The dark, dangerous side of Dutch tolerance

Ben Coates is the author of the books “Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2015) and “The Rhine: Following Europe’s Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps” (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2018). 

GOUDA, Netherlands — For a journalist to be gunned down in any city would be a shocking event. But in Amsterdam, famed as the most liberal city in the world, it feels like an earthquake.

Since Tuesday evening, when the famous crime reporter Peter R. de Vries was shot in the head in a busy street, Dutch media and politicians have talked of little else. This is, after all, a country where crime rates are low, prisons are being closed because there are not enough prisoners to fill them and the prime minister usually has no bodyguards and cycles around on his own. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen here.

In some ways, though, the shooting feels grimly inevitable. The Netherlands is rightly famous for its habits of tolerance and compromise — but recently there’s been growing bitterness in the public sphere, including an increasing number of threats and assaults against journalists and media outlets.

Last year, the state broadcaster NOS announced it was removing its logo from its roaming broadcast vans because “almost daily, journalists and technicians on the road to report are confronted with verbal abuse, garbage is thrown, vans are blocked [and] people bang on their sides or urinate on them.”

“It has all changed so quickly in a short time,” the NOS chief news editor said.

As in some other countries, it’s also become routine for leading politicians to denounce the press on a regular basis. Last month, for instance, the far-right politician and rabble-rouser Geert Wilders tweeted that “Journalists are — with exceptions — just scum of the ledge,” to which his fellow parliamentarian Thierry Baudet promptly agreed: “It is so.”

There’s clearly a huge difference between scorning journalists like this and shooting them, and many of those who usually enjoy taunting the press have been quick to condemn this week’s attack. But it’s also clear that the Dutch media climate is increasingly fraught: According to one government minister, reported threats and acts of aggression against journalists roughly trebled between 2019 and 2020 alone.

A couple of years ago, someone even fired an anti-tank rocket at the Amsterdam headquarters of a crime magazine. Against that backdrop, incidents like this week’s shooting feel less surprising than they should.

At the time of writing, De Vries is fighting for his life and police have arrested several suspects, but much else about the case remains unclear. However, it’s widely assumed that De Vries was attacked not simply for being a journalist, but because of his role as a confidant of a key witness in a major drug gang trial — one of a series of high-profile incidents which have exposed some other dark elements of Dutch society.

The Netherlands has been known for its unusually tolerant approach to drugs for years. Under a policy known as gedoogbeleid, marijuana is technically illegal here, but its sale and consumption are widely tolerated by authorities, including in the famous Amsterdam “coffee shops” where people consume a lot more than just coffee.

For a long time, the “ban it but tolerate it” policy seemed like a masterful bit of Dutch difference-splitting: The police were free to focus on more serious problems, and there was little evidence marijuana use harmed wider society.

The stereotypical coffee shop in Amsterdam or elsewhere looked less like a seedy drug den and more like a friendly neighborhood establishment, run by a cheerfully rumpled proprietor who’d been sitting there for decades.

In recent years, however, the Dutch drug trade has been transformed. The oddities of the gedoogbeleid mean that while soft drug use is tolerated, supplying larger quantities remains illegal. This means that the main source of large quantities of marijuana is, by definition, criminal organizations.

As demand for drugs in Amsterdam has soared due to tourism, many of the rumpled old coffee shop owners have been forced out, and professional criminal gangs have moved in, running supply networks that are headed by rich foreign masterminds and stretch across Europe.

Trade in cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs has boomed, and there have been widespread reports of new shops and bars being opened purely to launder drug money, as part of what the Telegraaf newspaper called “a golden age for the Amsterdam drug criminals.”

In 2019, a report commissioned by Amsterdam authorities warned that the city had “given free rein … to a motley crew of drugs criminals, a ring of hustlers and parasites, middle-men and extortionists, of dubious notaries and real estate agents.”

“We definitely have the characteristics of a narco-state,” the chairman of a Dutch police union told the BBC.

Faced with such challenges, the authorities in Amsterdam and elsewhere have made repeated efforts to clamp down, including trying to restrict the sale of marijuana to foreign tourists. The government itself has even tried to muscle in on the drug trade, licensing a few legal marijuana growers to keep the coffee shops supplied.

However, while some dodgy shops have closed, its effect on the bigger problems seems limited, and there have been violent gangland turf wars. In 2018, Amsterdam’s police chief Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg gave a sensational television interview in which he complained it was almost impossible to tackle minor crimes because his force was “dealing with assassinations for 60 to 70 percent [of the time], and for the rest, mainly with radicalization and terrorism investigations.”

That may have been an exaggeration, but a visitor arriving in the Netherlands bearing cheerful clichés about laid-back liberals and endless cycle paths might still be shocked to open a newspaper, only to read how often hand grenades are left lying in doorways as threats from one gang to another. According to RTL news, in one four-month spell in 2019 alone, there were 23 incidents involving hand grenades being left at homes or workplaces, many of them in Amsterdam.

In some circles, there’s a tendency to dismiss such incidents as just “criminals hurting criminals” — and to assume that organized crime is nothing for law-abiding people to worry about. But that odd cordon sanitaire has also begun to fray lately, and violent gang disputes have spilled over to affect reporters and the public too.

In 2016, the crime blogger Martin Kok was shot dead after reporting on several controversial cases. Three years later, Derk Wiersum, a 44-year-old father of two, working as a lawyer in the same drug trial which Peter de Vries was involved in, was shot dead in front of his wife in a suburban Amsterdam street. Two months after that, another lawyer narrowly survived a shooting while walking his dog near the German border. And now De Vries himself, a Dutch celebrity known for his work exposing drug dealers, kidnappers and others, has been attacked in broad daylight.

Individually, these events would be shocking enough, but together they feel like something worse: a fresh confirmation that there are real threats to the freedoms we Dutch hold dear. On Wednesday, King Willem-Alexander denounced the latest shooting as an assault on a cornerstone of the rechtsstaat — using a hard-to-translate Dutch phrase referring to the constellation of institutions and individuals that underpin the rule of law.

It’s important to emphasize that, overall, the Netherlands remains a remarkably successful and peaceful society. Around where I live, to the south of Amsterdam, you’re still more likely to run into a dairy farmer wearing clogs than a vicious drug lord.

But it’s also clear that although Dutch tolerance brings many delights, it also has a seamy side. Underneath the country’s pretty façade there’s a dark undercurrent, which may be getting stronger.