Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  Huizinga’s view on the national character, though not exactly wrong, did reveal a certain complacency. Bourgeois satisfaction is by no means to be despised; indeed, it is a recipe for peace and orderly contentment. It is also, perhaps, a trifle boring. Heinrich Heine did not mean it as a compliment when he said that he would head for Holland when the end of the world was in sight, since everything in that country happened fifty years later. Like most quips of this sort, it was unfair, yet not totally untrue, especially in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Netherlands had pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, and so on. This, too, led to an air of satisfaction, even smugness, a self-congratulatory notion of living in the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfectly evolved playground of multicultural utopianism.

  I had left Amsterdam in the winter of 1975, at the height of its good times, driven by a traditional Dutch wanderlust, a desire to set sail for the wider, larger world, but also by a certain boredom with the Dutch idyll. My restlessness may well have been a sign of growing up in a pampered society, where there was always enough to eat, and no one had to fear a knock on the door after midnight. Yet there were cracks showing in the national idyll even then, as I was leaving. Seven young Moluccan activists had just seized a train in a province near the German border and held the passengers hostage in an attempt to get Dutch support for the independence of the south Moluccan islands from Indonesia. When the hijackers failed to get their way, the engine driver and two passengers were murdered and, to the horror of millions watching TV, tossed casually onto the tracks. On my way to the airport, we had to make a detour because the Indonesian consulate had been occupied by Moluccan activists shooting off guns.

  These acts of violence, or terrorism, have been largely forgotten now. There were no heroes in this story, and the villains were more pathetic than monstrous. It was in fact a typical case of unresolved colonial bad faith. Moluccans, many of them Christians, had fought on the Dutch side in colonial wars. Like minorities in other European empires—the Hmong in Indochina, the Indian Sikhs—they served in colonial armies in exchange for privileges and protection. When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1941, the Moluccans—unlike most Javanese—resisted on behalf of the Dutch, and were treated by the Japanese with special venom. When Indonesia declared independence after the Japanese defeat, the Moluccans once again fought alongside Dutch troops, in a brutal campaign (“police actions”) to crush the Javanese-led independence movement. It was a bloody as well as a hopeless cause.

  The Dutch finally left Indonesia in 1949, and they took the Moluccan soldiers with them. They had no choice, since the Indonesians would not let the “traitors” go home to the Moluccas. But since the Moluccans had no desire to rebuild their lives in the cold and frowsy towns of postwar Holland, and the Dutch had no desire to let them stay, the Moluccans were promised a swift return to an independent homeland. The Dutch would see to that. But of course the Dutch had no intention of creating any more trouble with Indonesia. So the poor Moluccans were shunted off to former Nazi concentration camps, such as Westerbork, from where, less than a decade before, almost a hundred thousand Dutch Jews had been deported, most never to return. Westerbork had been built originally for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. That, too, was supposed to have been a temporary solution. They, too, were not expected to stay. By 1975, it was clear that independence for the south Moluccans was an illusion, a deceitful promise of a false dawn. A new generation had grown up with no hope of returning and no life outside the camps. It was not a good start to the new age of multiculturalism.

  3.

  Amsterdam, December 21: The family of the murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh is angry with Prime Minister Balkenende for his failure to console the next of kin. The Government Information Agency denied this. Yesterday night in the television program Nova, Van Gogh’s mother reproached the prime minister for … visiting a mosque as well as an Islamic school, while forgetting about a little boy whose father had been murdered in Amsterdam.

  NRC HANDELSBLAD, DECEMBER 21, 2004

  Immediately after Van Gogh’s murder, the bickering began. Within hours, shock curdled into recrimination. Ministers in The Hague blamed the AIVD, the domestic intelligence service, for its failure to keep a closer eye on Mohammed Bouyeri. The prime minister and the minister of justice were blamed for not tackling hate speech in the mosques. Job Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor, blamed the AIVD for not sharing intelligence with the Amsterdam police. The interior minister, in charge of the AIVD, was blamed for letting terrorists roam free. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was blamed for causing unnecessary offense with her polemical film. Theo van Gogh was blamed for insulting the Muslims. The Friends of Theo, a select band of quotable voices in the national and international press, blamed Cohen for being a coward, the government for being careless, the Muslims for being in denial, the prime minister for being unfeeling, and the Netherlands for being a miserable little country that let one of its geniuses die. And the Friends of Theo were accused in turn of being “merchants of fear.” The real rot, yet others opined, set in with a generation of arrogant Social Democrats who had failed to see the emerging “drama of multiculturalism” and denounced those who did as racists.

  This is the other side of complacency, of being a little too satisfait. When smugness is challenged, panic sets in. There was in the finger-pointing a tone of wounded amour propre, of resentment that things had suddenly gone wrong, a sense of pique, of being affronted by one’s own shattered dreams. There is a Dutch word that perfectly expresses this feeling: verongelijktheid, to be wronged, not by an individual so much as by the world at large. You could see it in the faces of people who turned up on TV, quarreling in the wake of the murder. You often see it in the way the much-heralded national team plays soccer.

