Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  3.

  I was taken to see Fouad and Farhane perform by two of the most prominent Friends of Theo: his main scriptwriter, Theodor Holman, and his producer, Gijs van de Westelaken. We drove to the theater in Gijs’s convertible, speeding through the narrow nineteenth-century streets of south Amsterdam on a warm evening in June. Holman, a chunky man in his early fifties, is famous for his confessional columns and radio shows, in which he talks a great deal about his late friend Theo, as well as his own frustrations, often of a sexual nature. The theater was located in a gleaming new “community center,” designed by the city authorities to foster multicultural tolerance through the arts in a heavily Muslim area that had become notorious for its high crime rate. Mohammed Bouyeri, Van Gogh’s killer, was born a few streets away.

  As we entered “dish city,” Theodor joked about being assassinated. “I need a disguise!” he cried in mock fear. Moroccan youths, he said, often taunted him by shouting “Mohammed B. Mohammed B!” There were not many people in the streets of this dreary 1950s neighborhood. The travel agents offering cheap flights to Morocco and Turkey were closed. A few young men hung around a shabby-looking kebab joint, speaking loudly in a Dutch slang that owes much to American rap. Women in black headscarves carried plastic bags from a local supermarket. Two old men in beards and djellabas sat on a bench staring ahead in silence. From a distance the community center reminded me of a mosque, with a white minaret. It turned out to have been a Christian church before its current incarnation.

  Theodor greeted the pretty young woman behind the bar, the manager of the community center, with effusive enthusiasm. Her parents were from Turkey, he explained. She had voted for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the only one in her family and circle of friends to have done so. Theodor had tried to seduce her on several occasions, but to no avail. In the bar, he spoke gloomily of the 1960s, and how he felt “all screwed up” by the sexual liberalism of his parents. I looked around, curious to see who came to this community center. Even though we were in the middle of “dish city,” few people looked non-European. The “Turkish” woman confirmed this. “Most of the locals who come here,” she said, “are Dutch natives.”

  This was certainly true of the audience for Fouad and Farhane’s play: well-meaning liberals watching two former street kids act out their road to redemption. The short play consisted of sketches, performed at great speed, of robbing old ladies at a cash machine, of neighborhood fights, of gang-banging girls, of smoking dope, of getting arrested, of being imprisoned, and finally of seeing the light, returning to school, and “doing something positive for the community.”

  Fouad and Farhane had performed their play at schools, in prisons, even for Job Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor. It was perhaps a little too wholesome, smacking too much of do-goodery, to be wholly satisfying as theater. But when they joined us for a soft drink at the bar afterward, there was something about them that was more intriguing, an edge that was lacking in their play. They had attitude. I wanted to hear more about their lives, but this was not the time or place. There was a lot of good-natured joshing, slapping of hands, and kidding around between them and the Friends of Theo, but little conversation. Gijs in his expensive suede shoes looked less incongruous in the community center than Fouad and Farhane in their T-shirts, baggy pants, and baseball caps.

  I made a date with Farhane to meet him in The Hague, our hometown. After the two actors had left, Theodor and Gijs swapped anecdotes about Theo, about his success with women, his flowery letters full of clichés about eternal love, about his sense of irony. “Irony,” said Theodor rather solemnly, “is such an essential part of the Dutch makeup. I really notice this after Theo’s death. It’s so much part of our tradition.”

  It is indeed part of the tradition, and a great deal of humor depends on it. But there is a less positive side to this tradition. Irony can be a healthy antidote to dogmatism, but also an escape from any blame. Outrageous or offensive statements are often followed by protestations that they were meant in jest, but only once their poisoned darts have hit their marks. Irony is a great license for irresponsibility. Theo van Gogh liked to call himself the village idiot, as though that absolved him of everything. And yet he wanted to be taken seriously too. This wanting it both ways is a common disease in Dutch intellectual discourse, exemplified by some of the writers Van Gogh admired most. Its destructive power can be cushioned in a narrow society where everyone knows the rules of the game. When it is exposed to outsiders with a less playful view of words, the effects can be devastating.

