It was a long time coming, but Rotterdam police force commander Aad Meijboom has finally called it a day and tendered his resignation. As corps commander he was ultimately responsible for the failure in communication during the riots in Hook of Holland in August last year.

Senior police officers disregarded warnings that hooligans intended to disrupt a free dance party on the beach near Hook of Holland (Hoek van Holland in Dutch). As a result there were no riot police on hand when fighting broke out and about 45 police officers on the scene were besieged by hundreds of hooligans. The officers fired the unprecedented number of 76 shots and one of the rioters was shot dead.

Today's de Volkskrant writes that Mr Meijboom’s postion became untenable after an inquiry into the beach riots published a damning report. The Rotterdam corps commander initially dug in his heels, saying that “A captain should be on the bridge during a storm”, but eventually gave in after a series of “intense conversations” with Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb.

Trouw points out that Mr Meijboom had alreadyr said he would leave if one of his officers was dismissed because of the riots, but this was disingenuous because Mr Meijboom as corps commander had the authority to decide on any forced dismissals.

AD writes that the official reason for his resignation is that the corps commander “has come to the conclusion he is not the right man to continue as leader of the Rotterdam police force.” Both the Rotterdam police corps and the mayor’s office are denying the obvious: Mr Meijboom resigned over the Hook of Holland riots. May the force be with him.
 
False reports of child abuse
Trouw dedicates most of its front page to a report on the large numbers of false reports of child abuse and the damage that false accusations wreak on the families involved. “1,600 families hit by false accusations every year” the paper writes. “One in ten accusations of child abuse are wrong.” In the province of Flevoland the percentage is as high as 18.7.

Investigations into allegations of child abuse have far-reaching consequences as many people automatically assume that where there is smoke, there is fire. Child abuse expert Ingrid ten Berge of the Dutch Youth Institute says that very little attention is being paid to the problems facing families who have been ‘reported’ on suspicion of child abuse.

Ms Ten Berge feels it is strange there have been no studies into the effects that reports of child abuse have on the families  concerned: “It is a huge invasion of your privacy. We should ask ourselves: how can families deal with that?”

However, a spokesperson for the authorities investigating the reports acknowledges that wrongly-accused families may feel damaged, but says it’s an inevitable side effect: “We tell people: file a report, even when in doubt. Because every report is a chance to bring a child out of the dark.” There is still a ‘yawning gap’ between the number of reports filed (16,000) and the number of abused children: more than 100,000.

Cash soon to be history
AD reports that the Consumentenbond (Consumers’ Association) expects that paying in cash will be a thing of the past within five years. Consumentenbond spokesperson Barbara den Uyl says “cash will be banned”.

On Monday, telecom provider Telfort announced that, as of April, for reasons of security, its shops would only accept card payments. The Consumentenbond calls it “a bold step”, but expects other shops to follow suit soon. According to Ms Den Uyl, “This should be planned well. A supermarket which gets rid of all its cash registers now is going too fast. I wouldn’t give my daughter my bank card to go buy a piece of cheese, but that may well be outdated soon.”

Retailers’ organisations say the decline in cash payments is “a snowball which is rolling faster and faster”. The supermarket industry organisation CBL wants card-only cash registers to be commonplace by 2014, but says “solutions must be found for clients who have problems making card payments or lose their grip on their expenditure without cash.”

Labour Party not as squeaky clean as it would have us believe
The Davids Commission recently published the results of its inquiry into the decision-making process regarding Dutch political support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, causing anger within the Labour Party - part of the current coalition government - when Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende (also PM in 2003) flatly rejected the commission’s criticisms.

However, de Volkskrant reports that commission member Cees Fasseur said on Monday that Labour was not quite as opposed to political support for the invasion as it would like us to believe. Mr Fasseur, a historian and legal expert, points out that one month before the invasion, Labour Party leader and current Finance Minister Wouter Bos said that, after the adoption of UN resolution 1441, a second resolution was “desirable, but not necessary.”

Labour Senator Klaas de Vries, today one of the fiercest critics of the decision to provide political support to the US, was then a cabinet minister. According to the minutes of a cabinet meeting in 2002, Mr De Vries said about the earlier intervention in Iraq that “Power politics, in that case, prevailed over a strict application of the rules of the international legal order”.

And in a joint declaration of the Labour Party and the Christian Democrats in 2003, the two parties stated their acceptance of “resolution 1441 as de facto grounds for intervention”. Mr Fasseur’s statements come at a politically inconvenient moment: after weeks of difficult negotiations, the cabinet is to present its reaction to the inquiry’s report this morning.

Somalis least successful immigrants
Free newspaper De Pers reports that the integration of Somalian refugees in the Netherlands is “a total failure”. According to the paper, “Somalis in the Netherlands are becoming increasingly radical and criminal”. About 6,000 Somalis are awaiting the outcome of their asylum requests, while 22,000 have been granted Dutch nationality.

The paper quotes a 24-year-old Somalian man who says that a former classmate has suddenly started wearing a burqa. He says that escaping into religion is a trend among Somalis in the Netherlands. Many of his former friends “have started living for their faith” or chosen to pursue criminal careers.

Recent figures from government body Netherlands Statistics show that after years in which many Somalis moved to the United Kingdom, many Somalian asylum seekers are finding their way to the Netherlands again. Last year saw a 50 percent increase, which means 41 percent of all asylum seekers in the Netherlands are Somalian.   

The government’s Social and Cultural Planning Office writes in its annual report that, compared to other migrant communities, “looking at the various fields of integration, the position of Dutch citizens of Somalian descent gives the most reason for concern”. Within migrant communities, Somalis have the highest unemployment figures and crime rates while Somalian children underachieve at school.

One of the reasons for the current situation is that highly-educated Somalis often leave for the United Kingdom which recognises their diplomas. And until May of last year, all Somalian refugees were automatically granted a residence permit because of the violence in their country. However, the justice ministry decided to go back to examining each individual application due to widespread identity fraud.