  Proud of their superior skills, their multicultural makeup, the almost mocking manner of their free-flowing play, maddening the players of more prosaic teams, like Germany, the stars of Dutch soccer usually start their games with all the swagger of swinging Amsterdam. In their playful individualism, their progressive daringness, they know they are the best. And sometimes they are. But when things go against them and the plodding Germans, or the bloody-minded Italians, or the cussed English, go up a goal or two, the heads slump, the bickering starts, and the game is lost in a sour mood of verongelijktheid: Why did this have to happen to us? What did we do to deserve this? Aren’t we the best? Well, fuck you!

  In November 2004 things had clearly gone badly in the experimental garden. The mood of peevish disillusion was articulated most clearly by the writer Max Pam, a prominent Friend of Theo, in a television program broadcast on the day after the murder.

  Pam was asked whether he really wished to leave Amsterdam and move to Germany, as had been reported. Well, said Pam, that was an exaggeration. But, as it happens, he had recently bumped into Harry Mulisch, one of Holland’s most famous novelists, and Mulisch had said he no longer liked living in Holland either and was considering a move to Germany. Pam sympathized. For he, too, was fed up. What distressed him more than anything was the end of a particular way of life, a kind of “free-spirited anarchism,” full of “humor and cabaret,” a life where it was possible to make fun of things, to offend people without the fear of violence. “A kind of idyll,” he sighed, had come to an end. Watching Pam, I kept thinking of the Dutch soccer team. After Theo’s death, things were no fun anymore.

  Like Heine’s words, Pam’s sentiments contained an element of truth. The Netherlands never was a utopia, but the world had indeed changed since 9/11, and that world had caught up with Amsterdam, just as it had with New York, Bali, Madrid, and London. The Moluccan problem was a local tragedy. But Mohammed Bouyeri, a sad loner from an Amsterdam suburb, whose social horizons had progressively narrowed to a small radicalized
circle, was part of a violent wider world connected by Internet, CD-ROMs, and MSN.

  4.

  Amsterdam: On Sunday evening more than a thousand demonstrators remembered the Reichskristallnacht of 1938. They also reflected on recent statements of anti-Semitism. The European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, called the comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany “grotesque and slanderous.” This is a new form of anti-Semitism which he believes is mostly confined in Western Europe to “ill-informed North African youths.”

  VOLKSKRANT, NOVEMBER 10, 2003

  Violence against Muslims in the Netherlands has strongly decreased. Acts of violence from extreme right-wing groups have also diminished. Remarkably, very few anti-Semitic incidents have been caused by people of foreign origin. This has been revealed by research undertaken by the University of Leiden and the Anne Frank Foundation in 2002.

  NRC HANDELSBLAD, JANUARY 12, 2004

  Holland, and Amsterdam in particular, has a long history of taking in foreigners. Sephardic Jews arrived from Antwerp and farther south in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many of them refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. The Dutch Republic in its Golden Age was wealthy and offered religious freedom. This actually prompted many Jews, who had let their traditions lapse or been forced to convert to Catholicism, to revive their faith. A large Portuguese synagogue was built in Amsterdam between 1671 and 1675, and another was built by Polish and German Ashkenazim in 1670. For a long time, Jews, many of them very poor, suffered from all kinds of professional and social restrictions, but they were not persecuted, until the Germans arrived in 1940. This earned Amsterdam the Yiddish name of Mokum, the City.

  The Huguenots, like the Jews, found refuge in the north from persecution. They escaped to the Dutch Republic after Louis XIV revoked their religious freedom in 1685. Holland enjoyed the fruits of the Enlightenment before most other countries in Europe. It is surely no coincidence that the socalled early Enlightenment of the Dutch Republic was partly inspired by the ideas of a son of Sephardic refugees in Amsterdam, Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza.

  Holland’s reputation for hospitality is deserved, but immigration in the twentieth century is also a story of horror, opportunism, postcolonial obligations, and an odd combination of charity and indifference. Few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany—Anne Frank was, for example, one who did not—survived the German occupation. Their fate was certainly not welcomed by most gentiles in Holland, but despite the bravery of many individuals, too little was done to help them. Altogether 71 percent of all Jews in the Netherlands ended up in death camps, the highest percentage in Europe outside Poland. That is the horror that still hangs over Dutch life like a toxic cloud. Largely unmentioned until the 1960s, the shame of it poisons national debates to this day.

  The end of empire in the Dutch East Indies, despite the problems with Moluccans, was less traumatic. The violence happened too far away. And those Eurasians and Indonesians who chose to move to the Netherlands in the 1940s and 1950s were relatively small in number, generally well educated, and easily absorbed. The same was true of the first wave of Surinamese from the former colony of Dutch Guiana. Arriving in the 1960s, when the Dutch economy boomed, these mostly middle-class men and women found work as nurses, civil servants, or teachers. The dirty work, in the boom years, was done by “guest workers” from Turkey and Morocco, single men cooped up in cheap hostels, prepared to do almost anything to provide for their families back home. These men were not expected to stay. One of them was Mohammed Bouyeri’s father.

