Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  To call it nihilism would be wrong, for Mohammed did have a utopian ideal, however absurd and cobbled together, which was the state of pure faith, where nothing but the word of Allah and his prophet could penetrate. When he was visited by a prison psychiatrist before his trial, Mohammed turned his back on him, put on his headphones, and drowned out the world in amplified Koranic prayers. The impulse to seek oblivion, to be intoxicated or overwhelmed by a great force, is not rare. The rush of drugs, sex, and death stems from a common source. But this leaves the question, why him? What turned Mohammed into a character from Conrad?

  3.

  Hamid Bouyeri, Mohammed’s father, is a relatively successful man in terrible physical shape. Years of hard menial work in Amsterdam, where he arrived in 1965 via France, have damaged his knees so badly that he can no longer kneel when he goes to pray at his neighborhood mosque. He has to sit in a chair. It can’t have been easy to raise a family of eight children in a cramped apartment on the salary of a dishwasher. He worked long hours and did all the shopping on the weekends. His wife barely spoke a word of Dutch. And yet, compared to the people in Douar Ikhammalen, a dirt-poor hamlet in the Rif mountains, where he began tending goats at the age of five, Hamid is a rich man. The mosque near the river, down from the village, with its fine minaret covered in red, yellow, and green mosaic, was built with his money. He also built a house, where his brother lives on a small pension earned from years of backbreaking work in Paris. But Hamid likes to spend his summer holidays in another place he owns, in Oujda, a resort town near the Algerian border with hotels, restaurants, and cafés.

  Mohammed last visited his father’s native village in 1999, when he traveled through in his white Peugeot. His Berber was not really good enough for him to communicate easily with his relatives, and the tiny village, which most young men left to work in Europe because they could barely make a living growing corn and olives in the hard red clay, held few attractions. He preferred to hang out in Oujda, where he spent most of his time in the cafés, listening to Western pop music.

  Much was made in the press, after the murder of Van Gogh, of Mohammed’s successful integration as a Dutch citizen. He was said to have been “promising,” a “clever kid,” a “positivo,” who was popular and active in the community. There was some truth to this, but one of his high school teachers also remembers him as “timid and aloof,”2 a boy who had trouble looking you in the eye. Always on the heavy side, he was no good at sports and shy around girls. He did work very hard, though, for he wanted to do well at school, have a career, be a success.

  When Mohammed entered Mondrian High School, it was still a mixed school. About 40 percent of the pupils were of non-Dutch origin, mostly Moroccans. Everyone took part in theater performances, fashion shows, and school excursions. But things began to change while “Mo” was there. Muslim girls were no longer allowed to go on school trips. Boys cut classes and spent their days watching satellite TV, or hanging out in snack bars on nearby August Allebé Square. Within five years, the school had become “black,” almost 100 percent allochtoon.

  A few weeks after Van Gogh’s murder I spoke to the headmaster of a mixed school in the east of Amsterdam, near the place of the murder. His school had pupils of forty-two different nationalities. When it came to school excursions and other extracurricular activities, it was always the Moroccan parents who objected to sending their daughters, never Turks or other Muslims. Yet the Moroccan girls were also among the hardest-working pupils. “To get away from the influence of their fathers,” he explained. I asked him what he thought of Mohammed Bouyeri. Had he come across radicalized youths of that kind?

  He answered my question in a roundabout way. “Ten years ago,” he said, “we would tell promising pupils from minorities to pull a little harder. We put pressure on them, telling them they had to work harder than others to succeed. Often they would, but then, if things didn’t go their way, when they faced a setback, perhaps because of discrimination, they could get very angry indeed.”

  Something like this appears to have happened with Mohammed Bouyeri. His former history teacher told a newspaper reporter that the radical youths were almost always the better educated: “I think they find ideals in fundamentalism that are impossible for them to reach in Dutch society when they leave school. Because employers won’t take on Moroccans, for example.”

