NL-Aid

Afghan police who were trained by British soldiers of NATO's International Security Assistance Force

In the Netherlands, the government has won the backing of a majority of lawmakers to send troops and police to northern Afghanistan to train police recruits. To secure the support of smaller parties, the minority coalition of Prime Minister Mark Rutte promised the training in Kunduz province would be increased from six to 18 weeks to improve the quality of the program.
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Staff at the Dutch embassy in Managua (Nicaragua) are helping improve the lives of adolescents and young adults by starting projects related to sexual and reproductive rights. One of the projects is being carried out in the village of El Tortugero, in the isolated RAAS marshland region on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
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The government finds the report Less Pretension, More Ambition: Development Aid That Makes a Difference to be valuable, and it considers its recommendations to be very useful. Written by the Advisory Council on Government Policy (WRR), the report, outlines the key global challenges, such as raw materials and energy scarcity, transboundary diseases, climate change, cross-border crime, and the need to reach international trade agreements. The central themes of Dutch foreign policy are stability, the legal order, and more prosperity. Effective development cooperation contributes to this.
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Last year the Dutch government collapsed over a debate about a longer stay for the Dutch forces in Afghanistan. This year the new minority government led by Mark Rutte is facing the same dilemma, dressed up as something different.
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If the Dutch join a NATO police training mission in Afghanistan, 90 trainers may be travelling out to the war-torn country in as early as mid-March. Around 60 trainers will go to the northern Province of Kunduz and the remaining 30 will be based at a camp in Mazar-e-Sharif. The mission is due to begin in mid-May.
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Interchurch Organisation for Development and Cooperation uses public funds to finance Electronic Intifada website that equates Israel with Nazis.

Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal “will monitor ICCO’s activities. He will consider this as a minus when he makes up the balance when ICCO applies again in new a subsidies-round,” Ward Bezemer, a spokesman for Rosenthal, told The Jerusalem Post last week.
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The Netherlands has emerged as a major defender of oil giant Shell in the latest batch of leaked US diplomatic cables. RTL claims the government refused to back some UN resolutions if they would hinder Shell’s operations. For example, UN sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear activities did hit British firms, the news channel says. ‘But the Netherlands wanted an exemption for Shell.’ RTL says the cables show how far the Netherlands was prepared to go to defend Shell’s interests and points out that financial firms such as ABN Amro were forced to pay fines for doing business there.
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Two weeks after a leaked cable cost a U.S. ambassador his job, another diplomat has found his life suddenly complicated by WikiLeaks — this time in the Netherlands. Yesterday WikiLeaks published a September 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in the Hague detailing U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder’s efforts to keep the Dutch from bailing on the war in Afghanistan after 2010. Among Daalder’s interlocutors is a Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs official named Pieter de Gooijer, who at one point in the conversation suggests a means by which Daalder could secure the further support of the Netherlands in the war effort:
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Dutch Development Cooperation Minister Ben Knapen, who is on a visit to Sudan, has said the Netherlands will recognise Southern Sudan. “If a majority of the population votes for secession from the north, we will definitely take steps to recognise South Sudan as a country.”
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