In the face of a crippling housing crisis, van Steenberge is one of a growing number of Dutch voters turning not to the far-Right, but to a centrist party making a surprising comeback, Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). The CDA’s campaign emphasizes “core Dutch values” like fairness and solidarity while making clear that you don’t have to be Christian to agree..

The country is at a crossroads. In the 2023 elections, the bouffant-haired veteran of the far-Right, Geert Wilders, won the most seats, shaking the political establishment. But by June, he triggered the collapse of the government, citing a lack of support for his asylum policies.

Ahead of a general election on 29 October, the question is whether anti-establishment parties that feed on feelings of exclusion will continue to rise or whether a different story of nationhood can emerge. The CDA does not define itself in opposition to outsiders but as an inclusive movement of “Christian democracy”. Created in the Seventies to forge bonds between Protestants and Catholics, it’s back with a quiet “c”.

The latest polls show a dramatic rise in CDA support that would give it some 25 of the 150 seats in parliament — compared to its current five. At a packed AGM and campaign launch in Rotterdam earlier this month, the mood among the 1,500 attendees was jubilant. Louder than the crowd’s rendition of the Dutch national anthem were the words of praise for their cherub-faced soft-spoken leader, Henri Bontenbal.

“Are you, like me, meeting people every day who say: ‘I’m going to vote for Bontenbal’?” former CDA prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende asked the room. “They say the CDA is needed again in Dutch politics. When you look at what is happening, it seems like a bad theater show in The Hague. There’s a gap between people and politics, trust is falling away, democracy is under pressure… And then there is Henri Bontenbal, who comes here with another story.”

The term for common decency, fatsoen, is on everyone’s lips. The program voted through at the Rotterdam meeting stressed a return to values many Dutch people see when they look in the mirror: fairness, moral integrity, order, solidarity and kindness. While the CDA advocates for “more grip on migration”, it refused to support a migration bill this summer because a Party for Freedom amendment would have criminalized offering illegal migrants something as simple as a bowl of soup.

The Party for Freedom, though, is still leading in the polls. But having achieved little during its year of government, it has been losing voters while the up-and-coming far-Right party JA21 threatens to split its base. JA21 voices the same suspicion of immigration and Islam but with politer words. By contrast, Wilders’ unfiltered comments resulted in a criminal conviction and two decades of 24-hour protection against death threats. JA21 has attracted scores of members; the Party for Freedom has just one – Wilders.

Even if the Party for Freedom wins the most seats again, it has no realistic hope of forming a majority government in the splintered Dutch scene. Every other major party — the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), GreenLeft/Labour and the CDA — has already ruled out working with it. JA21 leader Joost Eerdmans dismissed the idea of a minority far-Right government on stage at that conference, wondering: “Is that a stable answer to the mess and chaos that was left behind, also by Wilders?”

More form this author

The implosion of Geert Wilders

By Senay Boztas

Dutch society used to be organized around “pillars” — groups such as Catholics or socialists who had their own media, neighborhoods and several main political parties. But the highly proportional parliamentary system has struggled with the ever-more splintering of political support across a dizzying number of parties.

Amid this political volatility, the country faces real, pressing issues. Someone earning an average income can afford just 2% of homes nationwide. There is a housing shortage due to an increase in single-person households and population growth of a million since 2014, largely through labor migration. Combined with lax lending rules and the world’s largest homeowner subsidies, this means home prices have doubled. (The average property goes for almost twice the UK average.)

According to a recent state commission report, the country needs to grow to around 20 million people by 2050 to maintain prosperity. But as Europe’s second most densely populated nation, the Netherlands faces hard choices about how to use its land: for meat processing, logistics depots, or to address the country’s nitrogen crisis caused by decades of intensive farming. And it’s hard to deny the impact of climate change in one of the world’s most vulnerable river deltas.

In contrast to the hard-Right narrative, the CDA is sending a clear message about responsible choices and trade-offs. Beneath the focus on decency, the CDA strikes a soft-Right, pro-Europe chord. The party would criminalize rejected asylum seekers who refuse to return to their country of origin. It also backs a controversial law to distribute asylum centers more evenly across the country. Regarding the country’s nitrogen problem, it sides with the farmer unions which plan to cut emissions through innovation and voluntary buy-outs, with sanctions only a last resort. On security, it proposes a “freedom contribution” tax and Scandinavian-style military service. And when it comes to addressing the housing crisis, it wants to phase out the world’s most generous mortgage tax breaks and stop existing homeowners blocking new builds — a big deal for young people like Van Steenberge, who has bought an apartment but is waiting for a court ruling on whether it can be built due to protests from the neighbors.

Suggested reading

Can Le Pen be stopped?

By Julian Jackson

Bontenbal refuses to trade insults with opponents, explains controversial policies clearly, and defends compromise. He is now seen by voters as a safe pair of hands. “You can say now he is the new rising star, like Balkenende in 2002 and later Mark Rutte,” Joyce Boverhuis, pollster at EenVandaag, said. “In our polls, we see that of all the party leaders, he is most seen as prime minister because of his stability, decency, and also [that] he is open to make compromises. He is really realistic and people appreciate that.”

Many think the center can in fact hold. At the CDA conference, D66 liberal democrat MP Jan Paternotte, an unlikely guest, expressed cautious optimism. “I think that people have had enough of arguments, of promises made that turn out to be pipe dreams. There is a huge need for honest politics.”

The Dutch have always been deeply pragmatic about bridging political differences. According to D66 “list pusher” Sandra Phlippen, who is also chief economist at ABN Amro bank, climate collaboration isn’t Left or Right, but part of the national identity since devastating 1953 floods sparked the delta program. “This fundamental belief in being safe from the water is going to begin to change,” she told me, a few days before conference weekend.

Anything can change in Dutch politics. In the last two elections, there were last-minute spurts first for D66, and then in 2023 for the Party for Freedom. Tom Louwerse, director of research at the Leiden University Institute of Political Science, closely monitors the polls and sees signs that voters could roll the dice and make a Left-Right coalition likely – with Bontenbal and his CDA in pole position..

“Presenting this more moderate image until now has served him quite well,” he said. “We also see sometimes in Dutch elections that parties peak too early, so you never know whether that’s the case or that they just keep on growing until election day.”

Some believe any centrist government would be reckless to ignore the same anti-establishment discontent that sparked Brexit and propelled Donald Trump to power. Hans-Martin ten Napel, associate law professor at Leiden University, has studied the CDA’s comeback but believes radical voices are still loud, even if it is broadcast on alternative channels.

“The system made sense in the previous century when society was not so fragmented,” he said. “But I think parts of the electorate have become increasingly frustrated. You can vote for change, as perhaps two-thirds did in November 2023. But nothing ever seems to change.”

Will the Christian Democratic Appeal have the moral courage — and the votes — to break that cycle?

Donald Trump’s embrace of Argentina’s new President, Javier Milei, shows how empty of ideological consistency populism can be. If Trump in his first run for the White House and his presidency stood for anything, it was for the rejection of economic libertarianism in favour of tariffs, immigration restriction and a refusal to cut the middle-class entitlements on which his voters depended. Milei, however, is a free-market radical whose programme is the exact opposite of “Trumpism”. And yet, hours after Milei was elected president of Argentina, Trump posted on social media: “Congratulations… you will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again!”

This might seem like a contradiction, but only if Right-wing populism is considered a coherent public policy programme. And that is far from the case. Today, populism is little more than a shared campaign style — like the weird hair Trump shares with Milei, Johnson, and Geert Wilders.

Suggested reading

Britain is Europe's liberal outcast

By Aris Roussinos

Further evidence that populism has become a gimmick, rather than a serious programme, comes from the record of populists in office. Silvio Berlusconi, the original Right-wing populist, a plutocrat and media celebrity before Trump, was prime minister in four Italian governments. Despite all the commotion, it is hard to see what, if anything, changed as a result. Under Georgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-Right has reconciled itself to the EU and softened its tone. In the UK, Johnson came and went, securing Brexit but otherwise leaving no trace on public policy. And like a bad-tempered, orange-haired Cheshire Cat, Trump in his first term left nothing but a scowl.

Populist voters in all Western democracies, whatever their other differences, want current high levels of immigration to be reduced. Trump made this central to his campaign in 2016, and it was inextricably wrapped up with Brexit under Johnson. But once in office, Trump betrayed his voters by refusing to press for the only effective way to reduce demand for immigration — requiring American employers to certify that their workers are all US citizens or legal immigrants. Instead, Trump avoided clashing with the business wing of the Republican Party, which is keen on cheap illegal immigrant labour, and diverted attention to a “big, beautiful wall” along the US-Mexican border which his own party failed to fund.