  Apart from his teachers, most of the native Dutch people Mohammed encountered in his daily life in an immigrants’ community were bureaucrats of one kind or another: social workers, welfare officers, local officials who dealt with subsidies for this and that. Many of them have good memories of him, at least initially, as a reasonable person. “Mo” wanted to be a pillar of his community, help people out, by offering them computer lessons, or organizing youth clubs.

  An old friend recalled Mo as a cheerful boy, full of curiosity and good stories. They delivered newspapers together and talked about all kinds of things, from soccer to the black holes in the universe. His politics were moderately left-wing. The fate of the Palestinians exercised him, but he didn’t get his information from Al Jazeera or Moroccan television. Instead he watched Belgian TV, which he found less biased in favor of Israel than the Dutch stations.3 Mohammed hardly ever went to the mosque. Fasting during Ramadan was about the extent of his religious life. Friends remember how much fun he was when he got stoned on hash, spinning long fantastic tales from his fertile imagination.

  A “positivo,” then, but in 1994 came his first disappointment. The youth club which he frequented with his friends had to make way for a new apartment building. Local authorities reassured the boys that they would get a new club soon. The boys asked for a shuttle bus to take them to their new clubhouse, which was only a short walk from the old one. Their demand was turned down. They were then told that the club had to be shared with adults. Since adult company was the last thing they wanted, the final evening in the old club turned sour, with acts of vandalism. When the occasion ended in a small riot, the kids were chased out of the building by dozens of policemen with dogs. There was a rash of arson attacks on the new place. Security had to be tightened.

  After graduating from Mondrian High School, Mohammed enrolled in an accounting course. Then, another setback. In November 1997, he got into a brawl with a number of policemen in a coffeeshop in Amsterdam. When he applied for a security job at Schiphol Airport a year later, he was turned down because of a negative police report. Around that same time, resentment that had been seething in the neighborhood ever since the trouble over the clubhouse suddenly exploded into a full-scale riot on August Allebé Square. Bottles were thrown, cars rocked, windows smashed. But Mohammed and his friends were nowhere near the scene. They were getting high in a dance bar north of Amsterdam.

  He met his first and possibly only girlfriend there, a half-Dutch, half-Tunisian girl, tall and striking in miniskirts. He was proud to be seen with her. But the affair didn’t last long. Attracting women was never easy for Mohammed. He liked typical Dutch girls, perhaps because he thought they were “easy.” But he could be too aggressive. On a holiday in the Canary Islands, his companion, a Moroccan-Dutch friend from Amsterdam, worried when Mohammed tried to pick up Spanish girls in the streets. Rejection made him violent. He would blame it on racism.

  The words of the psychiatrist in Amersfoort, Bellari Said, came to mind when I read this. He ascribed the high incidence of schizophrenia among Muslim males in Europe to the “cognitive wiring” that goes wrong when faced with bewildering temptations. While many women embrace the liberties of Western life, men, faced with rejection and frustration, turn away to a fantasy of tribal honor and religious rectitude. A teenage desire for “easy” women makes way for disgust and rage.

  The official response to the riot on August Allebé Square was to invest more government money in the neighborhood. The Bouyeri family’s apartment was one of the places scheduled for renovation. Mohammed and several friends demanded from the authorities that the apartments be rebuilt in a way
that was in line with Islamic custom. The women should be able to go in and out of the kitchen unseen. At least one city councillor was sympathetic. Instead, another disillusion. No renovation. The building was now slated for demolition. In the meantime, social workers dropped in for regular visits to see to the welfare of the families who lived there. Mohammed refused to talk to them.

  4.