  It was the second wave of Surinamese, arriving around 1972, that began to cause problems. Newly independent Suriname was shedding people, hundreds of thousands of them, mostly the descendants of African slaves. It is said that a sign at Paramaribo airport read: “Will the last Surinamese please turn off the lights.” The oil shock in 1973, when Arab oil producers punished the Netherlands with an embargo for its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, had created a crisis in the Dutch economy. There were no longer enough jobs for the guest workers from Turkey or Morocco, let alone more than two hundred thousand newcomers from a Caribbean backwater.

  The result was widespread unemployment, dependence on the welfare state, petty crime, and a vicious circle of social discrimination and sporadic violence. There are still many Surinamese without an official job, perhaps as many as 30 percent, but the Surinamese are no longer a “problem.” They always speak Dutch, excel at soccer, and by and large have been moving steadily into the middle class. Like the West Indians in Britain, they are not universally welcomed, but are still recognized as an exotic yet integral part of the national culture.

  The same is not true of the guest workers and their offspring. Like the Moluccans, these men were not regarded as immigrants. Their stay was supposed to have been temporary, to clean out oil tankers, work in steel factories, sweep the streets. When many of them elected to remain, the government took the benevolent view that in that case they should be joined by their wives and children. Slowly, almost without anyone’s noticing, old working-class Dutch neighborhoods lost their white populations and were transformed into “dish cities” linked to Morocco, Turkey, and the Middle East by satellite television and the Internet. Gray Dutch streets filled up, not only with satellite dishes, but with Moroccan bakeries, Turkish kebab joints, travel agents offering cheap flights to Istanbul or Casablanca, and coffeehouses filled with sad-eyed men in djellabas whose health had often been wrecked by years of dirty and dangerous labor. Their wives, isolated in cramped modern apartment blocks, usually failed to learn Dutch, had little knowledge of the strange land in which they had been dumped, sometimes to be married to strange men, and had to be helped in the simplest tasks by their children, who learned faster how to cope without necessarily feeling at home.

  The Turks, backed by a variety of social and religious institutions, formed a relatively close-knit community of shopkeepers and professionals. Grocery stores in Amsterdam are often owned by Turks, and so are pizzerias. If Turks turn to crime, it is organized crime, sometimes linked to the old country—financial fraud, illegal immigration, hard drugs. There are links to political violence in Turkey, to do with militant nationalism or the Kurdish question, but not so much with revolutionary Islam. That appears to be more a Moroccan problem.

  Moroccans in the Netherlands are mostly Berbers, not Arabs, from remote villages in the Rif mountains. Like Sicilian peasants, they are clannish people, widely distrusted by urban Moroccans, and often, especially the women, illiterate. Less organized, with the narrow horizons of village folk, and awkwardly wedged between the North African and European worlds, Moroccan immigrants lack the kinds of institutional support that give the Turkish immigrants a sense of belonging.

  Those who manage, through intelligence, perseverance, and good fortune, to make their way in Dutch society, often do very well indeed. Those who don’t, for one reason or another, drift easily into a seedy world without exit of gang violence and petty crime. Most vulnerable of all are those who find their ambitions blocked despite their attempts to fit in with the mainstream of Dutch life. Anything can trigger a mood of violent resentment and self-destruction: a job offer withdrawn, a grant not given, one too many doors shut in one’s face. Such a man was Mohammed Bouyeri, who adopted a brand of Islamic extremism unknown to his father, a broken-backed former guest worker from the Rif mountains, and decided to join a war against the society from which he felt excluded. Unsure of where he belonged, he lost himself in a murderous cause.

  During the last few decades, the guest workers and their children were joined by another group of newcomers, many of them scarred by political violence: Tamils from Sri Lanka, Syrians and Iranians, Somali escapees from civil war, Iraqis, Bosnians, Egyptians, Chinese, and many more. Since Holland, like all European countries, almost never accepts immigrants who come for economic reasons, people try to get in as asylum seekers. Some are in genuine danger, some are not, but until recently, most managed, in one way or another, to stay on, lega
lly or otherwise. When an Israeli cargo plane crashed into a poor suburb of Amsterdam in 1992, the number of victims was impossible to calculate, since the housing estates were filled with illegals. Even the official statistics in Amsterdam are remarkable. In 1999, 45 percent of the population was of foreign origin. If projections are right, this will be 52 percent in 2015. And the majority will be Muslim.

  5.

  Afshin Ellian, rightly, made a name for himself as an expert critic of the Iranian regime, which he knew from the inside. Then something went wrong. He took the role upon himself of the ultra-right-wing critic of the soft multi-culti left: the foreign lapdog of the right. And when he can’t find the soft left, he will make it up. In doing so, he adopts a tone that does not exist among Dutch writers.

  RONALD PLASTERK IN VOLKSKRANT, JULY 15, 2005

  Does a civilized society need religion? Historian Jonathan Israel wrote Radical Enlightenment about the philosophical current which had no room for God. He says: “Hirsi Ali is an heir to Spinoza.”