Murder in Amsterdam Read Free Page A

years later. Like most quips of this sort, it was unfair, yet not totally untrue, especially in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Netherlands had pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, and so on. This, too, led to an air of satisfaction, even smugness, a self-congratulatory notion of living in the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfectly evolved playground of multicultural utopianism.
    I had left Amsterdam in the winter of 1975, at the height of its good times, driven by a traditional Dutch wanderlust, a desire to set sail for the wider, larger world, but also by a certain boredom with the Dutch idyll. My restlessness may well have been a sign of growing up in a pampered society,where there was always enough to eat, and no one had to fear a knock on the door after midnight. Yet there were cracks showing in the national idyll even then, as I was leaving. Seven young Moluccan activists had just seized a train in a province near the German border and held the passengers hostage in an attempt to get Dutch support for the independence of the south Moluccan islands from Indonesia. When the hijackers failed to get their way, the engine driver and two passengers were murdered and, to the horror of millions watching TV, tossed casually onto the tracks. On my way to the airport, we had to make a detour because the Indonesian consulate had been occupied by Moluccan activists shooting off guns.
    These acts of violence, or terrorism, have been largely forgotten now. There were no heroes in this story, and the villains were more pathetic than monstrous. It was in fact a typical case of unresolved colonial bad faith. Moluccans, many of them Christians, had fought on the Dutch side in colonial wars. Like minorities in other European empires—the Hmong in Indochina, the Indian Sikhs—they served in colonial armies in exchange for privileges and protection. When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1941, the Moluccans—unlike most Javanese—resisted on behalf of the Dutch, and were treated by the Japanese with special venom. When Indonesia declared independence after theJapanese defeat, the Moluccans once again fought alongside Dutch troops, in a brutal campaign (“police actions”) to crush the Javanese-led independence movement. It was a bloody as well as a hopeless cause.
    The Dutch finally left Indonesia in 1949, and they took the Moluccan soldiers with them. They had no choice, since the Indonesians would not let the “traitors” go home to the Moluccas. But since the Moluccans had no desire to rebuild their lives in the cold and frowsy towns of postwar Holland, and the Dutch had no desire to let them stay, the Moluccans were promised a swift return to an independent homeland. The Dutch would see to that. But of course the Dutch had no intention of creating any more trouble with Indonesia. So the poor Moluccans were shunted off to former Nazi concentration camps, such as Westerbork, from where, less than a decade before, almost a hundred thousand Dutch Jews had been deported, most never to return. Westerbork had been built originally for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. That, too, was supposed to have been a temporary solution. They, too, were not expected to stay. By 1975, it was clear that independence for the south Moluccans was an illusion, a deceitful promise of a false dawn. A new generation had grown up with no hope of returning and no life outside the camps. It was not a good start to the new age of multiculturalism.
    3.
    Amsterdam, December 21: The family of the murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh is angry with Prime Minister Balkenende for his failure to console the next of kin. The Government Information Agency denied this. Yesterday night in the