  4.

  We sat on the sidewalk terrace of a coffeeshop in The Hague, not far from the medieval Dutch parliament, barricaded against terrorist attacks with bollards. Farhane, a short, baby-faced man in his early twenties, gave the thumbs-up sign to various passersby. A few even merited a high five. This was his town, he told me, people knew him here. He was a real “Hague kid.” His soft, cherubic features offered a peculiar contrast to his chest and arms, which were those of a trained fighter—he was keen on tae kwon do, the Korean martial art. We talked about theater, about Van Gogh and his murder, about 9/11, and about what it was like to grow up Moroccan-Dutch in The Hague.

  Farhane’s family is in fact unusually successful. His father taught himself to speak Dutch and owned several shops in The Hague. His two elder brothers were the first Moroccans to finish the prestigious Gymnasium Haganum. One works as an IT expert for the ministry of justice, the other for a large insurance firm. “I was the exception,” Farhane said. “Everything was fine until I screwed up.”

  Farhane quit school, joined a gang, got involved in various crimes, was sent to a juvenile detention center, and ended up in a school for difficult children, where he learned nothing. Kids just sat around reading comics and smoking dope. One girl committed suicide on the third day he was there. He decided that this was no place to linger and robbed the headmaster in order to get expelled: “If I hadn’t robbed him, I’d still be sitting there, smoking dope, reading comics, and getting into fights.”

  One of Farhane’s earliest and bitterest memories goes back to when he was six. It still fills him with anger. The parents of his best friend, a Dutch kid, wouldn’t let them play together. He wasn’t even invited to his friend’s birthday party. It was clear that he was not wanted. “That’s something you never forget. Even though I wasn’t so aware of what it meant at the time, it haunted me when I was a teenager. The worst thing is to be put in a box, to be told you don’t belong. So you join others who’re in the same box.”

  In Morocco, he explained, children play in the streets, but they’re never out of sight. Everyone knows each other. Adults look out for other people’s kids. But life in The Hague is different. The boys are let loose, as if they were in a Moroccan village, but no one keeps an eye on them. They run wild because there is nobody to tell them what’s right or wrong. The parents themselves don’t know how to cope with practical things, so their children have to help them with everything, filling out forms, and the like. That’s why children lose trust in their own parents. You end up feeling angry.

  With your parents? “No, with the Dutch state, which let us come here without explaining how things work. They let our parents clean the streets, work in factories, fix everything, but it’s up to us, the children, to solve their problems. We can’t blame our parents. We just can’t rely on them.”

  I thought of another Dutchman of Moroccan descent whom I had met not long before, in Rotterdam, where he worked for a famous architectural firm. His father had also come to Holland as a guest worker, but had never owned anything himself. Although not an uneducated man—he went to a Koranic school in Morocco—he worked at a menial job in the same furniture factory for twenty-five years. Samir, the son, was born in Morocco, but joined his father when he was three. He remembers seeing his father at work, and noticed how his colleagues made jokes at his expense. There was no malice in what they said, just condescension. They treated his father as if he were a child. “That hurt,” he said. “It�
�s like seeing your mother being scolded by some Dutch woman in a store for not speaking Dutch properly.”

  He felt embarrassed for his parents, not because they didn’t see what was going on, but because they had to pretend not to. They were too proud to show their humiliation, and so their children felt it all the more. When his father had worked at the factory for twenty-five years, he was picked up, as a special treat, to go to work in the boss’s car. That was all. “That’s when I saw how much respect he was given.”

  Did his father ever regret having come to the Netherlands? “No, he didn’t, because he sacrificed everything for us to have a better life. He wanted me to become a doctor, the safest option. He doesn’t understand why I wanted to become an architect. He thinks I’m a kind of bricklayer.”

  Farhane speaks Dutch to his brothers. With his parents he speaks Berber as well as Dutch. “About fifty-fifty,” he said. Samir, the architect, said he still felt “like a guest in this country.” I asked Farhane whether he ever felt Dutch. “Neither Dutch, nor Moroccan,” he replied. What if Holland plays soccer against Morocco? “Then I’m for Morocco, for sure! But if I had to choose between a Dutch passport and a Moroccan one, I would choose the Netherlands. You have to think of your interests. A Moroccan passport would be useless. But with soccer I can choose for my own blood.”

