The hell in the Netherlands
It couldn't happen in the Netherlands. The spectacle of hundreds of demonstrators smashing shops and street furniture, violently confronting the police and applying urban guerrilla techniques to set fire to and loot everything in their path, was more the stuff of territories further south or east. Well, another myth falls. The Dutch, civilised, austere, law-abiding and law-and-order minded for the most part, have also had to contemplate the terrorism-tinged hooliganism so often seen in other European countries and, of course, in the United States of America.
As always when such riots break out, the pretext is usually the least important. Anything will do to light the fuse. In this case, the excuse was the imposition of a nationwide curfew between 21:00 and 04:30. The measure was adopted by the incumbent government of the liberal Mark Rutte, following the report that more than 950,000 people had been infected by the coronavirus pandemic and almost 14,000 had died.
The apparently spontaneous protest movement seems to have had local coordinators, capable of "unleashing hell" simultaneously in some fifteen cities, from Rotterdam to Urk, from Amsterdam to Breda, from The Hague to Eindhoven, from Tilburg to Geleen or Den Bosch. Most of the nearly two hundred detainees claim their "right to freedom" to express their anger with such violence. But the members of these genuine urban guerrillas range from anti-vaccine deniers to veteran criminals accustomed to destruction and looting wherever a brawl is announced in Europe, including the members of the so-called sports clubs, whose practical role has shifted from healthy support for the team to the most violent hooliganism.
The Dutch have not experienced a curfew since the Second World War, and the current experience of rapine and destruction was seen by them as the preserve of countries they looked down on. Hence, they are astonished that this kind of global anger has also erupted on their territory. Incidents, described as "the worst in forty years" by shocked municipal authorities, including the Muslim mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb.
Liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte, already on the campaign trail for next March's elections, admits no political claim to the protesters when he says that “you have to wonder what it is these people were thinking”, before stressing that the riots are "criminal violence" and "we will treat criminal violence as exactly that".
Despite being in office, if he is to revalidate his mandate, Rutte will have to manage these riots in a way that does not serve as fuel for the far right, which still continues to look more than sidelong at the UK in terms of its anti-immigration postulates, as well as rather enthusiastically embracing the primacy of the Dutch interest over anything that might signify solidarity. These traits have to a large extent been introduced and entrenched across the parliamentary spectrum. A case in point is the recent scandal of the almost 30,000 families that the Dutch tax office pursued since 2014, accusing them unjustly of fraud until they were rounded up and ruined, without any political force expressing any doubts or questioning the causes of the drama.
The Netherlands was looked upon with envy from much of Europe, especially from the south, from where it is considered practically a chimera to reach its scrupulous levels of honesty and tolerance, and for its exemplary general respect for the common rules of coexistence, i.e. quality democracy. Of course, the vandals who have unleashed hell these days are not going to destroy that mirror in one fell swoop. But they do bring the country closer to what is unfortunately suffered by honest and tolerant citizens in other countries, where criminals act much more frequently, convinced of the net profitability of their crimes, i.e. that they have a much better chance of enjoying what they have gained by breaking the law.