I just saw the news conference of the prime minister of Malaysia making a statement about where Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 ended up. And I was very emotional just before the statement, when of course the news people made the story bigger and bigger and built some kind of climax. But my emotions were not of sadness or something, but of admiration, in the first place for the Malaysians, who in the last few weeks were confronted with something big, something that has never happened before, something that nobody could have prepared for, something that would already be big for a large Western country and somehow managed to handle all of this, handled all of this in a very professional way. And while thinking now my emotions were also emotions of sadness, as the Malaysians have been criticized so much. And I truly believe they didn’t and don’t deserve any criticism as I think they handled this whole situation very well, especially checking and rechecking facts before making statements while at the same time internally changing their investigation as the last few days we saw their search move to the area they made a statement about today.
And also applause for all those people involved in this search, where I have the feeling something like this has never been done before. So many countries and institutions in some kind of worldwide search for something lost. And for the people coordinating all this, presumably, again, the Malaysians. How in heavens name would someone be able to set up some kind of project team to organize this type of search in a month, let alone in days or weeks.
Well, nothing much more to say right now but:
Applause for the Malaysians.