For his part, Johnson as prime minister proved to be as ineffectual in stemming mass migration to the UK as King Canute was in stopping the tide. In 2021, Johnson promised not to return to “the old failed model of… uncontrolled immigration”. And yet, more immigrants arrived in the UK in 2022 than all those who arrived between 1945 and 2022.

The problem here is structural: the very feature of modern Western democracies that creates the demand for populist politicians also ensures their failure. In the north Atlantic, this structure has been transformed in the last generation by two phenomena. The first is the transfer of decision-making power away from democratically elected legislatures and executives to entities that are highly insulated from election results: national and transnational judiciaries, central banks, international institutions, and corporations such as the social media giants that function as de facto public utilities but with no democratic oversight or control. The second is the disintegration of political parties as mass membership organisations, in which ordinary citizens in local chapters can participate and exert influence outside of elections.

The first transformation — the loss of power to technocrats, both public and private — is in itself sufficient to explain the rage and alienation of much of the electorate in the West. In many countries, voters have learned that, no matter what party or candidate they select come election time, nothing will change in terms of policy. After they put in a lot of coins and press a lot of buttons, with no drink rolling out, they start to kick the vending machine.

Suggested reading

The Left was blinded by Berlusconi

By Thomas Fazi

This fury, particularly when it comes to immigration, is then exploited by populist candidates. But here another transformation comes into play — the capture of powerful, hierarchical organisations by outsiders such as Trump, Johnson or, for that matter, Jeremy Corbyn. With the collapse of organised parties as gatekeepers, competition among protest candidates tends to produce theatrical mavericks who take pride in their independence, even if they happen to run for office as a candidate of one or another legacy party.

Here, then, is the challenge. It took a generation or more for authority to be drained from the political branches in the West to these technocrats. And it will take at least as long for the political branches of government to regain decision-making power that they never should have ceded.

For this to happen, it will require a prolonged campaign of legislative reform and “lawfare” by disciplined parties and coalitions in national legislatures. This, in turn, will require skilful and patient leaders who are institutionalists and party-builders devoted to creating organisations that will outlast their time in office — the very opposite of the wild-haired maverick who campaigns on a slogan such as “build the wall” or waves chainsaws around. On being elected to office, the populist can try to rule by decree, but will lack an organised party to work through, and will find that many policy reforms are impossible to implement.

In the US, those who say that they vote for a particular candidate on the basis of their likely nominations to the Supreme Court or the Federal Reserve show that they actually understand where genuine power lies in modern democracies. Under the unwritten constitution of contemporary America, activist judges make the most important laws; the role of the President is to appoint them, and the role of the Senate is to confirm or reject them. Instead of a big, beautiful wall, Trump’s only lasting legacy, for instance, may indeed be his judicial appointments, which produced the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that returned the power to regulate abortion from the federal government to the states.

For structural reasons, then, popular frustration with the thwarting of voter preferences will continue to create demand among angry, disempowered voters for outsider candidates with big, striking promises, if not always big, striking hair. And, once they are elected, populist demagogues will press the buttons on their desk that are supposed to make their government or party spring into action — only to discover that, in reality, the vending machine is broken and nothing happens.

Times are indeed pretty good for Caroline van der Plas. Surrounded by the thousands of blooms that adorn the Royal FloraHolland Trade Fair, the leader of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB), the Dutch farmer-citizen party, is here to baptise a new pink rose named in her honour. She’s also here to rally support among the nation’s sympathetic flower-growers before this month’s general election.

“Farmers are fighting hard,” she tells them. “Not just to survive — but also for the environment and for the energy transition. We will keep representing the voice of common sense in the years ahead.”

In the splintered political landscape of the Netherlands, this voice of the countryside has spent the past years thrusting itself into the mainstream. In March, as the Dutch government formulated plans to buy out thousands of “peak polluter” farms, the BBB soldiered on, winning the nation’s regional elections and seizing the biggest share of the Dutch Senate.

Since then, some of her supporters have recently switched to another new party, Pieter Omtzigt’s centre-right New Social Contract, wooed by his growing reputation as a corruption-buster and strong showing in the polls. But the BBB is still set to win up to 11 MPs on November 22, a huge gain on its single seat in the last general election. In the Dutch system of proportional representation, there is a high chance that it will be invited to be part of the next coalition government.

More from this author

On board a migrant cruise ship

By Senay Boztas

To do so, however, the BBB will need to shake off its association with the radical Right groups who joined its farmer protests last year. When I put this to Van der Plas, she downplays the risk. “That’s simply not true and I always get a bit cross about it,” she says. “If you look at our voting behaviour and what we do, we are a centre-right party.”

Today, the BBB has expanded from the single issue of farming. Its representatives frequently talk about a “noaberstaat” (a state based on a traditional sense of community), more power for parliament, pro-business policies and an increased social safety net. It also wants to limit asylum to 15,000 migrants a year and impose housing rules for labour migrants. All form the basis of its election manifesto, which party officials refused to have costed by independent economists. “We don’t speak in woolly words,” Van der Plas explains. “We speak the language of the people on the street. And that appeals to a lot of people.”

Her programme certainly appeals to the crowd watching the “Sweet Caroline” rose being christened. “It’s good that she is here,” Arno Heemskerk, an orchid grower from Zevenhuizen says. “There are some who would rather get rid of the farmers and the growers, and we are made out to be big polluters. Of course, we need to do something for the climate, but if there’s one sector that has been busy for years, it is the horticultural sector. We need to make the transition but we need more time to do it.”

One rose grower, who wishes to stay anonymous, suggests that support for the BBB is also motivated by a fear of the Left. He’s particularly concerned about the return of Frans Timmermans, a former European politician who headed up the European Green Deal and now leads a new GreenLeft-Labour coalition. “We are busy seven days a week producing these roses,” he says. “Anyone but Timmermans. We are afraid of him.”

More from this author

The drug trade has wrecked Amsterdam

By Senay Boztas

Steven Van Schilfgaarde, chief executive of Royal FloraHolland, is more optimistic about Van der Plas. “What I see in the BBB is that they want to listen, they have a warm heart for the sector and they understand its economic importance for the Netherlands,” he says.

As the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter, farming has always been a central pillar of Dutch politics. But it also remains a divisive issue. As well as making up some 1.4% of the country’s GDP, it is also responsible for nitrogen-based and phosphate emissions and a major contributor to unlawful levels of damage to protected nature reserves. In response, the BBB does not deny that the farming sector needs to reduce pollution, but instead believes that this must happen more slowly, giving farmers “perspective” on future income rather than just buy-outs to stop.

By doing this, says Bart Koenen, a researcher at Kantar Public, the BBB is attempting to distance itself from its depiction as a radical protest party and brand itself as a voice of common sense. “We have had four [Mark] Rutte governments and the need has grown strongly for a new kind of politics, new faces, a more transparent government,” he says. “It is quite a Left-wing party on social security, access to medical care and affordable transport, and so it’s in a position to speak to a large proportion of the electorate in the cities. But on the other hand, it wants a quota on migration, scoring well with the Dutch public because a lot of people find immigration a big problem that hangs together with a huge housing shortage.”

He points out the BBB’s approach to scrapping nitrogen pollution rules — which currently restrain speeds on motorways and house-building — plays well in solving the country’s lack of an estimated 390,000 homes. “The BBB says that the nitrogen pollution problem isn’t important: we need to build houses.”

In the hope of making this happen, Van der Plas has spoken openly about a potential coalition with Omtzigt’s New Social Contract, which is campaigning primarily around better governance after a series of expensive government scandals over childcare benefits, the Groningen gas wars and unpopular Covid lockdowns. Sarah de Lange, professor of political pluralism at the University of Amsterdam, sees new voices on the centre-right thriving following the total collapse of traditional government parties. “The far-Right in itself is not doing that great, contrary to popular narrative,” she says. “But that is because other parties are doing so well. The core message of the BBB is about the good people in the countryside or provinces who have common sense, against the cosmopolitan elite that is neglecting part of the country. It is agrarian populist with far-Right leanings on some issues [such as immigration].”

