AMSTERDAM, 23 January 2005 — The death of a 19-year-old handbag thief at the hands of the woman he robbed has reopened a raw wound in Dutch public life.
Ali el B. was Moroccan. Germaine C. is Dutch. And the incident occurred within meters of where controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been cut down just 11 weeks previously by a Moroccan enraged at his depiction of Islamic custom.
Since the incident on Monday evening on Linnaeus Street to the east of central Amsterdam, politicians, commentators and legal academics have all had their say.
Members of the large Moroccan community in the area have marched in silent mourning to their local mosque.
Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende has felt obliged to come out in public support of Integration Minister Rita Verdonk, who remarked that if Ali el B. had not stolen a handbag, he would have come to no harm.
Verdonk was merely trying to “calm feelings” in the Moroccan community after friends of the dead youth claimed he had been murdered, Balkende said, but he acknowledged the outcry revealed “the seriousness of the climate in the Netherlands”.
The facts of the case are not in dispute. Ali el B. and an associate opened a car door in traffic on the busy street on Monday evening, stole a handbag and rode off on their scooter.
Germaine C. gave chase in reverse gear, and Ali el B. was crushed to death between her car and a tree in a side street.
The 43-year-old woman was arrested and held in custody until Thursday on suspicion of manslaughter. Justice officials said she had taken an “unacceptable risk”.
Right-wing politicians expressed outrage at her arrest, and the conservative Telegraaf newspaper mounted a front-page campaign through the week, querying what the prosecution office “thought it was up to”.
The world had been “turned upside down”, parliamentarian Geert Wilders said. “My reaction is simple. By arresting the woman, they have turned the victim into a criminal and the criminal into a victim.”
Wilders demanded that a law allowing foreigners found guilty of terrorism to be deported should be extended to ordinary criminals. “You’ve got state terrorism and you’ve got street terrorism,” he said.
Even more moderate politicians, like Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen, were quick to point out that Ali el B. had a criminal past.
Comparisons were quickly drawn with the murders of Van Gogh on Nov. 2 and of Pym Fortuyn, the maverick anti-immigration politician who was shot and killed in May 2002 in the closing stages of the last election.
After years of complacency over ethnic relations, the Dutch have begun to see their society as under severe social strain.
A poll taken in the wake of Van Gogh’s murder has found that a third of Dutch people take a negative view of Muslims. Only a fifth feel unthreatened by the million-strong Muslim presence in their country — equivalent to 6 percent of the population.
Muslims, mainly Moroccans and Turks concentrated in the big cities, also feel themselves under threat.
Second-generation members of these communities have begun to talk of returning to their parents’ homeland. Many native Dutch would cheerfully bid them farewell.
