Yasmine’s flight was slightly late and she was afraid that she would miss her connection and also the boys when they landed. When her own plane landed, she grabbed her bag and turned on her Blackberry, because she knew the boys would ring her if she was late. But the phone rang immediately. It was her daughter, Samira. She was crying.
Chapter 15
17 July 2014
Around 6pm Dutch time, the GHOR, a Dutch governmental organisation responsible for leading and coordinating help during disasters and crises, was called to Schiphol to assist relatives and friends of the victims who were expected to arrive at the airport. As the sun began to set at the end of that warm summer day in July, distraught relatives drove their cars to Schiphol airport. Wondering where to go, they approached airport staff in the departure hall, but no one appeared to have any idea where to direct them.
Robert Crolla was one of the first people to arrive. Not knowing where to go or which way to turn, he headed for the bar area, where more relatives soon joined him. For the time being, bewildered and in shock, they sought each other’s company, grouping together and waiting at a bar inside the hall.
The European managing director of Malaysia Airlines, Huib Gorter, a Dutchman who grew up in New Zealand, was sitting in his garden in the Netherlands enjoying his day off when he received a telephone call from the Malaysia Airlines area manager: radio contact with Flight MH17 had been lost. It was a Code Red. For everyone in the aviation business, this was their worst nightmare.
His phone did not stop ringing after that. Huib Gorter had quit smoking months ago, kicking the habit after years of addiction. But when he left the house he stopped at a local store and bought a packet, his first in ages. He thought he would need it.
Rushing to his office at Schiphol, he saw rows of TV network vehicles and realised that he must prepare to talk to the press. But first he had to meet the relatives. Minutes later, Gorter left Schiphol in a police car with its lights flashing, leaving no doubt that disaster had struck. The flashing police car took its passenger to the Steigenberger Hotel; the plan was that relatives were to be brought there and informed about what had happened.
The distraught groups that had flocked to the bar area at Schiphol airport were now gently ushered away by police and guided to waiting shuttle buses. They were told they were being taken to a private location. As they moved off, the faces peering out through the bus windows appeared stunned, as mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends tried to process the pending reality that their family members and friends might never come home. Baffled by the growing realisation that their loved ones had most likely died far from their homes, in a tragedy caused by a conflict none of them had any part in, all they could do was wonder why. There was no sense to it, no logic.
A pastoral counsellor met the relatives at the hotel, but most of those first arrivals had to wait for hours while many more distraught next of kin and friends were collected at the airport and brought to the hotel. In the meantime, these frightened and distressed people continued to demand answers but were forced to wait as scant details trickled out of a remote area in Ukraine where a separatist insurgency was raging. The Malaysia Airlines and Schiphol officials in the room appeared to know as little as they did, but what little news there was could be found mainly on social media and it soon became evident that it wasn’t good. There were no reports of people being found alive from the crash site. By now everyone was fearing the worst.
When Huib Gorter finally addressed them, he understood that he was facing the hardest challenge he had ever had to tackle in his life. It was something he knew that everyone in the business feared, a situation his colleagues hoped they would never experience. The room was unusually quiet and you could almost hear a pin drop. As he tried to form words to console the waiting next of kin, the mood changed and he was suddenly faced with their anger, their despair, their denial. There was no shouting or displays of heated emotions as at the airport in Malaysia, but people did demand answers. It was all directed at him because, for the time being, there was no one else.
Gorter knew very little about what exactly had happened to flight MH17 at that point, and the one thing he could not give the waiting crowd was answers. Copies of the passenger list were distributed by assistants to the relatives; people’s lives were shattered as their family members were crossed off that list when they were confirmed as having boarded the ill-fated plane.
Unable to contain himself, Huib Gorter cried along with the people who had been so shockingly betrayed by this dark twist of fate. He knew he would not see his bed that night, but that was the least of his problems. Slowly but surely, as the evening progressed and more details emerged, it became evident that no one on the plane could have survived the crash.
After being informed about the disaster by Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte hastily returned to the Netherlands. Rutte had left for a holiday at the Bodensee in Germany earlier that week after having just ended a somewhat difficult EU summit. Arriving at Schiphol airport, a visibly emotional and drawn Rutte addressed the media: ‘I am devastated. The whole Netherlands is mourning its loss. This beautiful summer day has ended in the blackest possible way.’
At 10.30pm Dutch time, Huib Gorter finally conducted a press conference at Schiphol airport. Press from all over the world had been waiting for hours and now heard a lot of heartfelt sympathy and words of comfort for the relatives, but little information about the cause of the crash and why the plane had been flying deep into a conflict zone above Ukraine.
‘For those relatives who wish to travel closer to the site of the tragedy, a flight will be provided to Kiev, possibly departing tomorrow,’ Gorter said. But he also warned about the difficulty in reaching the crash site, which was about a seven- or eight-hour drive by car from the Ukrainian capital. Probed repeatedly by the press, who wanted answers as to why the plane had been flying over a war zone, his answer was: ‘It is classified as a safe area to fly over, otherwise in our industry we would not be able to file a flight plan over an area that is dangerous.’
Sunrise came to Australia and New Zealand, and with it the devastating news of a plane shot from the skies. In New Zealand, the frantic family of rottweiler-fancier Rob Ayley began sending him messages; they hoped his email about missing the bus meant he’d also missed the flight.
In Melbourne, Ross and Sue Campbell had just arrived home to Greenvale when they heard that a Malaysia Airlines plane had been shot down over Ukraine. Fearing the worst, they rushed over to the house of their friends, the real estate agent Albert Rizk and his wife, Maree, to check on their children. And for the second time in five months, Maree’s stepmother learned she’d probably lost another loved one to a Malaysia Airlines disaster.
Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott phoned his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte that same evening and held a televised press conference in Australia a few hours later. Where Rutte had refrained from publicly accusing any nation or person until more was known about the circumstances surrounding the crash, Tony Abbott was quick to lay the blame.