More from this author

Big Veganism is coming for you

By Senay Boztas

But Van der Plas, a charismatic and straight-talking figure, is working hard to appeal in the cities too. After the flower presentation, a swig of fizz and a mint, she will be whisked off to a photoshoot outside the massive trade fair. Later, she will take off her Doc Martens to have tea in her socks in a caravan with a community of travelling people in Amsterdam.

Joining her out campaigning, Claudia van Zanten, a former councillor for the liberal VVD in Amsterdam and seventh on the BBB candidate list, says it is a party of business that does not just appeal in the countryside. “BBB is a party of the community that is committed to all residents of the Netherlands, farmers and citizens,” she says. “We want a smaller government with fewer civil servants and impossible rules… that pays attention to the human dimension again.” It’s a message, she points out, that did well earlier this year in parts of Amsterdam Municipality such as Weesp. And it appears to have established a stable level of support elsewhere; Van der Plas in particular won public admiration over summer, when she claimed she had no desire to be prime minister, tottering around and abroad “in high heels”.

“I’d never have thought that this would have happened when I was a little girl,” she tells the crowd as she pours pink fizz over a bunch of “Sweet Caroline” blooms intended for her Irish mother. “I am going to tell her: ‘Your daughter has her own rose!’” And when election results are in and coalition negotiations start, she may well find she is coming up roses too.

Like everything in the life of this man — who, as a result of his criticism of Islam, has received death threats and had 24/7 security for 19 years — the words are carefully chosen. Other populist parties on the Dutch Right have risen and fallen but Wilders, remarkably, is still here, the longest-serving MP, with 25 years in parliament. He is the establishment “outsider”, dependably critical of the government, and the Netherlands’s best-known party leader. And right now, he is polling as the biggest voice on the far-Right, ahead of next month’s general election, with his anti-immigration, anti-Islam stance combined with left-wing social policies on topics such as benefits, pensions and healthcare.

Most parties have for years said that they will not work with Wilders. Objections have been made to his attitude towards the rule of law and his refusal to apologise for a 2014 speech calling for “fewer” Moroccan people — which was judged to be criminal. But now, for the first time in a long time, his Party for Freedom (PVV) has a chance at governing. The party currently leading some polls, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), has a new head, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, and she has said she will “not shut out any party” from coalition negotiations.

So, does this party of one — for Wilders is the only member — really want to be part of the Dutch government it has been attacking for years? “Yes, we do, actually — and I think our chances are improving by the day,” he tells me, leaning in and speaking softly. “Because people or parties who were excluding us are not, now — at least not all of them — and we are doing better every week in the polls.” Why is this?

“We have a very stable party, a good programme, good candidates and people are really fed up with policy about asylum seekers, immigration and terrorist threats. So, I believe if there would be any chance for us — which, of course, is not true, but still — if there would be any chance to govern, it would be now.”

More from this author

How Antwerp became Europe's drug gateway

By Senay Boztas

Indeed, despite the recent rise of a Dutch farmers’ party, and one hat splintered from the Christian Democrats under the popular backbencher Pieter Omtzigt, Wilders has endured in Dutch politics. “Wilders has, over the years since 2006 when he started the Party for Freedom, built up a very strong brand,” says Sjoerd van Heck, a pollster at Ipsos. “He has adhered to the basic principles of how you position something in the market, communicating a consistent message and always staying true to it.” He is, for instance, consistently anti-immigration.

As an immigrant to the Netherlands, I found it somewhat uncomfortable to interview the people who came to the PVV launch. It was surprising to find that many think Wilders sometimes goes too far. “I don’t see him as prime minister, but he has a lot of good points,” says Robert, 65, from Roermond. Past proposals, such as for a headscarf tax, are not popular, even among his supporters.

Jeanet Brakel, 48, from Noord Brabant, tells me: “He says things you’re not supposed to say, and some people find him too hard-line, but he does it for us and he does it in a funny way.” I wonder if she would feel more kind-hearted towards immigrants if she felt less hard up herself? “It’s difficult,” she replies. “Everything is expensive. Holland was a rich country but now so many people are lining up [for benefits] and the foreigners come here and get everything.”

To his supporters, Wilders is a strong voice against the cosmopolitan, liberal ideology that, most feel, leaves them behind. He has what van Heck, the Ipsos pollster, describes as “an economic agenda that’s a bit Left-wing”. And some of those I met at De Blauw Trap swing between fringe parties on the far-Right and those on the far-Left. Hai van Dijk, from Venlo, says he has swung between Wilders and the Socialist Party (SP). “It’s all a protest vote, an anti-vote,” he says. “People don’t feel heard.”

He is not alone, according to Matthijs Rooduijn, associate professor of political science at Amsterdam University. “Discontent was always mobilised by parties on the fringes of the political spectrum: radical Right parties or radical Left parties like the SP,” he says. “But right now, we have two parties that are really mobilising this discontent — and really expressing worries about our politics in the Netherlands — that are not clearly from the fringes of the political spectrum.” That is, the new farmers’ party, and Omtzigt’s.

Responding to this new challenge, from these two new parties, Wilders has claimed in the Dutch press that he is “milder” than he used to be, willing to cooperate on reducing asylum rather than “banning” it, and scrapping his “Ministry for Remigration and De-Islamisation”. But Rooduijn says the content of his manifesto is much the same: “When you look at his programme and ideas, it’s not really more moderate than it was in the past. What has changed is maybe the tone of Wilders” — in a bid, apparently, to appeal to more mainstream parties as a coalition partner.

The other thing that has changed, according to Rooduijn, is “the fact that Yeşilgöz has opened the door a little bit”. But, he adds, “I still don’t think it is very likely he will be part of a government coalition”. Other parties, not least Omtzigt’s recent addition, still exclude Wilders. Omtzigt is currently leading some polls, and his manifesto launch this week addresses the core issues of this election: promoting a decent standard of living, controlling immigration, but above all restoring trust in government. Recent scandals have severely damaged faith in politicians — including one relating to earthquake damage in Groningen and another relating to tax that felled a previous government and is still unresolved.

It will be very difficult for any government to restore that trust, though. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most proportional systems, with 21 groups in parliament and 26 standing. A whole spectrum of views gets parliamentary representation, but the irony is that voters have very little influence over who actually governs: the coalition process is a “black box” of political negotiation that takes place in The Hague, not the ballot box.

Whether or not Wilders succeeds in being part of government — or supporting a minority coalition — the influence of far-Right parties like his is undeniable. “To some extent, these voters have succeeded,” says Rooduijn. In response to them, centre-right parties have shifted their policies. “They have become more restrictive on immigration, more focused on identity issues,” he says, in a bid to win back voters.

Suggested reading

Britain is Europe's liberal outcast

By Aris Roussinos

Meanwhile, Wilders sells his story of being an outsider while taking a vigorous, sometimes poisonous, sometimes funny part in the democratic system. He is an excellent debater, sharing his quick wit in the chamber through social media clips and regular newsletters. In a recent budget debate, he enticed his Forum for Democracy rival Thierry Baudet to explain why he doubts the moon landings happened, before saying, like a practised stand-up: “I think you are already quite far on your way to the moon.”

Was he inspired by Trump, with his banter and his America first mantra? “Well, it was not what I thought about: I am not Trump,” he tells me. “But it is happening in many Western countries and also in the Netherlands, that our own people have been forgotten: normal, average people, families, who are having trouble making ends meet.” Although at the campaign launch, Wilders referenced the conflict in the Middle East and terrorist acts in Europe — and has consistently been pro-Israel — his voters seem focused primarily on the Netherlands. “We are there for them.”

After an hour of pressing the flesh, he is ushered into a car which 11 police officers accompany out of the square. Back in De Blauw Trap, the crowd trickles home. And I notice a sign above the bar. “Nights you can’t remember,” it reads, “with friends you’ll never forget.”

A look at the job advertisement offers clues. The first requirement is: “Practical experience from several years of visiting brothels”, and “experience with escorts is an advantage”. You’ll need a “clean, well-groomed appearance” and a “health certificate”. You have to “enjoy dealing with people” and have “no fear of contact”. The job description is simple: “You will test brothels for service, cleanliness and compliance with safer sex practices. You have fun having sex with the different ladies and then create an evaluation.” Something tells me only a man could do this job.

Many legal brothels employ undercover inspectors, a practice known as “test purchasing”. The aim is to assess the quality of “service” a prostituted woman is providing. If it is found that her performance is lax in any way — for example if she fails to convince the punter that she is enjoying herself, or refuses particular sex acts that he demands — she can be fined on the spot by the brothel owner. This is the reality of legal prostitution: it benefits the pimps and the punters and offers the women no protection whatsoever.

