The papers are taking the euro crisis very seriously and the Dutch police training mission to Afghanistan is also in the news. A policeman may well face murder charges, and avoid the holiday rush at Schiphol airport. It’s all in the Dutch dailies.

Euro crisis talks
Several of today’s papers run the same photograph of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel meeting each other last night ahead of today’s Eurozone summit. It’s the sort of picture journalists love - both leaders have their index fingers in the air, as if simultaneously making aggressive points to each other.

AD simplifies the message: “Oui or Nein”, reads its headline. It says the two politicians were trying to thrash out a common line before the summit which, the leaders hope, will prevent Greece going bankrupt. The paper asks whether the French ‘yes’ or the German ‘no’ to a further bailout will prevail.

In a lengthier front-page analysis, Trouw says Mrs Merkel wants the banks and other financial institutions to help pay for a solution. Mr Sarkozy prefers the idea of extra taxation and increasing the Eurozone’s emergency fund. It says Mrs Merkel’s line is backed by countries including the Netherlands, while Mr Sarkozy has the support of the “southern countries”.

Trouw believes that, despite the preliminary German-French discussions, success at the summit is anything but assured. It quotes European Commission boss Manuel Barroso: “…the situation is extremely serious.” He is warning of “negative consequences both inside and outside Europe” if no agreement is reached today.

Although it has no picture, nrc.next devotes a huge double-page spread to the story. Whichever way forward the Eurozone leaders choose, it will be expensive and complicated, the paper argues. It says the politicians have to convince the voters that complex solutions are sometimes the best ones. This, it advises, should be done by appealing to their citizens’ benevolence.

Police not military training in Afghanistan
Standing alone, de Volkskrant is the only paper to relegate the euro crisis to an inside page, preferring to run a cover story on the Netherlands’ police training mission to Kunduz in Afghanistan. 

It says the Dutch police instructors are treading very carefully to show the press that the conditions opposition MPs imposed on the mission are being adhered to. One of the key conditions was that Afghan officers trained by the Dutch would not be used in anything that could be construed as military operations.

At the moment, the Dutch are observing German personnel who are already training Afghan police. During a session on how riot police should march against demonstrators, the Dutch observers were at pains to point out to the attendant media that they would not be giving such lessons.

Instead the Dutch plan to include training in human rights, the journalists were told. “For example, by explaining during sessions on arrest techniques that you shouldn’t hit a suspect,” as one trainer points out.

Policeman could be charged with murder
Today’s nrc.next takes up the case of an amateur footballer who was shot dead by a lone policeman in May. The dead man was with other members of his Haarlem soccer team, celebrating an amateur competition victory. They were on a pub crawl in Amsterdam when the incident occurred.

The policeman maintains the men threatened him after he’d arrested two of their number for being drunk and disorderly. He says he fired a warning shot and then three further shots, aimed at the men. As well as killing one, two others suffered gunshot wounds.

We’re told that, at the time, media reports suggested the men were drunk, had taken cocaine and had been causing trouble all afternoon. Their full names were published. A small amount of cocaine was found on one of the men, but relatives of dead man deny he had taken the drug. They say he was trying to defuse the situation when he was shot.

The paper explains that the incident was caught on security cameras and that the officer involved wasn’t aware of this when he made his statement about what happened. The footage contradicts parts of his evidence. The Solicitor General says that “the officer made the violence out to be more serious than it was”, and describes the footage as the most important evidence in the case.

The man’s family have now officially reported the case to the police, and are pushing for the policeman to be charged with murder.

Holiday irritation
Believe it or not, today’s De Telegraaf leads with a report on holidaymakers’ aggression targetting staff at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Overbooked flights and delays, it says, are leading to ground staff being subjected to “verbal abuse. And worse.”

A KLM spokesperson tells the paper that “our people are being dragged over the counter because someone’s baggage is overweight … as if it’s our fault!” The airline has decided to leave last names off staff identity badges in order to protect personnel from trouble when they’re away from work.

“It’s striking that passengers are increasingly aware of their rights, or rather think they know what those rights are,” says a member of Schiphol ground staff. “This leads to major slanging-matches on an almost daily basis - and sometimes even blows.” De Telegraaf just stops short of advising us to travel out of season.

(as)