  The day Theo van Gogh died, Farhane was on a train bound for Amsterdam. He was going to meet a writer to discuss a film script, and he knew something was up because people had called him on his mobile phone. By a bizarre coincidence, the writer lived on the street where Van Gogh was murdered. When Farhane arrived at his house, Van Gogh’s corpse was still lying on the bicycle path under a blue plastic sheet. Farhane, like many Moroccan-looking people that day, was pursued by reporters who wanted to get his reaction. He refused to talk. “Those journalists had no respect,” he said.

  Farhane owed a lot to Van Gogh. Without him, he would never have become an actor. He enjoyed working with him. Theo was always open to discussion. But now he had to explain to other Moroccans that Cool! had been made before Submission, the film Van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for otherwise he “would have been seen as a traitor.”

  He had seen only a small bit of the eleven-minute film. “It was totally ridiculous, totally missing the point.” Van Gogh must have been “tricked into making such a film.” Projecting the Koran onto the naked body of a woman is “an insult, the kind of insult I could never forget, like that time I wasn’t allowed to play with my best friend at school. All Moroccans feel that way. I would never support Mohammed Bouyeri. But about the film he was right.”

  Right to kill Van Gogh? Farhane frowned, and played with his empty Coca-Cola glass. He found it easier not to speak entirely for himself: “No Moroccan respects Mohammed Bouyeri. To commit a murder during Ramadan—that is totally unacceptable.” It was an odd answer that I had not expected. What did the fasting season have to do with the right to commit murder? Farhane looked pensive, then said: “Well, murder is never justified. Mohammed was not acting alone, of course. He was just a crazy guy. Mad! But I can see how one can be pushed into it.”

  Farhane saw how extremists began to emerge after 9/11. He still meets them from time to time in coffeehouses around The Hague. They say things there which they would never say in front of a camera. Only the other day someone said millions of Muslim women wanted to marry Mohammed Bouyeri. “You get pushed into it,” Farhane repeated. “Just like me, you get into the wrong crowd of people, who are in the same boat as you, whose values are different from those in Holland. It doesn’t happen overnight. Like dope, it is a gradual thing: you start off with a toke, then a few more puffs. Then you roll a joint …”

  5.

  It’s not in Amsterdam that the demographic change in Holland is most visible. Though not quite a metropolis, Amsterdam is still a city where people are used to seeing foreigners. Even in Rembrandt’s day there were large communities of strangers. More startling is the change in small provincial towns, where nothing much has happened since the war against Spain almost five hundred years ago. I knew Amersfoort, near Utrecht, only as the place where my grandparents moved into a retirement home. This is not a fair perspective, to be sure, but Amersfoort, with its pretty fifteenth-century church spire, its medieval market square, and its pleasant suburban houses, seemed like a place of deep provincial torpor, comfortable and very dull. Mondrian was born there, but left when he was eight. The only other thing of note is that the woods on the edge of town were the site of one of the most vicious Nazi concentration camps: Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Amersfoort.

  Of the 129,720 citizens of Amersfoort, almost 21 percent are now of foreign origin. The police estimate that 40 percent of the Moroccan boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen are suspected of criminal behavior. It is a vague statistic. What does “suspected” mean? This may simply be a reflection of local prejudices, or perhaps the situation is worse than the figures suggest. It is impossible to know for sure.

  In the shadow of the Church Tower of Our Lady, I had tea with Bellari Said, a small, trim man, born in Morocco, who spoke Dutch with the strong southern lilt of Limburg, near the Belgian border. It is an accent that normally can mean only one thing to a Dutch person: that the speaker’s family is Catholic. This is no longer the case, of course. Bellari Said was a Limburger too. As we spoke, young men and women on stilts, dressed in grotesque animal masks and strange peaked hats, were moving across the market square, frightening the children, perhaps reenacting some medieval pageant.

