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Charges of racism after Caribbean visitor dies in Dutch cop custody
The videos on social media show five burly police officers and one man on the ground in a stranglehold. Mitch Henriquez, a black man from Aruba, died soon afterwards and three nights of rioting ensued in an immigrant quarter in The Hague. Was his skin colour a factor?
Three nights of rioting in the Schilderswijk quarter of The Hague have left smashed display windows, burnt-out bus stops and streets strewn with uprooted paving stones.
It was caused by hundreds of residents of the deprived neighbourhood near the city centre, who did battle with police into the early hours as they protested the death of a man after his detention by police officers.
"The violence is unacceptable," Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, echoing the outrage expressed by many Dutch politicians. "It really has to stop... I'm really angry about this," he told national television.
That put him on the same page as Jozias van Aartsen, mayor of the Hague. As Schilderswijk continued to simmer, Van Aartsen declared a partial state of emergency, with a ban on gatherings.
Meanwhile observers began to draw comparisons with racial unrest in US cities.
Mitch Henriquez was from the Dutch island of Aruba in the Caribbean, and he was black. On June 27, he went to a festival in The Hague.
According to his sister, he shouted out that he was armed as a joke that went badly wrong. He was immediately overpowered by police.
"The arrest was justified," the public prosecutor's office said afterwards, even though it was soon clear that Henriquez had been unarmed. "He became ill later in the police vehicle."
The 42-year-old man, who was in The Hague on holiday, was reported to have died in hospital the next day, with the cause as yet unestablished. The prosecutor's office termed the death "regrettable."
But videos began surfacing on the internet that instantly cast doubt on this version of events.
They show Henriquez being overpowered by five officers, who sat on his head and his back, holding him in a stranglehold for several minutes as they searched him. He was motionless by the time the police van arrived. He had to be lifted in bodily.
An official investigation revealed that Henriquez had suffocated. The five officers involved were immediately suspended.
But by then the fuse had been lit. "The incident involving Henriquez was the drop that caused the bucket to overflow," says Mourad Ouari, chair of the local Action Committee.
More than 90 per cent of the residents of Schilderswijk, one of the poorest areas in the Netherlands, are immigrants or originate from the former Dutch colonies of Suriname or the Antilles.
According to Ouari, there is a widespread feeling that they are discriminated against. "Their identity documents are checked more frequently without reason. Cars are stopped, because the driver is from Turkey, Morocco or the Antilles," he says.
Many Schilderswijk residents have for years made similar allegations to Dutch media organizations. Police have even anonymously spoken of open racism in the corps tasked with policing The Hague.
Former national Ombudsman Alex Brenninkmeijer charged the police with racism. "If it's someone of colour, you can beat them up - that is a mentality that increasingly comes to the fore," he told a broadcaster in 2013.
Brenninkmeijer's comments were greeted with outrage from the public and politicians.
But others insist that racism is an everyday occurrence. Immigrants feel that they are treated as second-class citizens, when looking for a job or trying to get into the disco, but also in dealings with the authorities and the police.
The Council of Europe has called on the Netherlands to do more to combat racism, but most native Dutch - citizens and politicians - reject this as not fitting into the country's tolerant image.
"There is no racism in the police," Van Aartsen said after the death of Henriquez. But turning a blind eye does not help, as Gerard Boumann, head of the national police corps, has said.
In April this year he warned his officers against the "poison of exclusion creeping into the organization."
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I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free.
Marcus Garvey
There shall be no solution to this race problem until you, yourselves, strike the blow for liberty.
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