[ad_1]
There is panic in the Netherlands, as the government imposed the lockdown this Saturday to prevent the spread of the British variant of covid-19. In a country where conspiracy theories are gaining ground, people furious at the restrictions took to the streets, looting and attacking the police, even burning down a COVID-19 testing center. On Sunday alone, 240 people were arrested, accused of being part of the “covid hovigans” mafia – on social media, more violence was promised Monday night, the newspaper said. Algemeen Dagblad.
“I am afraid that if we continue on this path, we will move towards civil war,” Eindhoven Mayor John Jorritsma told reporters on Sunday.
And it wasn’t hyperbole. That night in Eindhoven, the mutineers – “the scum of the earth,” in Jorritsma’s words – had burned vehicles, vandalized train stations and looted shops. They threw stones and fired fireworks at law enforcement officers, who fought back with tear gas and water cannons, in a true pitched battle. For hours, the city’s rail services were paralyzed, because there were people walking on the tracks, the canal advanced RTL.
In the capital, Amsterdam, the scene was not much different. During Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people attended the call for a movement of restaurant entrepreneurs, similar to the “Survive with bread and water” movement, led by personalities like Ljubomir Stanisic, joined by PEGIDA, an Islamophobic and anti-movement movement. . – Original immigration in Germany, ignoring the curfew to protest the closure.
The crowd wreaked havoc on the way to the meeting point, the famous Museumplein or Museum Square. There they erected barricades with bicycles, so numerous in Amsterdam, they fired fireworks at the riot police, they threw stones and even knives, the authorities denounced. The answer was loads of mounted agents, dogs, and more water cannons – the images show the protesters projected against the walls of the Van Gogh Museum.
However, perhaps the most dramatic incidents occurred in small towns, such as Urk, some 50 miles from the capital. On Saturday night, dozens of young people from this fishing village reacted to the closure by going out into the streets by honking their horns. The protest quickly escalated: the mob headed for the port, setting fire to a test center, which was completely destroyed.
At the same time, in the eastern city of Enschede, the target was a local hospital, the windows of which were stoned, terrorizing health professionals in the countryside. “We are all in a difficult time, I understand that people feel uncomfortable. But expressing it by destroying everything and intimidating us, I don’t understand it ”, reacted to the newspaper Jan den Boon, one of the doctors there. Tubantia. “It’s terrible,” he summed up.
Change of speech The Netherlands, which has always imagined itself as a peaceful country with soft customs, is in shock from the riots this weekend. “This has nothing to do with the protests,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, promising a strong hand and putting police on high alert Monday night. “This is criminal violence and we will treat it as such,” he said.
However, Rutte is in a particularly weak position to deal with the chaos. The Dutch prime minister has always been a fan of austerity policies, both at national and European level – for some weeks he was one of the blockades to the so-called European “bazooka” – but he failed. In January it was learned that the promise to end the misuse of social subsidies led to more than 20,000 families, some of the poorest in the country, being unfairly accused of tax fraud. The revelation of this massive suffering, in a parliamentary report, led to the resignation of Rutte, leaving the Executive.
It doesn’t help that the vaccination program against covid-19, the great hope against the pandemic, is running at a snail’s pace in the Netherlands, even the coordinated start of the European vaccination failed due to a computer problem.
Furthermore, the sudden change in the government’s message makes the situation even worse. At the beginning of the pandemic, Rutte was one of those who resisted the greatest confinement or mandatory use of masks, ensuring that the Dutch were not children, that they knew how to protect themselves. The Dutch call this feeling of exceptionalism nuchterheid, anything like sobriety or cold blood. Something that has disappeared, before an average of new daily cases that reaches five thousand, with the country on the verge of reaching one million registered infections, reacting with a curfew after 9:00 p.m.
And few doubt that disinformation played a key role in the riots this weekend: One in ten Dutch people actually believe in some conspiracy theory about Covid-19, according to a Kieskompas poll. Among the most popular is the theory that the 5G network is responsible for the pandemic, mixed with anti-vaccination paranoia or even narratives of Qanon, a strange conspiracy, born in the US but spreading across Europe, believing that the world is ruled by Satanist pedophiles, but they will be saved by a coalition led by Donald Trump.
Covid-19 “acts as a contrast medium” for these conspiracy theories, defended Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch counterterrorism agency. “It makes visible things that were previously invisible and unites groups that were not united,” having as a common denominator “an anti-government sentiment,” Aaalbersberg explained to Bloomberg, highlighting an increase in violent attacks and threats against politicians and journalists in the country.
