Justice III

Just when I decided I'd write less about the old polderland in the future, I was confronted this evening with a rather unsavoury discussion on a TV program in re of the impending parliamentary elections on 22nd November; this discussion was vis-a-vis problems that have arisen in the labour party (PvdA). This party had just put a great number of candidates of Turkish descent on it's ballot list, when the discussion in France broke loose about the bill which prohibits the denial of the genocide of over one million Armenians in the earlier years of the last century. (I am linking here to the relevant website of Wikipedia which currently cannot be updated due to recent vandalization.)

In Holland meantime it transpired that although these candidates have Dutch passports or are native Dutch, their loyalties still lie for the most part in the old country. Apparently the Turkish government has been leaning hard on them so as to ensure there would be no crimes against Turkishness through acceptance of the term genocide c.q. holocaust.
To cut a long story short, a number of candidates have been forced by the party to withdraw. But the party was also anticipating with great regret the loss of all these Turkish votes. So the leader, Wouter Bos, came up with an ingenious political trick: Monday night he gave a press conference for the Turkish media, in which he stated that the term genocide is being used too loosely, on the whole. His number two, a female politician of Turkish descent clarified that in international law, genocide is only then genocide if it can be proved, which is decidedly not the case here; so no "Ermeni Soykırımi" and satisfaction all round that the matter has been smoothed so cunningly. Which is indeed the case, as apart from a weblog post in Elsevier magazine by Leon de Winter, there isn't a journalist, voter or politician who commented on the matter.

Apart from the shameless opportunism of the statement - it pictures once and for all Wouter Bos as the unscrupulous power politician that he is - this party (see also posts on Jan Pronk) was one of the first to acknowledge genocide when it transpired that three thousand Muslim men might have been massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. Their prime minister and his government even stepped down over the matter. But this, well let's be fair, is almost a hundred years ago (the passing of time is in Holland always a readily accepted mitigating argument), it costs the votes of the Turkish constituency, it hasn't been proved and it upsets a future EU member state, on which rests the duty to prove to the entire Umma that the EU is not a Christian club (God forbid!).

Everything else apart, this matter once again underlines my conclusion that The Netherlands has become a depraved country. The way this discussion is being conducted is shameful, is immoral (or worse I fear, amoral) and unsavoury; it is a slap in the face of the Armenian survivors and their families (yes, they do exist, even though a century has passed). The saddest aspect of it all is, that nobody even notices the depth and length of cases like this! The same politicians expressed today their full indignation about the death sentence pronounced on Saddam Hussein (as anticipated): a civilized country doesn't do hangings, you see (applause).