The advertisement for the brothel tester was on a website run by Kaufmich, a business that describes itself as a “social network for sex workers, customers, brothels and companies in the erotic environment”. If you are looking for any type of paid work in the German sex trade, Kaufmich is your go-to website. It also offers tips to punters on everything from the best local “gang-bang sex parties” to sourcing heavily pregnant women who are selling sex.

In countries such as Germany, Holland, and Switzerland — where all aspects of prostitution are perfectly legal — the women are marketed as merchandise, the sex buyers viewed as clients, and the pimps merely managers. At the heart of the project to sanitise the sex trade is the language used to describe it. In the Seventies, Carol Leigh, an advocate for blanket legalisation, coined the term “sex work” to suggest that prostitution is “a job like any other”. I’ve seen this phrase — as well as “sex work is work” and “blow jobs are real jobs” — emblazoned across placards and heard it chanted at rallies to promote legalisation. If prostitution is simply a job, then how can it be abuse? If it is merely labour, how can it be detrimental to wider society?

It’s a nice idea. But in practice, legalisation has left women terrifyingly vulnerable. In Germany, the current legislation imposes almost no rules on the punters. Condom use is supposedly compulsory, but as one woman in a “mega-brothel” pointed out: “Who, exactly, is going to enforce that rule and put one on his dick and stop him from taking it off, as they often do?”

Meanwhile, a high degree of control is imposed on the women. They are expected to be onsite for periods of up to 15 hours — until 3 o’clock in the morning — to allow brothel owners to confidently advertise that there are always dozens of different women to choose from. Partial or full nudity is required of all prostitutes while they’re on the premises. They don’t get to decide what acts they perform: management decides what “services” are on offer; whether “blow jobs are included in the basic rate”.

In German culture, prostitution has been whitewashed. There are many legal pimps on mainstream television. Michael Beretin, one of the pimps running the Paradise mega-brothel, had his own TV show, Redlight Experts, in which he reviews brothels. Beretin had seriously assaulted his then wife when he signed the TV contract. And in 2013, criminal investigators discovered that criminal gangs were operating within the business. Significant numbers of women had been trafficked from other countries. The brothel owners were sentenced to five years in prison.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. No other job on Earth exposes the so-called workers to such extreme violence, abuse and degradation. One 2018 study found that more than 60% had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

And yet, European authorities continue to enable the sex trade. In Zurich, there is a large “sex performance box” zone — a drive-thru outdoor brothel on the outskirts of the city — which is maintained by public money. Every day, local municipality workers empty bins full of used condoms, soiled tissues, and empty tubes of lube. The Swiss government spends more than $800,000 per year maintaining the booths. It is clearly keen to make it easier for men to pay for sex with financially desperate women. In 2014, it was revealed that inmates of La Paquerette, a social therapy department for prisoners near Geneva, were allowed to visit prostituted women being held in a local immigration detention centre. Members of End Demand, a feminist human rights organisation in Switzerland, tell me that the idea behind the visits was that the male prisoners could “let off steam” ahead of being released into the community.

Recent evidence shows that physical and sexual violence against women involved in the Swiss sex market is commonplace. Fortunately, there are moves, supported by a growing number of politicians in the country, to end legal prostitution and criminalise the punters.

More from this author

Germany: Europe's bordello

By Julie Bindel

The problem extends far beyond Europe, however. The picture is just as horrific in Nevada, the only state in the US where brothels are legal. I have visited a number of them, and the conditions inside are nothing like the glamorous images that illustrate their websites. Many women both live and prostitute in a single room, where pornography plays on loop. They are not allowed any of their own personal possessions on display, and are only allowed to leave the brothels — which are often surrounded by metal gates — if they are chaperoned by an assistant pimp. This is in case they pick up a sexually transmitted infections from consensual sex.

There is no requirement for the punters to show that they are not carrying a disease upon entering the brothel, but the women are required to be tested every week. Brothel owners typically pocket half of their earnings, while the prostitutes are expected to pay for their own condoms, wet wipes, sheets and towels.

Of course, this is just good business. While in Nevada, I met with the late Dennis Hof (who died in 2018), America’s biggest pimp — he owned the majority of the legal brothels in operation at the time — who refused to accept the label, because he operated in the legal world. “I am a businessman,” he told me. “I have a license to do this.” For pimps, it is all about profit. The wellbeing of the women is irrelevant. All the prostitutes I interviewed in Nevada brothels spoke of using tactics aimed as dissociating from their feelings while having sex with punters, in order to cope. One woman told me she repeated the mantra, during each encounter: “I am not selling myself, but renting out my body for an hour”.

Suggested reading

The sex work lobby exploits strippers

By Kat Rosenfield

Prostitutes desperately need protection, but every attempt to unionise these “workers” has failed. Pro-pimp organisations have long been masquerading as “sex workers’ unions” — in 2002, a London newspaper ran a front page with the headline, “Sex Workers To Join Trade Union”. People lobbying for the legalisation of the sex trade had persuaded Britain’s third-biggest union, the GMB, that prostitution was a job and that those selling sex deserved “worker’s rights”. The now-defunct International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) was never a union; it is a lobby group for the decriminalisation of pimping. In the early days, its main spokespersons were two gay men — whose rather unrepresentative voices (at most, 20% of the entire sex market is men selling sex to men) became dominant in the “sex worker’s rights” debate. One of these, Douglas Fox, was co-owner of a large “escort agency” based in north-east England.

Another organisation that masqueraded as a union was the Red Thread, based in Amsterdam. Founded in 1984 — and funded, from 1987, by the Dutch government — even at its height, it had just 100 members, out of the nation’s estimated 25,000 prostituted people. It never fought a single case on behalf of a “worker” in court. What it did do was act as a propaganda machine for legalisation. The Red Thread only lost its government funding when the international media began to report on the evidence coming out of The Netherlands that legalisation had been an unmitigated disaster. Under this regime, Trafficking and pimping has increased, organised crime is rife, and women are not protected from violence.

Those who advocate for the legalisation of prostitution claim it makes it safer for the women. Those in favour of decriminalisation, including many liberals and some feminists, argue that “sex workers” can be protected by unions and health and safety measures. But prostitution is inherently abusive. There is no way to make it safe.

And, under legalisation, prostituted women are inspected and not protected. After all, if selling sex is the same as flipping burgers for a living, there needs to be quality control of the product. This is another gross example of legalisation benefitting men while betraying women: whoever the lucky candidate is for the brothel testing job in Germany, he can easily pretend it is regular employment, while he is encouraged to “have fun having sex with the different ladies”.

Who cares what those ladies are thinking, feeling and experiencing? When women’s bodies become commodities, they cease to be human, and the men who buy and sell them can no longer claim to be humane. That is what the legalisation of prostitution achieves.

The BBB grew out of the mass demonstrations against the Dutch government’s proposal to cut nitrogen emissions by 50% in the country’s farming sector by 2030 — a target designed to comply with the European Union’s emission-reduction rules. While large farming companies have the means to meet these goals — by using less nitrogen fertiliser and reducing the number of their livestock — smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

Given the irrational nature of the policy, many protesting farmers believe it can’t simply be blamed on the urbanite “green elites” currently running the Dutch government. They suggest one of the underlying reasons for the move is to squeeze small farmers from the market, allowing them to be bought out by multinational agribusiness giants who recognise the immense value of the country’s land — not only is it highly fertile, but it is also strategically located with easy access to the north Atlantic coast (Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe). They also point out that prime minister Rutte is an Agenda Contributor of the World Economic Forum, which is well known for being corporate-driven, while his finance minister and Minister of Social Affairs and Employment are also tied to the body.

The struggle playing out in the Netherlands would seem to be part of a much bigger game that seeks to “reset” the international food system. Similar measures are currently being introduced or considered in several other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Britain (where the Government is encouraging traditional farmers to leave the industry to free up land for new “sustainable” farmers). As the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy sector, agriculture has naturally ended up in the crosshairs of Net Zero advocates — that is, virtually all major international and global organisations. The solution, we are told, is “sustainable agriculture” — one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which form their “Agenda 2030”.

This issue has now been pushed to the top of the global agenda. Last November’s G20 meeting in Bali called for “an accelerated transformation towards sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems and supply chains” to “ensure that food systems better contribute to adaptation and mitigation to climate change”. Just a few days later, in Egypt, the COP27 annual Green Agenda Climate Summit launched its initiative aimed at promoting “a shift towards sustainable, climate-resilient, healthy diets”. Within a year, its Food and Agriculture Organization aims to launch a “roadmap” for reducing greenhouse emissions in the agricultural sector.

