Rather than follow up with the second part of her blog topic on Dutch culture, Micheala Smith finds that the sheer volume of social and political developments in the Netherlands over the past month fire her pen.

Is cutting street lighting the answer?

The following news items caught my attention:

• Former Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, having been reprimanded several times for her refusal to toe the party line and respect the leadership of Mark Rutte, quits the VVD (Conservative Party). She and Geert Wilders, 'superstar xenophobe', launch a scarily nationalist 'movement' rather than party – 'proud to be Dutch'. Polls indicate that the two hard-liners would gain approximately 30 out of the 150 seats in the Lower House if elections were to be held now.

 

•  The government announced plans to reduce CO2 emissions and be more energy-efficient. One measure is to cut street lighting – at night! The millions of lamps burning during daylight hours in every conceivable public building inexplicably have escaped attention.

 

• During the Week of Democracy, documentaries about Bolivia's and Venezuela's indigenous presidents Morales and Chavez revealed the extent to which their governments are sabotaged by the West. They were elected partly because they promised to return their countries' natural resources to their owners – the people. So what about Dutch gas? Its price being linked to the now staggering price of oil on the international markets, the government are laughing all the way to the not so Dutch any more ABN Amro, while ordinary householders and pensioners can barely afford to heat their homes.

 

• Dutch university students receive freebie credits for lectures and courses they haven't taken and that frequently don't even exist. Also, research has shown that students are satisfied with just scraping through their exams. As diplomas in the Netherlands are awarded on a pass or fail basis, hard work and excelling at what you do have ostensibly become redundant.

 

• The week before last, during a painfully half-hearted attempt by the media to put Darfur firmly on the political and media agenda, an interview with celeb UN Ambassador and Darfur campaigner Mia Farrow was broadcast. As the conflict in Darfur is financed by billions of dollars worth of Sudanese oil sold to China each year, Mia Farrow is calling for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. A Dutch current affairs programme had Madam Chairlady of the Netherlands Olympics Committee Erica Terpstra, twice Olympics medallist swimmer, comment on the possibility of a Dutch boycott. "The Olympics are about sports," she said, "Not about politics."

 

• On 29 October, the Committee for the Evaluation of Closed Criminal Cases issued its report on the prosecution of the Dutch 'Angel of Death' Lucia de Berk, Holland's most notorious serial killer about to become Holland's most famous miscarriage of justice. The performance of the judges in the case had not been reviewed because, under Dutch law, judges are infallible and can only be criticised by other, higher judges. Even so, the conclusions of the committee were most damning – police and prosecutors had relied to such an extent on a 'gut feeling' of Lucia's guilt that they had failed miserably to investigate scenarios and data that might have led to any outcome other than guilt.

What all these issues have in common can be summarised in one word: Complacence. They're all indicative of a short memory and very static processes indeed. Once famous for their realism, albeit 400 years ago, the Dutch are now in the grip of something in between Groundhog Day and a powerful Disney-style myth, the kind in which the girl always gets her prince and the baddies always get their comeuppance. And it works the other way round, too. If you've had some sort of bad luck – like Lucia de Berk – you're bound to be a baddie and if you've landed yourself a prince and a palace to boot, you must be a goody.

Unpicking some of the items above and reserving others for a later date, folk seem to have forgotten already that, as recently as 2006, Rita Verdonk twice misinformed the Lower House over having supplied information relating to deported failed asylum seekers to their national governments, Congo and Iran. Two deported Iranian homosexuals were hung yet our Rita insisted that Iran was safe for gays.

Another scandal and more twists and turns in Parliament involved 181 Syrians. It was Rita Verdonk who proposed a law that Dutch must be spoken in all public places. She called for the abolition of the Commission for Equal Treatment (in the UK: Commission for Racial Equality) following a decision that a Muslim teacher could not be forced to shake hands with male colleagues. And now she's teamed up with Wilders.

Rita Verdonk

Much as I think she's a dangerous, misguided demagogue who does nothing constructive to take Holland into the future, the complacency lies with her fellow MPs and journalists alike.

Not once have I heard any of her opponents mention that more Dutch leave the Netherlands than immigrants come in, that this is an ageing society, that the birth rate is too low and that Holland needs immigrants like fish need water. They might point out that retirement wouldn't be so cushy if Spain closed its borders to the Dutch. Nor has anyone pointed out that the immigrant community represents nearly 10 percent of the population and therefore contributes for 10 percent to every single aspect of the economy as a whole – including the salaries of the MPs.

As to the lighting issue, many years ago, the Dutch were told that switching tube lights on and off costs more energy than leaving them on all day. Things have changed, however. The notion of global warming and reducing CO2 emissions has entered the public domain. So what's to stop an Einstein of a civil servant proposing the replacement of blankets of tube lights with individual halogen desk lamps? What's to stop a clued-up journalist from looking at the government's energy consumption and putting the idea into the public mind? Probably the most common Dutch response to suggestions of change is 'that's the way things are and you won't be able to do anything about it' (zo is het nu eenmaal en daar kun je niets aan doen). That's fine if spoken by a member of the public; downright deplorable if uttered by a journalist or politician.

All I have to say in respect of Dutch gas and its spiralling cost is … I despair. How did it ever get this bad? How is it that an entire people allowed their government to get away with this? Why do they let it continue to get away with it? It's their gas. Unlike in the UK, no pensioners have died from hypothermia in the Netherlands – yet – but I'm fairly sure even such an event wouldn't prompt sustained protest.

