NETHERLANDS MOVE Draft avoidance made easier

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33819, 16 April 1975, Page 27

NETHERLANDS MOVE Draft avoidance made easier

(N.Z.P..4. -Reuter—Copyright) AMSTERDAM. The traditional military system has taken another sharp knock in the liberal Netherlands: soon conscripts will be exempted automatically from national service if they simply object to violence. To avoid the draft, all the objectors will have to do under planned new legislation is to fill in a Defence Ministry form, and tick off their scruples. Apart from purely religious grounds, acceptable reasons include insurmountable objections to violence in general, or to the use of weapons of mass destruction, or the belief that one or other of the country’s 15 N.A.T.O. allies is using its aimed forces contrary to the spirit of international law.

Conscripts will be granted exemption on these grounds without any kind of further check, except in times of war or if the number of objectors rises so steeply that it endangers the country’s defence. At present there are about 2000 conscientious objectors a year. The new system, according to the Prime Minister (Mr Den Uyl), is a revolutionary step, even for the Netherlands, which takes a very tolerant attitude towards demands by its 50,000 outspoken conscripts. Already the best paid in the world, these have already notched up a series of victories over the authorities in

reducing the rigours of barrack-room life and traditional discipline. They have held sit-down demonstrations on the barrack square, refused to salute officers, and held mass protests to press for better food, longer leave, more comfortable conditions, shoulderlength hair, and higher pay. Not that military life is really tough in the Netherlands compared with other N.A.T.O. countries. In the last nine years the vociferous conscripts' trade union — the only one of its kind in the world — has managed to increase enlisted men’s pay to 670 guilders (about $200) a month — 20 times higher than in France, four times as much as that in the Scandinavian countries, and double that in West Germany.