The endgame is hinted at in several other UN documents: reducing nitrogen use and global livestock production, lowering meat consumption, and promoting more “sustainable” sources of protein, such as plant-based or lab-grown products, and even insects. The United Nations Environment Programme, for example, has stated that global meat and dairy consumption must be reduced by 50% by 2050. Other international and multilateral organisation have presented their own plans for transforming the global food system. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy “aims to accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. Meanwhile, the World Bank, in its climate change action plan for 2021-2025, says that 35% of the bank’s total funding during this period will be devoted to transforming agriculture and other key systems to deal with climate change.

More from this author

How the Davos elite took back control

By Thomas Fazi

Alongside these intergovernmental and multilateral bodies, a vast network of “stakeholders” is now devoted to the “greening” of agriculture and food production — private foundations, public-private partnerships, NGOs and corporations. Reset the Table, a 2020 Rockefeller Foundation report, called for moving away from a “focus on maximising shareholder returns” to “a more equitable system focused on fair returns and benefits to all stakeholders”. This may sound like a good idea, until one considers that “stakeholder capitalism” is a concept heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, which represents the interests of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet.

The Rockefeller Foundation has very close ties to the WEF, which is itself encouraging farmers to embrace “climate-smart” methods in order to make the “transition to net-zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030”. The WEF is also a big believer in the need to drastically reduce cattle farming and meat consumption and switch to “alternative proteins”.

Arguably the most influential public-private organisation specifically “dedicated to transforming our global food system” is the EAT-Lancet Commission, which is largely modelled around the Davos “multistakeholderist” approach. This is based on the premise that global policymaking should be shaped by a wide range of unelected “stakeholders”, such as academic institutions and multinational corporations, working hand-in-glove with governments. This network, cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, consists of UN agencies, world-leading universities, and corporations such as Google and Nestlé. EAT’s founder and president, Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian philanthropist who is married to one of the country’s richest men, has described her intention to organise a “Davos for food”.

EAT’s work was initially supported by the World Health Organization, but in 2019 the WHO withdrew its endorsement after Gian Lorenzo Cornado, Italy’s ambassador and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, questioned the scientific basis for the dietary regime being pushed by EAT — which is focused on promoting plant-based foods and excluding meat and other animal-based foods. Cornado argued that “a standard diet for the whole planet” that ignores age, sex, health and eating habits “has no scientific justification at all” and “would mean the destruction of millenary healthy traditional diets which are a full part of the cultural heritage and social harmony in many nations”.

Perhaps more important, said Cornado, is the fact that the dietary regime advised by the commission “is also nutritionally deficient and therefore dangerous to human health” and “would certainly lead to economic depression, especially in developing countries”. He also raised concerns that “the total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin” would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products. Despite these concerns, raised by a leading member of the world’s top public health body and shared by a network representing 200 million small-scale farmers in 81 countries, EAT continues to play a central role in the global push for the radical transformation of food systems. At the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, which originated from a partnership between the WEF and the UN Secretary-General, Stordalen was given a leading role.

Suggested reading

George Monbiot's farming fantasies

By John-Lewis Stempel

This complete blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private-corporate spheres in the agricultural and food sectors is also happening in other areas — with Bill Gates standing somewhere in the middle. Alongside healthcare, agriculture is the main focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances several initiatives whose stated aim is to increase food security and promote sustainable farming, such as Gates Ag One, CGIAR and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Civil society organisations, however, have accused the Foundation of using its influence to promote multinational corporate interests in the Global South and to push for ineffective (but very profitable) high-tech solutions which have largely failed to increase global food production. Nor are Gates’s “sustainable” agricultural activities limited to developing countries. As well as investing in plant-based protein companies, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, Gates has been buying huge amounts of farmland in the US, to the point of becoming the biggest private owner of farmland in the country.

The problem with the globalist trend he embodies is obvious: ultimately, small and medium-scale farming is more sustainable than large-scale industrial farming, as it is typically associated with greater biodiversity and the protection of landscape features. Small farms also provide a whole range of other public goods: they help to maintain lively rural and remote areas, preserve regional identities, and offer employment in regions with fewer job opportunities. But most importantly, small farms feed the world. A 2017 study found that the “peasant food web” — the diverse network of small-scale producers disconnected from Big Agriculture — feeds more than half of the world’s population using only 25% of the world’s agricultural resources.

Traditional farming, though, is suffering an unprecedented attack. Small and medium-scale farmers are being subjected to social and economic conditions in which they simply cannot survive. Peasant farms are disappearing at an alarming rate across Europe and other regions, to the benefit of the world’s food oligarchs — and all this is being done in the name of sustainability. At a time when almost a billion people around the world are still affected by hunger, the lesson of the Dutch farmers could not be more urgent, or inspiring. For now, at least, there is still time to resist the Great Food Reset.

Antwerp harbour leads up the River Scheldt and into the heart of Europe, a port the size of 16,600 football fields, sucking in 240,000,000 tonnes of freight each year. From the giant aerial photograph spread out on the floor of the Port Authority Building, you can see the open sprawl of its spreading fingers and multiple roads. But it’s not just bananas, steel and new cars that are unloaded here. Antwerp is now Europe’s main artery for cocaine smugglers, and the attendant violence they bring with them.

The increase in violent crime is, according to the Antwerp Federal Police, impossible to ignore. Last year, they confiscated €20.7 million in cash and goods and started 94 investigations into drug-related violence. Intercepted cocaine in Rotterdam harbour, in the Netherlands, dropped from almost 73,000 kgs in the record year of 2021 to under 47,000. Meanwhile finds in Antwerp have increased to a peak of almost 110,000 kgs. Antwerp is now, say customs officers, “the top destination for criminals”, and established Dutch drug gangs are spilling over the Belgian border. Last autumn, four Dutch suspects were arrested for allegedly preparing a kidnapping attempt on the Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, who went into hiding following a summer of grenade attacks linked to Dutch and Belgian criminal gangs. In Antwerp this January, 11-year-old Firdaous EJ, the niece of an alleged Belgian druglord, was shot dead in a drive-by attack on her home.

“It’s a narco-state lite,” says Teun Voeten, a photographer and the author of several books on the drug trade, who lives in Antwerp. He was first made aware of the problem of drug violence by the sound of hand grenades on his street in Deurne in 2018, an attack which damaged 16 cars and 10 houses. “The Amsterdammers were always the big bosses, but with the cracking of EncroChat and Sky ECC, some gang leaders have been arrested. Now the Antwerp families are going for themselves, and every change is marked with violence.” It is something Antwerp mayor Bart de Wever has warned about repeatedly: vergismoorden, collateral murders of civilians, which are rife in the Dutch criminal world. Now he says it is a “national crisis”. Last month, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo announced €17 million a year for a new harbour police force, more scanners, screening for 16,000 personnel in “sensitive” positions, and international efforts, including a deal with five shipping companies and the Dutch.

“Belgium has a problem because of its proximity to the Netherlands,” says Andrew Cunningham, drugs market and crime lead at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). “Rotterdam was seizing big hauls of cocaine a few years ago, the Dutch really improved port security, then there’s this waterbed effect: the criminals move to Antwerp to bring in the cocaine. Antwerp is a huge, sprawling port and it’s very difficult to control.” Around five years ago, police and prosecutors feared crime was leaching from the Dutch underworld into Belgium. But when academics including Charlotte Colman, professor of criminology at the University of Ghent, investigated the matter, they didn’t find a displacement, but an expansion of both the drug market and the Belgian and Dutch criminal networks.

More from this author

The drug trade has wrecked Amsterdam

By Senay Boztas

Historically, when there was a Low Countries frontier at all, the Dutch-Belgian border was always leaky. The Fifties and Sixties saw a “bitter battle” for customs officers when Dutch gangs began smuggling butter southwards. The Dutch, who had commercialised margarine, weren’t bothered about what they spread — but the Belgians demanded butter, which cost twice as much. Stuffing it into the back of American trucks, armed butter smugglers traded it over the border until it was no longer profitable. Then came the illegal drugs. By 2015, a peninsula in the River Maas had become a top crossing point for drug smugglers. It was impossible to police, so Belgium gave it back to the Netherlands.