  Bellari is another Moroccan success story. His parents are illiterate villagers from the Rif. Yet he has two university degrees, is active in politics, and practices psychiatry. Bellari’s politics are a mixture of leftist Third Worldism, with a particular animus against Israel and the United States, and an active interest in the Muslim identity. Hence his membership in Abou Jahjah’s European-Arab League and his desire to start a Muslim political party in the Netherlands. Since 9/11 and the murder of Van Gogh, Bellari is worried about the rule of law. Never in thirty years had he “seen a similar threat to the constitutional state.”

  Despite his feelings about Israel—“the West will only be reconciled with the Islamic world once Israel ceases to exist”—he sees the powerful “Jewish lobby” in the United States as an example for European Muslims. There should be an Islamic lobby of that kind in Europe, and Islamic schools, a recognized Islamic university, Islamic hospitals, and so forth. Only then can the new Europeans take their rightful places as citizens. The notion of secularizing Islam, in his view, is nonsense; it simply won’t happen. Instead, religion must be used to harness Muslims to the constitutional state.

  I was less interested in Bellari’s politics than in his work as a psychiatrist. He had some specific data about immigrants that were, to say the least, arresting. The main problems among his patients, he said, were depression and schizophrenia: depression was especially common among women, and schizophrenia among men. But schizophrenia did not seem to affect first-generation immigrants. The guest workers tended to become depressed, not schizophrenic. It was the second generation of Moroccans, born and educated in the Netherlands, that suffered from schizophrenia. A young Moroccan male of the second generation was ten times more likely to be schizophrenic than a native Dutchman from a similar economic background.

  There are several possible explanations for these startling figures. A sense of humiliation could be a factor, or the fact that immigrants tend to visit a psychiatrist only when things have come to a crisis. But Bellari has a theory about schizophrenia. He believes that the problem lies in the adaptation of a strictly regulated society to a freer, more open one. This can lead to disintegration of the personality. The pressure to assimilate is one of the risk factors for schizophrenia. Men suffer more than women because they have more freedom to interact with mainstream Western society. When the process of integration goes too fast, when the son of Moroccan villagers throws himself too quickly into the bewilderin
g maelstrom of Western temptations, his “cognitive wiring” can go badly awry. The desire for strict religious rules is a form of nostalgia, as it were, a way to regain the world of one’s parents, or what people think was the world of their parents. To remain sane, they long for the security of a paradise lost.

  Girls, or young women, have the opposite problem. They have to live with many traditional constraints; the old order still exists for many of them, and so they long for more freedom. Bellari is a sophisticated man, and he worries about the consequences of religious extremism. But he, like most Muslims I talked to, had little sympathy for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He thinks she has gone too far. “Look at her,” he says. “She’s a typical example of what I’m talking about. Having fought for her freedom, she goes berserk whenever she sees anything that smacks of the old ways that she grew up with.”

  Too much freedom, then, would seem to be a bad thing. Muslims of the second or even third generation need religion “as a stabilizing factor. It will help people integrate better, make them more altruistic, keep them on the right path.” It is a strangely conservative view for a man who thinks of himself as a leftist. He is convinced that only properly organized religion will stop young men from downloading extremism from the Internet.

  The yearning for the safe strictures of tradition also explains, in his opinion, why Muslim men prefer to marry girls from Morocco. Muslim girls born in the Netherlands are too threatening. And that is why, according to Bellari, more and more Muslim girls will end up marrying non-Muslims.

  He may be right, even though this doesn’t match the general impression that people have of Muslim women in the Netherlands. Perhaps because women in headscarves and veils, let alone burqas, are more conspicuous, it is women, more than men, who are the walking symbols of the kind of alien fundamentalism that many people fear. Yet the impression one gets of young Muslim women just from strolling around a Dutch city center is mixed and inconclusive: girls in headscarves and long dresses walk arm in arm with others in tank tops and jeans. It is as though religious attire is often worn as a fashion statement, or an assertion of difference, as much as a sign of devotion.