resultaat. Zijn “herhaalde pogingen om onzorgvuldigheden en wanbeleid aan te kaarten” zijn afgeketst, staat in het dossier waarover deze krant beschikt. En daar komt eind 2013 een conflict bij met zijn unitmanager over een slechte werkbeoordeling.

Het dossier, onderdeel van het bezwaarschrift tegen zijn werkbeoordeling, beschrijft tot in detail een reeks misstanden bij de NZa. De verwijten worden onderbouwd met 3 gigabyte aan bewijzen, zoals interne correspondentie, documenten, foto’s, geluidsfragmenten, alles bijeengebracht op een Dvd-rom.

Wat er uitspringt in het dossier van Gotlieb: patiëntengegevens en vertrouwelijke documenten zijn niet veilig bij de toezichthouder die een jaarlijkse geldstroom van 90 miljard controleert.

“Helaas zie ik geen andere route dan het u te melden langs deze onsympathieke weg”, schrijft Arthur Gotlieb. “De geest moet uit de fles en het deksel van de pot. Opdat het management tijdig kan bijsturen. Dit schreeuwt namelijk om interventie.” Twee weken nadat hij dit dossier had ingeleverd, pleegde Arthur Gotlieb zelfmoord.

NRC publiceert de komende tijd over het dossier dat Arthur Gotlieb samenstelde. Op deze pagina verzamelen we alle artikelen. Reacties: onderzoek@nrc.nl

Het dossier

Vijf voorbeelden van potentiële veiligheidslekken

Arthur Gotlieb concludeert in zijn dossier:

“De losse eindjes in de bedrijfsvoering tellen op tot een toestand die niet meer acceptabel is. De bedrijfsvoering geeft aanleiding tot zorgen over de automatiseringspraktijk. De gedeelde V-schijf is een tikkende tijdbom. Het mag een wonder heten dat dit potentiële veiligheidslek niet tot een ernstig incident heeft geleid.”

Vijf voorbeelden van deze potentiële veiligheidslekken bij de NZa:

1. Clean desk, niemand houdt zich eraan
De NZa heeft een huisreglement waarin staat dat je pas naar huis mag als je ‘desk clean’ is. De praktijk is anders – zo blijkt uit tientallen foto’s. Bureaus, papierbakken en printers liggen vol vertrouwelijk materiaal. Dat is niet zonder risico, ook al omdat het een komen en gaan is van tijdelijk personeel, plantenverzorgers en schoonmakers. In 2011 maakt Arthur Gotlieb bij zijn unitmanager melding van gelekte vertrouwelijke stukken. Hij krijgt geen reactie.

2. Overstappen naar instellingen waar toezicht op werd gehouden
Ook verlaten medewerkers met grote regelmaat de NZa om te gaan werken bij instellingen waarop zij eerst toezicht hielden. Regels die dat verbieden heeft de NZa niet, terwijl de toezichthouder straffen kan opleggen aan de onder haar toezicht staande instellingen en die instellingen ook kan dwingen vertrouwelijke informatie met de NZa te delen. Medewerkers beschikken per definitie over vertrouwelijke informatie over de zorgsector.

Neem de adviseur van de raad van bestuur. Hij wordt in 2012 consultant voor de farmaceutische industrie. Als fabrikant Bayer in augustus dat jaar de NZa voor de rechter daagt over vergoeden van geneesmiddelen, blijkt de consultant over de conceptdagvaarding te beschikken. In het dossier zit een e-mail van hem waarin staat dat hij het stuk van het hoofd juridische zaken van de NZa heeft gekregen.

3. Agenda’s delen zonder restrictie of instructie
CBP-directeur Paul Frencken solliciteert in juni 2009 bij de NZa. Brief en cv van de directeur van de ‘privacywaakhond’ zijn meer dan vier jaar lang in te zien voor het complete personeel, uitzendkrachten incluis. Ze staan in Outlook Agenda van de directeur van de afdeling Cure. Dat is niet vreemd binnen de NZa, waar veel vertrouwelijke stukken voor iedereen digitaal toegankelijk zijn. Zoals in Outlook Agenda. Het management propageert “het openstellen van de agenda’s” voor elkaar. Dit zonder restrictie of instructie.

4. Zelfs vakantiewerker kon bij de V-schijf
Medewerkers kunnen dat allemaal vinden op de zogeheten V-schijf, die iedere medewerker toegankelijk is. De schijf, die dient om bestanden tijdelijk te delen en ze vervolgens te verwijderen, groeide de afgelopen jaren echter uit tot zo’n 300 gigabyte aan informatie, het equivalent van 500 volgeschreven cd-roms. Op de schijf staan complete patiëntendossiers en 150 geluidsopnamen van hoorzittingen in bezwaarprocedures. Er zijn duizenden bestanden over tariefbeschikkingen, bezwaarprocedures en uitgedeelde boetes.

De NZa bepaalt bijvoorbeeld de tarieven voor dure geneesmiddelen in ziekenhuizen. In 2013 wordt de lijst met medicijnen herijkt om in 2014 nieuwe tarieven af te geven. In september 2013 staan alle databestanden hierover op de schijf. Terwijl de inkoopprijzen van de geneesmiddelen concurrentiegevoelig zijn.

5. Digitale handtekeningen
Op een ander deel van het netwerk – de W-schijf, die ook toegankelijk is voor uitzendkrachten – staan de digitale handtekeningen van directeuren en bestuurders alsmede de afbeeldingen van bezoekerspassen in hoge resolutie. Met een afdruk kun je zo een nieuw pasje maken om het gebouw van de NZa binnenkomen.