The criminals here speak the same language and exploit the free travel. “It’s a historical thing, that Belgium and the Netherlands work together, and they misuse the border,” says Prof Colman. “For example, in the case of synthetic drug production, you have the drug production facility in Belgium and then the dumping in the Netherlands… The border between Belgium and the Netherlands is a bottleneck for criminal justice, and an opportunity to be invisible and expand territory for the criminal organisation.” When one of her research team went into prisons to interview people convicted of producing or smuggling drugs, they said they saw Antwerp and Rotterdam “as one port” — all that mattered was which contacts they had on the inside. So when Rotterdam increased fines last year for people trespassing in the harbour to collect drugs hidden in shipping containers, the smugglers could easily shift to Antwerp. “The criminal organisations also take advantage of the difference in jurisdictions,” points out Joris van der Aa, crime reporter for the Gazet van Antwerpen.

Researchers believe most of the cocaine coming to Belgium goes to the Netherlands, and police hacks of “secure” messaging services — key to arresting suspects Ridouan Taghi and Saïd Razzouki in the ongoing Dutch Marengo gang trial — have revealed the inner workings of this relationship. “Initially with the Belgian-Dutch criminal networks, the [Dutch] were mostly involved in the higher level: logistics, the financial organisation,” says Prof Colman. “But today we notice that Belgians have gone up the chain, including controlling and organising the smuggling. They are not only working for Dutch people: Dutch people could be working for them as well. We see an expansion in the criminal networks, and we also see a kind of shift with people from Belgium picking up the lead role as well.”

Suggested reading

Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial

By Ioan Grillo

The cocaine trade is particularly streamlined, and the European market price of €50 a gram remains stable despite the amounts intercepted. Cunningham at the EMCDDA says: “When I ask law enforcement what they think the interception rate is, sometimes they say 10%, sometimes they say 25%.” Even if 40% were intercepted, it may still be worthwhile for criminals — like self-service tills in supermarkets, which accept a certain level of theft as “shrinkage” in exchange for lower staff costs. This is also a story, after all, about trade: a battle between the trade of the criminals supplying European demand for drugs, and “legitimate businesses” whose infrastructure networks they piggyback. When a company’s ships bring perishable goods to a new harbour like Vlissingen instead of Antwerp, says Van der Aa, the cocaine follows.

On the flip side, harbour companies and shipping businesses know that if — as Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb wants — they scan every fruit container, this costs time and money, making them less competitive. When I asked the five shipping firms that signed an accord with the Belgian and Dutch governments last month about this — Hapag-Lloyd in Germany, MSC in Switzerland, Seatrade Group Rotterdam, CMA-CGM in France and Maersk in Denmark — there was some reticence.

Menno van Gorcum, director of Seatrade Group Rotterdam, is glad of joint action. “It had reached a level where something had to be done, and fortunately there is sufficient political attention to this,” he says. “We just keep on doing what we have been doing.” Hapag-Lloyd stresses that it is a team game and agrees that nobody wants to be less competitive than other firms — or to tell the criminals how to get around the new measures. The puzzling thing, though, is why criminal gangs are now so openly violent, when this draws attention to their activities and forces politicians to invest more in policing. Voeten, whose book on the crystal meth trade is being translated into English later this year, believes it is down to cocky amateurism. “A good gangster is an ultra-capitalist,” he points out. “You use violence now and then, but the imminent threat of violence works better than violence itself.”

More from this author

How the Netherlands became a narco state

By Senay Boztas

While violent crime in general has decreased across Europe, in the context of drug-related criminality, it has remained stable or increased, according to the EMCDDA. Cunningham ascribes this to the rivalries between many groups “all vying for a slice of the lucrative cocaine market”. The increase in Belgium is undeniable since 2012, with the first known case related to a rip-off deal. Now experts see violent crime used as intimidation and punishment, but also a tactic, so that police will investigate a competitor. We also know more about “invisible” violence, including the construction of an underground prison equipped with a gruesome torture chamber in the Netherlands.

Elsewhere, the contrasting approach of the Belgian and Dutch governments is starker. While the Belgian prime minster and the mayor of Antwerp are talking about cracking down — including on drug users — the Dutch will start a trial of regulated cannabis growing in the south this October, and Germany plans to legalise and control the drug. “Let’s be realistic: it’s impossible to make a fortress of our ports,” says Van der Aa. “The federal police is short 150 detectives. Trying to stop the cocaine is cat and mouse play, but the criminals are still there. You have to stop them — and that is not happening in Belgium.”

“It’s fine on the other side, it’s fine on the other side!” sing five rowdy, dancing Brits, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”. On the other side of the 14^th century Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, a cluster of partying men yodel back. It is midnight on a Friday in the heart of Amsterdam’s De Wallen district, and I am on a reconnaissance tour with Amsterdam’s Night Watch.

This is not the Night Watch memorialised by Rembrandt in 1642, the civic militia that would defend the city of Amsterdam from outside attack. Now the enemy is within, in the area named for the old city walls, but now infamous as the red-light district of Amsterdam. Els Iping and her neighbour Romeo are pacing the streets. Armed with quiet words and high-vis jackets, they are part of the “Wallen Watch”, a local vigilante defence force against drunken, doped-up tourists on raucous, licentious holidays.

When tourists slip behind chains intended to dissuade them from trespassing on people’s doorways to smoke weed, when there are strippers dancing on bars without a sex licence, when two groups of British tourists share their version of 1980s hits with entire neighbourhoods, Els politely takes note. “Please could you be quiet,” says this grandmother and former politician, who has lived in the Red Light District for four decades. “People live here.” To my amazement, every time, the tourists (often British) look abashed, say sorry and go on their way.

Why have the people of Amsterdam been forced to take public order into their own hands again? Because six decades of tolerating sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll have turned their city centre into a non-stop Saturnalia for visitors “on holiday from their morals” (as former Labour councillor Dennis Boutkan memorably put it). But morality aside, it is also a question of numbers: with thousands packing out the roads and streets on weekend nights, it is sometimes impossible for even emergency vehicles to access the area. And Els and Romeo are not alone in believing all this has been facilitated by the legal grey area of state policy on soft drugs.

Romeo, who has lived for six years at the heart of all this, says that when he leaves for his morning work at 4am, there are frequently still groups of screaming tourists. “With the corona rules, the place was empty in a day,” he says wistfully. “I saw people who live here, who never dared to sit outside before, having a picnic.” Now the pandemic lockdowns are gone, the tourists are back. And 47% of them are tempted to Amsterdam by the coffeeshops, although it’s clearly the combination of party behaviour (drinking, screeching, leering, urinating, with a spliff on the side) that creates the most localised nuisance. “We started last year with 30 people,” Els tells me. “Six people have moved away. It’s noise you can’t arm yourself against. We are desperate…but I don’t want them to win.”

“They”, in her view, are the businesses that have everything to gain from a loud and cash-filled Red Light District: the drug dealers offering a menu from pills to cocaine, the brothel owners, the 166 cannabis “coffeeshops” (100 serving tourist demand alone), plus sweet shops, bars and restaurants (for those with the munchies). Some may be set up by upright businessmen; some, says the mayor of Amsterdam, are part of criminal networks. Thanks to the opaque business constructions common in the Netherlands, it’s hard to tell them apart.

And for local residents, ironically, the Dutch idea of “tolerance” has become completely intolerable. The prostitution windows where sometimes-trafficked foreign women show off their cosmetically enhanced wares, the raucous bars, the coffeeshops where cannabis is sold and smoked, feel like an invasion: not a liberal paradise, but a human zoo from another age. A soft drugs policy that was ahead of its time in the Sixties has stranded the Netherlands in a no man’s land between controlled legalisation and arrant criminality. Under the Opium Act, a policy of toleration or gedoogbeleid means that the state allows “coffeeshops” to be established, taxed, and to sell cannabis to customers for consumption on site. However, since commercial cannabis growing is illegal, they have to buy from criminals.

More from this author

How the Netherlands became a narco state

By Senay Boztas

Mayor Femke Halsema, the deputy mayors and heads of the local police and public prosecution are convinced that the situation is untenable. Halsema believes that full legalisation and regulation of cannabis — and also cocaine — is the answer. In the meantime, she wants to enforce an existing national law to ban tourists from coffeeshops in order to shrink the sector. A majority of city councillors, concerned about more vulnerable young men being sucked into dealing to meet tourist demand and a consequent explosion in street crime, voted against her proposal this month.