Erica Terpstra

The words of the chairman of the NOC on a possible boycott of the Olympics in China annoyed me greatly. Her own two performances at the Olympic Games of 1960 and 1964 were in the heyday of political struggle on two issues – Apartheid and the Cold War. South Africa was banned in 1960; Holland took a stance on Russia's invasion of Hungary; if Taiwan participated, China wouldn't appear and vice versa; The US boycotted the USSR over Afghanistan and the USSR retaliated four years later in LA. Does she not remember? If I know this or can find out at the click of a mouse, surely the revered journalist presenters-turned-comedy-duo must also know? Yet they just sat there, exchanged some witty repartee and grinned sheepishly at the important lady. The viewers were left with a very one-sided perspective of why it's not right and proper for Holland to take a stance on Darfur, Tibet, Myanmar and the human rights record in China itself. All of this while giving the 'wagging Dutch finger' to the government of Sudan.

If you feel strongly about the issue of Darfur or China, you can do several things – support Mia Farrow's campaign at www.dreamfordarfur.org, write to the Netherlands Olympics Committee or the Minister for Health, Welfare and Sports (VWA) or sign the on-line petition to boycott the corporate sponsors.

On to the last big story, that of Lucia de Berk's wrongful imprisonment. I'm not even going to attempt to summarise what happened – if you're concerned, the whole sad story is available in English at www.jokerxl.com and in Dutch at www.luciadeb.nl. Suffice to say that Lucia didn't fit in with the Dutch 'core identity', the linear life on the straight and narrow from birth to death that I described in my previous blog 'What's in a culture?'. As a result, she was hunted down, depicted as a modern-day witch and arrested at her dying grandpa's bedside. When she pleaded 'can I just do this?' she was told 'so you can kill him, too?' In the UK, her case would have been declared a miscarriage of justice by even a half-sensible judge on the basis of 'trial by media' but in Holland, Lucia's case was dried and dusted before the police even became involved. 

Lucia de Berk

A committee of scientists, lawyers, philosophers and others have been campaigning for justice for Lucia more or less since her arrest in 2001. No-one wanted to know. Justice had been done. Politicians hid behind the separation of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The judges closed ranks and upheld each other's verdicts and 'truth-searching' missions. The journalists moved on to the next day's news. Nothing might ever have happened if not, by sheer coincidence, a man was arrested on a charge of indecent assault who proceeded to confess to having killed a 10 year old girl – the Schiedam Park Murder - for which another man had already been put behind bars. It turned out that police and prosecutors had withheld from the court scientists' serious doubts about the DNA found on the dead child matching that of the accused. A Review Committee was set up to investigate other closed cases and sure enough, one after the other turned out to be unsound. Nevertheless, the Committee for Lucia struggled to be heard at all. The reason for investigating only a handful of cases, given by the chairman of the Review Committee Mr. Buruma on the same current affairs programme referred to above, was that 'we do not wish to undermine confidence in the judiciary'. Again, the duo had no response worthy of journalists taking something to task. Sheepish grins. Some quips. Again an audience left with a one-sided 'that's the way it is and you won't change it'.

This is the most serious charge of complacence of all. The absence of solid journalism, having free speech but wasting it on cosy chitchat at home while pointing fingers abroad, bodes ill for this country's internal innovation and external credibility. There's an excellent book on this subject by Noam Chomski called 'Manufacturing Consent'.

It gets worse. Although the overwhelming likelihood that Lucia never killed anyone became official on 29 October, she's still in prison. Only the Supreme Court has the power to free her but before a hearing can be scheduled, more research is apparently needed into precisely the alternative scenarios that would have proved her innocence before the original trial. You can sign the on-line petition to free Lucia at www.ipetitions.com/petition/lucia

The foreign media stand accused here, too. While they queued up for the gory details during the trial, no one is publishing anything on Lucia's plight when innocent. A project by the University of Maastricht called 'Reasonable Doubt' is already researching some 50 to 200 other possible miscarriages of justice.  Among them, the Brit Kevin Sweeney – another who stuck out 'above crop level'. So clever is Mr. Sweeney that he managed to set fire to his wife's bedroom in Holland while he himself was in Brussels. Again, the case is described in detail on dedicated websites, like www.fairtrialsabroad.org and www.justiceforkevinsweeney.com

Research undertaken by the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau puts the Dutch in fourth place internationally in terms of their confidence in the integrity of their judges. The report mentions that public scandals have no long-term effect on this confidence. So if the people don't break faith with their system, if the politicians won't take the judges to task, if the journalists are toothless old men, if a review committee has no jurisdiction – who's going to hold up the mirror and force the judiciary and other trusted institutions to take a long, hard look at themselves and find themselves wanting? For the judges, the people's short memory is a blessing in disguise. And for the people themselves? Ah, they'll live  happily ever after.

19 November 2007

Saturday 5 January
Lights for Lucia and the Three Wise Men'
 
A demonstration of compassion and support for Lucia de Berk. It will take place at Nieuwersluis (near Utrecht / Breukelen) at 1900 hours. The meeting point is at the swimming baths Zwemlust Zwemvereniging, Zandpad   15, 3631 NK Nieuwersluis  People who attend should bring torches, candles, lights or sparklers - no banners or signs.

(The reference to Three Wise Men is because 5th of Jan is Twelfth Night. Also, the Three Wise Men are the Grimbergen Triple of the Committee for the Evaluation of Closed Cases who issued the report detailing the gross errors in the prosecution of Lucia.)

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[Copyright Michaela + Expatica 2007]