  I have a friend who lives on August Allebé Square, the writer Dubravka Ugresic. Her building, which stands with its back to the square, is better than most. Many of her neighbors are non-Dutch: Chinese, Eastern Europeans, some people from the Middle East. Dubravka found a refuge in Amsterdam from the poisonous nationalism in her native Croatia, or, as she would have preferred it to remain, Yugoslavia. She is a refugee from a country that no longer exists. Cast adrift after the collapse of Communism, she is now part of a new European diaspora. We first met in San Francisco, at a writers’ conference in 1990, and have seen one another in various places since. One memorable evening in Berlin, we entered a bar full of Muslim refugees from Bosnia. Dubravka was the only woman, surrounded by agitated mustachioed men who wanted to tell us about all the terrible things they had seen, the rape rooms, the torture camps, the sites of mass killing. We asked them what life was like in the refugee shelter in Berlin. Fine, they said, fine—except for one thing. Oh, and what was that? The Gypsies, they said. They’re scum. They should all be killed.

  Dubravka was not sentimental. She had acquired her skepticism the hard way. All was quiet on August Allebé Square when we had dinner at her apartment on a midsummer night. Many of the local inhabitants were away on family visits to Turkey and Morocco. While talking about life in Holland, she told me something that I had heard once before, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, about the public generosity and the private conformism of the Dutch. The generosity of the state toward refugees and other newcomers can lead to a peculiar resentment. The Dutch feel, in Ayaan’s words, that since they “have been so kind” to the foreigners, the foreigners should behave as the Dutch do. Then there is the other kind of resentment, of the recipients of Dutch government largesse, who feel that it is never enough. Dubravka described the behavior of people from the Balkan countries. “They develop a criminal mentality in Holland,” she said. “They think this country is a soft touch.” A bit like those “easy” women.

  Europeans are proud of their welfare states, but they were not designed to absorb large numbers of immigrants. Immigrants appear to fare better in the harsher system of the United States, where there is less temptation to milk the state. The necessity to fend for oneself encourages a kind of tough integration. It is for this reason, perhaps, that immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean often express a contempt for African-Americans, who feel, for understandable historic reasons, that the state owes them something. Immigrants cannot afford to feel that kind of entitlement in the U.S. But in Europe at least some of them do.

  Reliance on state subsidies, even when it is utterly justified, has another pernicious effect on immigrant life. Organizations that use public money to represent the interests of minorities, or immigrants who work for the government, are often suspected of venality and self-promotion. Their motives, however selfless, are seen as tainted by the proximity of officialdom. “The subsidy tap” is a phrase I heard over and over from Moroccan-Dutch citizens, always used with scorn. To drink from that tap is to run the risk of becoming a “Moroccan mascot” or “pampered Muslim.”

  When I asked a prison imam of Moroccan origin about Forum, the worthy organization that promotes multiculturalism and tolerance, he rolled his eyes and said that Forum was “a subsidy tap which should be turned off.” In fact, he said, he was against subsidies. “Muslims always want subsidies. This should stop. The welfare state has gone too far.”

  The prison imam, Ali Eddaoudi, is not some braying freemarketeer, but a tough young activist, in his words, “a man of sharp opinions.” He was “proud” of his Muslim “brothers” for staging boycotts and demonstrations against the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet. This he saw as a spirited defense of “religious civilization.” Muslims, on the other hand, who had made a successful leap into the mainstream of Dutch politics were treated with scorn. The typical Muslim politician, he would have me know, was a “model alien.” Such people were not to be trusted. Instead, the political parties should “find more people who are part of their own communities.” I suspected that he meant more people like himself. So I asked him. He replied that he didn’t stand a chance in politics: “Just my beard is enough to scare them off.”

  5.

  Like many young men, Mohammed Bouyeri had an authority problem. But it was not quite the same problem that commonly afflicts the native-born autochtoon. If confrontations with the paternalistic authorities are felt as a humiliation, the lack of parental authority at home can be just as bad, or worse. Nora, the Muslim student leader in Nijmegen, felt “embarrassed” for her mother when they watched Submission on TV. Samir, the architect in Rotterdam, cringed when he saw the lack of respect for his father at work. Farhane, the actor in The Hague, felt the helplessness of his parents, who didn’t know how to cope with the simplest tasks in Dutch life.