Diederik Boomsma, councillor and head of the local Christian Democratic Appeal party, is one strong advocate of banning tourists from coffeeshops and is raising awareness about the dangers of drug use. “Peter Hitchens wrote a book about the drug policy in Britain and it starts with saying: cannabis isn’t merely a drug: it’s a cause,” he tells me. “That’s true in Amsterdam more than in other places and when something becomes a cause, people associate it with their self-understanding as a free, liberal, open-minded, tolerant city. But it doesn’t work. On the one hand, we say it’s allowed, you can buy the stuff in this coffeeshop, but it’s supplied by criminals so obviously you are going to have a huge criminal infrastructure. Why would you do something that funds violent criminals? Peter R de Vries was murdered right in front of my house.”

He is referring to the murder of a Dutch journalist who had been advising the crown witness against an alleged drug cartel — a killing which shocked the country into paying attention to its drugs problem. It was the third execution linked with the Marengo murder trial (involving leading members of a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation) following the deaths of the crown witness’s brother and his lawyer. For while the Netherlands’s transport links and horticultural and technical skills have made it a perfect landing-point for South American drugs (alongside its hugely successful domestic drug industry), this has brought violence in its wake. Experts like Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union, go as far as to call the country a “narco-state 2.0.”

Threats that the Telegraaf newspaper suggests come from the quarter of organised crime have recently even been aimed at Dutch Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. And four suspects were arrested in and around The Hague on suspicion of preparing to kidnap Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, after Dutch drug gang violence spilled over into Antwerp this summer. Across the Netherlands, drug experts like Pieter Tops and Jan Tromp — who wrote an influential 2019 report on the “dark side” of Amsterdam — believe some coffeeshops are part of a chain of ever more violent and lucrative drugs criminality, with shops, bars and property used to launder the money (part of a dodgy €16 billion a year that washes around the country, according to the De Nederlandsche Bank).

Suggested reading

Why America is losing the war on drugs

By Leighton Woodhouse

It’s a desperate situation, with the Dutch government investing millions in deterring crime that undermines public order, and putting together international partnerships to make its coastline “as unappealing as possible” for drug criminals importing their products. The public prosecutor finally has a larger budget to go after crime that has seeped into the “upper” world: lawyers, art galleries, accountants, banks and even civil servants who have committed alleged passport fraud, sold private details, failed to properly scrutinise their clients, or been over-eager to take payment in cash.

The justice minister of the Netherlands, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius doesn’t think legalisation by the Netherlands alone will do much, but admits the tolerance policy on cannabis really isn’t working. “If I’m honest, the ‘back door’ as we have it now in the Netherland, that [soft drugs] are tolerated but you can’t grow them, is very difficult to explain,” she tells me, after a meeting of European justice ministers in Amsterdam.

“Abroad, people look at you as though you are crackers. One point of view is that weed and soft drugs are another sector, another branch, with hard-working entrepreneurs and nothing wrong. But there’s also a notion that this is an entry point for cartels and other levels of drug dealing. You need to look at this very carefully.” She hopes that a much-delayed trial of legalised growing within 10 local areas begins soon so the ministry can analyse whether regulated cannabis growing reduces criminality. Meanwhile, others countries are experimenting with more permissive approaches to cannabis. Uruguay made the drug legal in 2013, followed by Canada, Mexico and some US states. Medical usage was legalised in Portugal in 2018 and Thailand is turning a blind eye, to stimulate tourism.

More from this author

The rotten heart of the Dutch gas wars

By Senay Boztas

While some people, including Amsterdam’s mayor Halsema and the attorney for the Marengo crown witness, Peter Schouten, believe legalising and regulating drugs is the only way to sort out the situation in the Netherlands, others want to send a message that drug tourism isn’t welcome. Boomsma has proposed a ban on weed smoking in public in the centre of Amsterdam, and believes his motion will get a council majority this year.

In the meantime, the situation in De Wallen — even compared with the bad old days of heroin addicts on the streets — is relentless for local people like Els and Romeo. While some political parties are focused on the problems of vulnerable districts on the outskirts, Els and Romeo point out that it is madness to make any part of the city essentially unliveable at a time of desperate housing need. Even some of the tourists seem blown away by it all. A young Australian woman emerging from the Casa Rosso “erotic theatre” at the end of the night on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, seems a bit dazed. “I need to wash off the filth,” she says, looking around and only half-joking.

The Netherlands needs more than a shower of liberal platitudes to clean up De Wallen. It needs clear drugs policy, a flashlight on criminal constructions and a power hose.

“We did it out of despair,” says Annemarie Nijhoff, who lives there with her partner Boelo ten Have. “That’s why we painted the farmhouse pink. It has been in the family for generations, carefully maintained. But for the last 10 years, it has been cracking so fast that we cannot repair it. Every time we report damage, we are told we are outside the earthquake zone.

“We believe it is a result of mine-related damage. We can’t pull it down because it’s a national monument. So we are completely stuck.”

Theirs is a common tale. This northernmost Dutch province has seen more than a million reports of damage since 1986, due to decades of earthquakes caused by 60 years of gas exploitation. In the process of emptying fourth-fifths of a field that contained 2,800 billion cubic metres of gas, the Dutch state has earned the equivalent of €417 billion. Its partner the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM) — owned by Shell and ExxonMobil — has taken the equivalent of €64.7 billion, according to figures seen by the Financieele Dagblad.

But what is most shocking is what has gone on behind closed doors: a succession of secret deals and convenient political myopia that are slowly being exposed in a ground-shaking parliamentary enquiry being televised across the country.

When the gas field was discovered and the first well was drilled in 1959, it was a gift to the once Nazi-occupied and war-torn country. But as the decades wore on, alarming signals of seismic activity, earthquakes and damage to buildings were dismissed, belittled and ignored by central government, which needed both the gas and the cash from exports.

Slowly, inexorably, press coverage and public outrage started to swell until, in early 2021, parliament voted to install its ultimate weapon of scrutiny: an enquiry to examine politicians, oil and gas executives, mining experts, residents and even schoolchildren who found themselves living in temporary homes with earthquake-proofed beds, as their families fell apart.

More from this author

Why Dutch farmers are revolting

By Senay Boztas

Now in its fourth week of hearings, the enquiry has uncovered political ignorance, secret lobbying, and agreements with NAM to avoid reducing production to strictly necessary levels. It also exposed a brazen admission by the former finance minister that, especially after the financial crash, the Treasury couldn’t do without the gas cash. Even though earthquakes were worsening and by 2015 the high court ordered non-essential extraction to stop, it did not.

Today, as a result, at a moment of Europe-wide energy insecurity, much-needed Dutch gas is no longer a political option, even if up to 20% of the field is still there. Thanks to tin-eared politicians and slippery oil firms, we are as vulnerable as the rest of Europe. Indeed, a week after Liz Truss removed a ban on unconventional fracking for shale gas in the UK (which is prohibited in the Netherlands), the Dutch experience might be seen as a lesson for politicians to listen and tread carefully.

In the beginning, the gas was welcome. “Straight after the Second World War, industry and government worked very closely to rebuild the Netherlands and extracting the gas for the benefit of the people at that time was a good thing,” says Liesbeth van Tongeren, Green Left politician and former director of Greenpeace Nederlands, who campaigned as an MP to reduce gas extraction from Groningen. Rather than build a sovereign wealth fund like Norway, the gas boosted the annual budget for the state, especially in later years.

But then, in 1986, the earthquakes began to start. The worst didn’t take place until August 2012, in Huizinge: it measured 3.6 on the Richter scale, but because of its relatively shallow depth (compared to natural earthquakes), it caused extensive damage and a cataclysmic feeling of shock.

By 2013, Groningen province was campaigning for expert research into the risks and compensation for damage. Yet somehow, that same year, gas extraction rose from 27 billion cubic metres to almost 54 billion, with the NAM advocating for more. The years that followed involved high court rulings, political promises to “stop the gas tap” and three different bodies charged with compensating owners and strengthening buildings.

But on the ground, the tremors were trivialised, partly because nobody died or was seriously injured as a direct result. “The Hague had the feeling that this was very far away,” says Van Tongeren. “If anything like that earthquake had happened in Amsterdam, it would have been dealt with completely differently. It was easier to ignore.”

Fast forward to today, however, and pledges to stop extracting gas from the field remain unfulfilled. Like every country in Europe, the Netherlands is scrambling to create more processing facilities for Liquefied Natural Gas. Any political debate about increasing this year’s 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas is unlikely to go anywhere. The government is promising to close the Groningen field entirely in 2023 or 2024, but only “if the geopolitical situation makes it possible”.

