"I've been thinking how horrible it must have been — the final moments of their lives when they knew the plane was going down..."
With tears in his eyes, Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans opened an emotional address to the UN Security Council on Monday with this thought.
"Did they lock hands with their loved ones? Did they hold their children close to their hearts? Did they look each other in the eyes one final time in a wordless goodbye? We will never know."
Timmermans said the tragedy, which claimed the lives of 193 Dutch passengers, has left a hole in the heart of his nation. He then launched into an angry plea for his nation's right to bring home the bodies.
In his nearly 7-minute address, Timmermans laid out his support of a UN resolution — one that Russia was hesitant to pass — to grant unimpeded access to secure the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a process that Timmermans called "excruciatingly slow."
In the days after the plane was downed in embattled eastern Ukraine, armed pro-Russian separatists guarded the crash site. Over the weekend, they sifted through the wreckage and loaded bagged bodies of the victims into train cars. Throughout the process, looting and the mishandling of the bodies were widely reported — something that particularly bothered Timmermans.
"Just imagine that you first get the news that your husband was killed, and then within two or three days you see images of some thug removing the wedding band from their hands," Timmermans said.
"To my dying day, I will not understand that it took so much time for the rescue workers to be allowed to do their difficult jobs and that human remains could be used in a political game," he said. "It is despicable."
The train filled with the bodies eventually left the crash site on Monday for Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. They will then be flown to Amsterdam, where the remains will be identified and returned to their homes.
The UN resolution was passed.
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