Arthur Gotlieb

Arthur Gotlieb (30 oktober 1963 - 22 januari 2014) was senior beleidsmedewerker bij de afdeling Cure van de NZa. Dertien jaar lang is hij de specialist voor de bekostiging van dure medicijnen. Gotlieb levert zijn dossier over de misstanden binnen de NZa en over zijn behandeling door het management op 10 januari dit jaar in bij zijn werkgever. Twee weken later pleegde hij zelfmoord. De internetsite van de NZa: “Arthur was een betrokken collega die zich volledig inzette voor zijn werk bij de NZa.”

Broer Marcel Gotlieb reageert namens de familie op het starten van een extern onderzoek naar het interne functioneren van de NZa:

“Mijn ouders en ik zijn aan de ene kant verheugd dat er nu - na tussenkomst van de NRC en bijna 3 maanden na de zelfdoding mijn broer - een onafhankelijk onderzoek komt naar het intern functioneren van de NZa. Aan de andere kant vinden wij het als familie ook erg triest om te moeten constateren dat het kennelijk tot afgelopen dinsdag de bedoeling was dat zijn verhaal in de doofpot zou verdwijnen. Het is schokkend om te moeten ervaren dat een organisatie als de NZa het eigenbelang lijkt te stellen boven het overstijgende belang rond de handelwijze van het Management in het geval van mijn broer en de misstanden die hij aan de kaak stelde. Op dit moment onthouden wij ons van verder commentaar.

Reactie NZa

De Nederlandse Zorgautoriteit (NZa) ontstond op de dag dat de ziekenfondspatiënt verdween. De toezichthouder is onlosmakelijk verbonden met de ingrijpende hervorming van het zorgstelsel in 2006. Met een verplichte basisverzekering voor iedereen en een keuze tussen verzekeraars die bij ziekenhuizen en artsen medische verrichtingen inkopen.

De NZa heeft sindsdien de cruciale rol om deze ‘gereguleerde marktwerking’ in goede banen te leiden. Zij is marktmeester, toezichthouder, tariefbepaler, adviseur van de minister en regelgever tegelijk voor een sector waarin jaarlijks 90 miljard euro omgaat.

‘Het is niet goed gegaan en valt niet goed te praten’
Eindverantwoordelijk voor de informatieveiligheid bij de NZa is Eitel Homan, lid van de raad van bestuur. De afgelopen jaren heeft de NZa het zo goed als mogelijk geprobeerd te regelen, zegt hij.

“Maar het gedrag in de praktijk was iets anders, moet ik constateren. Ik was niet van alle details op de hoogte. Soms was het onwetendheid om vertrouwelijke stukken mee te sturen bij Agenda afspraken.”

Homan zegt dat de NZa maatregelen genomen heeft na het dossier van Arthur Gotlieb. In die zin was het een welkom organisatieadvies, zegt hij. “Toen ik het las dacht ik: er moet iets gebeuren.” De voor alle personeel toegankelijke V-schijf is opgeruimd, personeel heeft instructies gekregen en er wordt gecontroleerd. “Ik trek het me aan”, antwoordt Homan op de vraag hoe het kan dat jarenlang de meeste vertrouwelijke documenten niet veilig waren. “Het is niet goed gegaan en valt niet goed te praten. Ik betreur het.” De NZa informeerde het College bescherming persoonsgegevens niet over de gang van zaken. Gaat Homan dat alsnog doen?

“Ik zeg toe dat ik dat ga doen.”

‘Gebreken zijn ernstig’
Bestuursvoorzitter Theo Langejan:

“Wat er met Arthur is gebeurd heeft mij geschokt. We zijn er ondersteboven van. Nu nog. Dat neemt niet weg dat de gebreken die hij noemt ernstig zijn. Arthur was een van de mensen die een key-user was. Die was aangesteld om dit soort fouten op te zoeken. In een aantal gevallen heeft hij die ook gemeld. Maar hij heeft ook geconstateerd dat daar in een aantal gevallen niet veel mee gebeurde. Ik betreur het dat Arthur het niet bij ons heeft gemeld, juist omdat hij een key-user is.”

Verantwoording

Arthur Gotlieb heeft op 10 januari van dit jaar een 600 pagina’s tellende bezwaarschrift ingediend tegen zijn negatieve beoordeling op zijn werk. Dat werd onder meer ingeleverd bij de raad van bestuur van de Nederlandse Zorgautoriteit. Het verweer ging vergezeld van 3 gigabyte aan bijlagen met e-mails, documenten, foto’s, geluidsbestanden en filmfragmenten ter onderbouwing van zijn verweer.

Op 22 januari pleegde de 50- jarige Gotlieb zelfmoord. Nadien is deze krant in bezit gekomen van dit dossier. NRC Handelsblad heeft contact opgenomen met zijn naaste familie. Die bleek er grote waarde aan te hechten dat zijn verhaal publiek werd.

NRC Handelsblad heeft uitgebreid wederhoor gepleegd bij diverse direct betrokkenen die Gotlieb beroepsmatig of privé kenden. De krant heeft op vrijdag 4 april een gesprek gehad. met de raad van bestuur van de zorgautoriteit. De publicatie van vandaag is ook vooraf voorgelegd aan de NZa.

Er is voor gekozen alle medewerkers van de NZa onder het niveau van de raad van bestuur te anonimiseren.

Nieuwsberichten

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