More from this author

Why Rotterdam erupted

By Senay Boztas

Meanwhile, Groningers are left angry and bewildered. What they are hearing in the enquiry reaffirms their suspicions over the years, the sense of being taken for fools, and a justification for all of their mistrust. “Some people think it’s all very well to have a parliamentary enquiry but that it won’t solve today’s problem,” Coert Fossen, chair of the Groninger Bodem Beweging (Groningen Ground Movement), tells me.

Another reason for their frustration is the fact that many have had to fight for every euro of compensation. Another historic house in Groningen has just been painted protest pink, an estimated 13,000 homes are still unsafe, and tens of thousands of claims have been rejected.

Fabian Buiter, a financial controller from Beerta, probably heard the most outrageous excuse from the Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen (IMG) now handling claims. An inspector said splits in his bathroom tiles masking €30,000 of damage were due to poor quality fittings and the soap he used in the shower. He lives on the edge of the official “contour lines” and after a failed court case, paid for the damage himself. He might even laugh about the soap-dodgers, if the whole thing didn’t make him want to cry.

Small wonder, then, that these down-to-earth Groningers, who are more used to ploughing the fields and keeping themselves to themselves, have lost trust in their government. For them, the political damage is done; and even when the gas stops, the earthquakes will continue for decades.

Some in The Hague put their hope in a strong enquiry report next February, leading to the creation of an independent arbiter that can control and effectively regulate fossil fuel extraction in the future. Others believe the situation will help speed up a transition to renewable energy. The danger is that despite the efforts of earnest parliamentarians, this scandal, like all the others in The Hague, will soon be written up, written off, and a part of fading memory. But in this corner of the Netherlands, the aftershock will remain.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

Suggested article

I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Aris Roussinos

Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

Suggested article

America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

Suggested article

How Ukrainian women will suffer

By Julie Bindel

But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

More from this author

Inside the surreal Dutch lockdown

By Senay Boztas

Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

Suggested reading

Why people love dead Jews

By Matti Friedman

And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

Suggested reading

Adolf Eichmann and me

By Shaul Ladany

The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

Suggested reading

Why Holocaust memorials fail

By Tanya Gold

During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.

De Kom is to Suriname what Mandela is to South Africa: a heroic patriot, an advocate of the oppressed, and a symbol of resistance against colonialism. His magnum opus, We Slaves of Suriname — originally written and published in 1934 — was the first history of slavery and Dutch colonialism in Suriname written by a Surinamese man. It was composed while he was exiled to the Netherlands and under surveillance for anti-colonial protests. After its publication, he and it were censored and neglected for years by the Dutch, let alone the West in general.

But then came the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and a renewed interest in examining the racial injustices of the past. There has since been a surge of interest in De Kom. Last February, the Dutch government pledged to honour him “with a generous gesture”. He became the first Surinamer to be included in the canon of Dutch history, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. And this month, the first ever English translation of We Slaves of Suriname will be published, 88 years after its completion.

The book is, in part, an ode to De Kom’s homeland: a beautiful, tropical wonderland, teeming with life. But it also tells the history of Suriname, from the beginning of European settlement — which very quickly led to the catastrophic demise of the nation’s aboriginal peoples — to when the Dutch fully colonised it in 1667, turning it into a plantation colony. From this point onwards, thousands of enslaved Africans were imported, to work producing sugar and coffee to export back to the mother country.

For De Kom, slavery was personal. He repeatedly refers to the enslaved as “our fathers and our mothers”, and deftly weaves his own autobiography into the history of Suriname. His father was born a slave, and later became a farmer. He was part of the generation of slaves emancipated into “free” citizenship under Dutch rule, yet haunted by memories still fresh in their minds, and stories passed down by their elders.

Early in the book, De Kom invites “the white reader”, who he believes will be sceptical of what he writes, to contemplate a sailing ship. For De Kom, the image is not one of freedom; it represents instead the torture of his ancestors:

“But we do wish to warn you. From your lofty seat, do not venture down the futtouck shroud … Up here you can smell the invigorating smell of tar and the salt sea wind … Down there it already reeks a mile leeward of the sweat and excrement of a thousand slaves packed into a hold.

Up here you can hear the cries of the albatross, the song of the sailors, and the crash of the wave … Down there you can hear the cries of the slaves, the wails of the women in labour, and the crack of the whip coming down on the backs of blacks.”

When the history of European colonialism is interrogated, the focus tends to be on the British and French (and, to a lesser extent, Spanish) empires. The role of the Netherlands is rarely noted, though it had one of Europe’s oldest empires, including colonies in Suriname, Java and Southern Africa. And, as Pepijn Brandon has argued, the Netherlands was also a key player in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch planters had a reputation for being especially cruel and sadistic in their treatment of slaves.

More from this author

How the Dutch invented our world

By Ralph Leonard

The typical colonial narrative argues for the “civilising” influence of the imperial power. De Kom counters this with brutal expositions of what Dutch rule really meant for the Surinamese, documenting gruesome accounts of the torture frequently dished out to those seen as slacking or insubordinate. A common technique was the notorious “Spanish billy goat”, where the slave would be mercilessly flogged while his two hands were tied together, his knees pulled up through the arms with a stick inserted between them and planted onto the ground. The frequent sexual abuse of black women by their masters, long a taboo subject, is also given in-depth treatment by De Kom.

Despite all this, De Kom is uneasily ambivalent towards the end of slavery in Suriname. In 1863, 100,000 or so slaves became free citizens — in name, but not in essence. “The physical instruments of torture,” De Kom lamented, “have largely been replaced by mental torments, poverty and want.” While former slave-owners were compensated for the loss of their “property”, former slaves received no reparations. They weren’t given any land, training, education or credit — unlike European settlers, who had received all these things upon arrival, to help them make a living.

Instead, former slaves had little choice but to enter coolie contracts under “state supervision” for ten years before they could even be officially “free”. It was basically another form of slavery; in other words, the abolition of slavery was managed in the interests of plantation owners, rather than the individuals they’d exploited. It was a sham.

Suggested reading

How Big Slave ruled Britain

By Gavin Haynes

Likewise, Suriname’s “autonomy” was also a sham. The nation was still seen as inseparable from the Dutch kingdom. De Kom’s raison d’etre for writing We Slaves of Suriname was to unshackle his compatriots from their “inherited sense of inferiority and to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” so that they could extricate themselves from the Dutch yoke.

Nevertheless, despite his fervent indictments of the evils of slavery and Dutch colonialism, De Kom was unlike some of his contemporaries, in that he did not subscribe to the “back to Africa” agenda. The decolonisation struggle he envisioned was not meant to be a violent one, or a regression into narrow tribalism: “What I was after was organisation, not a bloodbath.” He firmly believed that the mosaic society of Suriname — composed of blacks, Indians and Javanese — could unite in the spirit of solidarity to liberate their nation, and achieve a dignified human existence for all citizens.

On the last page of his book, De Kom dreamt of the day he would return to a free Suriname:

“Sranang my fatherland.
I hope to see you again once.
On the day when all misery shall be erased from you.”

More from this author

The abolitionist who believed in bloodshed

By Ralph Leonard

The lines are particularly poignant if you know that, when he wrote them, he would never see his treasured homeland again. Shortly after the German invasion of Holland in 1940, De Kom joined the Dutch resistance and wrote for the censored De Vonk, a paper affiliated with the Dutch Communist party, which mainly documented the abusive activities of fascist gangs in the streets of The Hague (in particular those against Jews). On the 7th August 1944, he was arrested by Nazi forces and sentenced to forced labour at Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis and was buried in a mass grave. Ever since, his legacy has risked fading into history.

His work is poignant, too, because Suriname has suffered since then. National independence, like the abolition of slavery, has not been a glowing success. Since 1975, when Dutch rule finally came to an end, Suriname has endured civil war, dictatorships, tribalism and corruption — similar to that which plagues a lot of post-colonial nations. The nation is still haunted by the abuses of empire.

Anton De Kom’s work doesn’t tell an uplifting story, then; but it is a common story, of how our modern world came to be. Black labour, in the form of chattel slavery, played a significant role in creating the wealth of the West. “This is the price we pay for the sugar you eat,” cries out the limbless and nameless Negro slave (owned by a cruel and unscrupulous Dutch merchant) in Voltaire’s Candide. Human beings turned into commodities: this is our history whether we are comfortable with it or not. And De Kom, despite all the efforts to silence him, will not let us forget it.