Maarten van Traa

Maarten van Traa   (Politician)
Born	18 May 1945 Oegstgeest
Died	21 October 1997 (Age 52)
Nationality	Dutch
Alma mater	University of Amsterdam
Member of	Trilateral Commission
Victim of	Premature death
Party	PvDA, Dutch Labour Party
Politician  Netherlands/House of Representatives In office 1986 - 1997  Chairman/Parliamentary Commission Research methods In office 1994 - 1996

Maarten van Traa was a Dutch politician for the Dutch Labour Party. He was MP for the Dutch lower house for 11 years. 1 year after heading the investigative parliamentary commission into a regional police force that was found to have aided and stimulated the Dutch drug criminals - one of the biggest scandals on Dutch soil - van Traa crashed to his death in what many media at the time labelled as "suspicious death" in Amsterdam, a death renowned deep politics research site ISGP named as one of the most suspicious deaths on Dutch soil.

Background

Van Traa studied law at the University of Amsterdam from 1962 to 1967. He then studied political science, first from 1967 to 1968 in France at the Sorbonne, then from 1970 to 1972 in the United States.

IRT-Affair

The Dutch police came under scrutiny in 1994, when newspapers reported that an inter-regional, semi-permanent detective squad, the "Interregionaal Recherche Team" or IRT, had been disbanded in December 1993 due to severe mismanagement and disputes regarding its methods and tactics. The IRT-Team was revolutionary in the Netherlands in that it tried to lead the national drug market by placing high-ranking and police officers and detectives in national drug cartels. Evidence including taped telephone conversations with criminal intelligence department officers discussing how the CID department in Haarlem had allowed criminal associates to car bomb someone to death, as the Irish IRA was involved and asked complicit dutch police officers to allow the hit. Other evidence was officers eliminating competition of known Gladio-linked Klaas Bruinsma and allowing dozens of drug shipments to be delivered under police protection. A television program revealed a list, circulating among criminals and lawyers, containing the names and addresses of several hundred police informers operating in the southern Netherlands. This list apparently originated from a highly confidential police source. The Justice Department commented that the list was three to five years old, lacked official status, and included some fictitious names but did not deny the list to be partly correct.

“As just stated, back in the early 1990s Langendoen and Van Vondel played a key role in the IRT affair. However, the more one tries to understand the affair, the vaguer it gets. Langendoen and Van Vondel allowed drug shipments to pass through customs in order to be able to find and arrest the major mafia bosses behind the trafficking, a typical American strategy that before and since the IRT affair has largely been illegal in the Netherlands. A June 1999 article explains the affair in the following manner: "Criminals didn't import 100 kilos [of cocaine] with help from the Dutch police, as the 1996 Van Traa Commission concluded, but 15,000 kilos of cocaine has been brought to market. But for the rest everything is a-okay.

"Various justice officers, an independent Wierenga Commission (1994), the parliamentary enquete [Van Traa] commission (1995) and the rijksrecherche [FBI] (1996) never managed to fully clarify the IRT affair. What is certain is that under the leadership of two Haarlem detectives, Langendoen and Van Vondel, who worked for the IRT team, about 100,000 kilos of soft drugs was brought onto the market during infiltration attempts [i.e., authorized pass-throughs]. But many questions remained unanswered. It is unclear, for example, how the police financed the drug imports and there was evidence that cocaine was imported royally. "Teeven and his chief officer H. Vrakking - who in 1993 decided to dissolve the IRT team... - have always been anxious to demonstrate that especially the Haarlem branch of the IRT team [i.e., Langendoen and Van Vondel] was out of line. ... Teeven recently opened negotiations with the for arms trafficking sentenced Mink K., who earlier had been a target of the IRT."

The primary target of the IRT team was mafia boss Klaas Bruinsma. After he was murdered in 1991 his successors as John Engelsma, porn boss Charles Geerts, and especially Etienne Urka became the target of the IRT. No one was caught, however, and reportedly the IRT was so "fixated" on the Bruinsma/Urka network that they forgot to pay attention to the network of Mink Kok, who, together with his allies, managed to smuggle 15 tons of cocaine through the backdoor. Certainly Kok's partner, Jan Femer, referred to the IRT years of 1991-1993 as the "golden years": "We could bring in almost anything: hash, coke, heroin, semtex, whatever we wanted." Kok was arrested in August 1994 in relation to an assassination a year earlier.”
JVDH (2017) 

Commission

Van Traa was chosen as chairman of the "Parliamentary Commission Research methods", a parliamentary commission to investigate the police and ministerial departments that green-lighted and did not halt the programs as the premilnary investigation blamed the district police of Amsterdam for being criminally infiltrated.

Their report noted; missing standards as the committee found that there was a lack of adequate standards for police and judicial action against organized crime; too much leeway was left to the police and judiciary by the legislature but also by the courts; A dysfunctional investigation organization as a result of unclear decision-making about who was responsible for what; The powers and responsibilities of those involved in investigation in the Netherlands were diffuse, and problems in authority relations. Although it is explicitly stipulated that the Public Prosecution Service has authority over the investigation, in practice this did not happen.

Death

Months after the final reports of the commission, Van Traa crashed to his death on the highway near Dutch capital Amsterdam, after much media speculation, it being ruled an "accident".

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