  Mohammed’s conflict with his father was common enough in immigrant families from rural backgrounds. It concerned honor, family honor, and it involved sexual freedom. In the spring of 2000, his seventeen-year-old sister Wardia met a boyfriend, named Abdu, a neighborhood kid, part of a gang of Moroccan youths known as the Daltons, a name lifted from a popular Belgian comic strip, read by most Dutch children, about a cowboy called Lucky Luke. The Daltons had been in trouble with the police. But that was not what bothered Mohammed. His problem was his father’s lack of authority. He should have kept Wardia under control. Having a boyfriend before marriage was not permissible. The fact that Mohammed had had a girlfriend himself was irrelevant, or perhaps not irrelevant but an example of faulty cognitive wiring. He was a man. Dutch women were easy, and therefore, in fact, disgusting. In the case of his sister, family honor was impugned. “What can I do?” said the father. “She won’t listen to me.”

  Mohammed wouldn’t let Abdu in the house. A fight broke out. The police had to be called to restore order. Soon after that, Mohammed left home, rented an apartment, and refused to see his father for more than a year. Around that time he also switched his studies from accountancy to corporate information technology. A year later, Mohammed was arrested again. He had come across Abdu in a park in the center of Amsterdam. Egged on by another Moroccan-Dutch youth, they had a nasty fight. When the police arrived, Mohammed had a buck knife in his hand, which he used to threaten one of the cops, a man of Turkish origin. The first time he lunged at him, he missed by inches. The second time, he slashed the policeman’s neck.

  Barely free, after twelve weeks in jail, another blow. Mohammed’s mother died of breast cancer. He had been her favorite child. Despite his periodic tantrums, Mohammed was good at hiding his feelings. He didn’t attend her funeral in Morocco, and the effect of her death on him was not immediately apparent to others. But people who knew him well thought he had become more introspective. He wanted to “find the truth,” he later wrote in a farewell letter to his family, just before he murdered Van Gogh. “I have often tried to find ways of showing you the Truth, but it’s as though there was always a wall between us.”

  This quest for the truth set him on the path to Islam. Some would blame his domineering behavior toward his sister on Islam too. Certainly Ayaan Hirsi Ali would. But religion was perhaps not the primary issue. More important was the question of authority, of face, in a household where the father could give little guidance, and in a society from which a young Moroccan male might find it easier to receive subsidies than respect.

  Mohammed’s quest for the truth might also have been affected by 9/11, but this event appears to have confused him more than anything else. He certainly didn’t support the U.S. government, but he didn’t condone the killing of innocent civilians either. Violence, he told fri
ends, was not the solution. On the other hand, he was open to the idea that it was the Jews who had staged the attacks. But this was hardly unusual. Many Muslims were receptive to that particular canard.

  Mohammed was still active in neighborhood projects, organizing public debates, cooking lessons, and the like. He had plans to organize a new youth club in his old school. It would be called Mondriaans Doenia, or Mondrian’s World. A photograph taken at this time, published in the neighborhood paper, shows a friendly young man stroking his sparse beard while smiling at the camera. His old habits—the beer drinking, the dope smoking, the chasing after Dutch girls—were gradually giving way to an increasingly moralistic outlook, especially after this latest plan, too, came to nothing. There were already enough other youth clubs, he was told. There wasn’t enough money to build a new one.

  Mohammed’s interest in corporate information technology proved to be as fleeting as his interest in bookkeeping, so he changed once again, this time to something called social educational relief work. He received a scholarship for this new field of study, but soon got bored again. Fellow students noticed a peculiar priggishness about him. He threatened people who drank alcohol, for example. One student recalled that “he didn’t seem to have any real friends at the college, especially at the end, when he formed a separate little group with other people who are now in jail.”4