IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

Wanneer: 07/01/2017 - 01:54

We are writing this text to inform you about something serious that got to our attention about a fellow activist.

A lot of you might know or have heard about Robert Molenaar. He might be a trusted friend or colleague to some of you. We feel the need to share this information with you in case he has not done this himself.
Recently we found out that Robert Molenaar/Animal Rights (his organisation) has been in regular contact with the Dutch secret service (AIVD). And let us be clear already, we have no intentions of spreading information based on rumors. We are basing this information on a document published by Animal Rights themselves and feel the urge to purely inform others and let them decide what to do with it.

Robert Molenaar has been active for over 20 years and has a lot of contact in the international animal rights movement. To some of you this might sound shocking or very unexpected. We are not writing this text to make assumptions on why Robert Molenaar is/was in contact with the secret service, we purely want to warn and inform you about what we believe is a serious issue that might have gone unnoticed by many.

In the document published by Animal Rights ´Jaarverslag 2015’ on their website they say the following on page 13:

English translation:
“We received a request from the General Intelligence and Security
Service (AIVD) to have a conversation about our work. The board of our
organisation has accepted this request. It bothered us greatly that our
foundation was wrongly positioned under the heading animals extremism in
the AIVD annual reports. Therefore we wanted to raise this issue and
also express how our organization works, what our values are and where
our operations exist. This resulted in more understanding of both sides.
We believe that it is better to talk with each other than talk about
each other.”

Original text in Dutch:
“‘Wij hebben een verzoek van de Algemene Inlichtingen- en
Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) ont-
vangen om een gesprek te voeren over onze werkzaamheden. Het bestuur van
de stichting
heeft dit verzoek geaccepteerd. Het stoorde ons enorm dat onze stichting
ten onrechte werd
gepositioneerd onder de noemer dierenextremisme in de
AIVD-jaarverslagen. We wilden dit
dan ook graag aankaarten en tevens kenbaar maken hoe onze organisatie
functioneert, wat
onze normen en waarden zijn en waaruit onze activiteiten bestaan. Dit
resulteerde in meer
begrip van beide kanten. Wij zijn van mening dat het beter is om mét
elkaar te praten dan
over elkaar.”

When you read this abstract text it can be understood simply as if their intentions are the ones of a mainestream organization that wants to avoid being branded as extremists and focus on positive media attention.

But we do know the secret service intentions are not to please organisations in their requests, but would purely do this to get advantage of the situation and gather information to potentially harm others. For those who know more about how secret services generally operate, it would be very questionable that they wanted to speak to Animal Rights/Robert Molenaar to come to good terms with them. These people are professionally trained to gain information and lay links to people/groups they want to investigate. What seems dangerous to us is the naive text written by Animal Rights as if the main purpose of their meetings were to understand each other better.

We find it important for you to realize that Robert Molenaar can claim anything about what was said in the conversations. We are not trying to imply that Robert Molenaar might have talked about specific no-go topics, we are just asking you to keep an open mind about which information might have been shared in those occasions.

Animal Rights/Robert Molenaar have a lot of international contacts and therefore these people/groups they have worked with are currently working with can be potentially also be affected by Robert’s contact with the AIVD.

When you are in contact with Robert Molenaar or other member of his organisation, please keep this information in mind and be careful of the content that you share with them. Because we don’t know when these conversations have started we also want to mention that short before Animal Rights was founded in 2015, Robert Molenaar was running the
organisation Anti Dierproeven Coalitie (ADC), also known as the Anti Vivisection Coalition (AVC).

We hope that this information will be appreciated by some of you. This text was written to inform our fellow activists about what we believe needs to be known and not to stress unverified information or incite conjectures.

Because the source of this information is already public and regarding the sensitivity of this topic we decided to not publish this under our own names. Feel free to share this information anywhere or with anyone that you believe should be informed.

If you have any questions or information you want to share with us then please get in touch. We can also imagine maybe Robert has been a close friend and that this information might be a bit of a shock, and you wouldn’t know what to do with it. To be honest, we all don’t know what was talked about and what harm was done.

Our e-mail addres: jaarverslag2015@riseup.net - (we can use PGP if necessary)

Link to the file on their website:
https://www.animalrights.nl/jaarverslagen > ‘het jaarverslag 2015’

Direct link to the document:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxPNb0qchRccWWgyVXpTbWVZaGs/view

Backup link to the document:
https://mega.nz/#!hdEBWZoA!jAj7MFkZ1faEa4hw9Mm8n-91FFb63CLJh-yNv0aO6Ls