Wanted US kidnappers turn up in a Dutch refugee centre, the Netherlands abuses human rights by locking up illegal aliens, and as the new right-wing coalition gets into gear, the left-wing opposition parties are flirting with each other.
 
“FBI’s most wanted” turn up in Holland
“Dismay in the US.” Popular daily De Telegraaf leads with the news that two criminals “on the FBI’s most wanted list” turned out to be holed up in a Dutch refugee centre. A “notorious US abduction case”, as AD describes it, ended in the Dutch village of Dronten.
 
The Syrian American brothers John and George Selah disappeared with their three sons in 2008, De Telegraaf explains, destroying their mobile phones so their whereabouts couldn’t be traced. The Dutch police won’t reveal just how long the two men have been in the Netherlands with their sons, now aged 11, 12 and 14. “It’s possible that immediately after fleeing the US they applied for asylum in our country,” says De Telegraaf. According to AD, the brothers’ ex-wives are now in the Netherlands where they have been happily reunited with their boys.
 
“Red-faced, the Netherlands is soon to extradite the suspects,” reports an outraged de Telegraaf. The paper demands a thorough investigation into the “blunder”. “How is it possible that two men suspected of kidnapping and large-scale fraud were able to find a safe refuge in the Netherlands and thus stay out of the hands of US justice?”
 

Netherlands “humiliates” jailed illegal aliens
In contrast to the two popular dailies, the more serious and left-leaning Trouw and de Volkskrant voice wider concerns about Dutch asylum policy. “End the inhumane detention of aliens,” Trouw heads it’s editorial. The Netherlands has been criticised for years for violating the European Convention on Human Rights, says the paper, because it routinely locks up rejected asylum seekers and new arrivals without travel documents. According to the convention, detention is supposed to be a last resort.
 
What’s more, the detainees spend much longer behind bars than their counterparts in other European countries, says Trouw, and the conditions are worse than those in normal Dutch prisons.
 
“Illegal immigrants are humiliated in prison.” De Volkskrant illustrates the problem with an in-depth report on the experiences of three people who have been through the detention system mill. They tell tales of strip searches, deprivation, and months in jail without any idea of when they might be released.
 
Trouw calls for the use of alternatives to detention, such as electronic tagging. “It must not be that the Netherlands has two kinds of human rights,” the paper comments sternly, “one for its own citizens, another for aliens”.
 

Romance in the air for leftwing parties
The parties on the left are putting their heads together to come up with a response to the Netherlands’ new rightwing government, report AD and Trouw. According to AD, the Labour Party and the smaller Green Left party are discussing cooperation or even a merger. The two parties are “talking about their discussions as if it were a budding love affair”, says AD. They are “cautiously holding hands, but the first kiss is still to come”.
 
Labour Party chairwoman Liliane Plouman describes the parties’ advances as a “reinforcement of the progressive voice”, says Trouw. Green Left leader Femke Halsema says simply “the aim is effective cooperation”.
 
While there seems to be promise in a Labour-Green Left love affair, it would be more problematic to involve the other two parties on the left, the Socialist Party and D66. For one thing, AD points out, D66 doesn’t see itself as a leftwing party at all. It is increasingly profiling itself in the centre, aiming to occupy a vacuum left by the Christian Democrats, who have shifted to the right. D66 leader Alexander Pechthold wants nothing to do with the socialists and doesn’t want to be “locked up in a leftwing block”.
 
Pollster Maurice de Hond is sceptical about the romance on the left. He tells AD that a marriage between the Labour Party and Green Left wouldn’t offer them any electoral advantages, and could actually scare Labour voters off. What’s more, he says, political mergers wouldn’t reflect the current fragmentation of views among the Dutch electorate.
 

Wilders claims Merkel is copying him
“Merkel is scared.” De Telegraaf, Trouw and AD all carry anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders latest contributions to the international debate. In the German weekly Der Spiegel he says German Chancellor Angela Merkel is copying his politics because she’s afraid of the rise of a German version of his far-right Freedom Party.
 
The German government responded with irritation, says de Telegraaf, claiming that Merkel isn’t copying Wilders but has been describing the multicultural society as “bankrupt” for years.
 
AD goes for even juicier quotes from the Der Spiegel interview, leading with “Wilders calls the Qur’an ‘worse than Mein Kampf’”. “According to the Freedom Party Leader there are more anti-Semitic passages in the Qur’an than in Hitler’s book.” Not that this is actually news, AD admits. After all, it’s one of the claims that Mr Wilders is currently standing trial for.
 

Netherlands exports Dutch round the world
People all over the world are speaking Dutch without knowing it, Trouw reports. A new Dutch dictionary of loan words in other languages has just been published. Heading the list of export successes is the word baas. It turns up in no fewer than 57 languages, in forms ranging from ‘boss’ in English to ‘bosi’ in a Chinese dialect. In past centuries the Dutch set up plantations around the world, the author points out, all of them with Dutch bosses.
 
The word ‘gas’ also turns out to be a Dutch invention – or Flemish, to be precise. The term was apparently coined by Jan Baptist van Helmont around 1600.
 
Some Dutch words have even been packed off abroad and then re-imported in another form. Bolwerk (bulwark) and manneke (little man) were taken up by the French, and then ended up back in the Netherlands years later as boulevard and mannequin. 
 
Not surprisingly, the former Dutch colony of Indonesia has absorbed the most Dutch words – 5568 in total. They range from gotperdom (from Godverdomme, God damn) to hip-hip-hura!