Amsterdam is a hub for trafficking children asylum seekers into sex slavery
What I didn’t like was the way the people hogged the whole sidewalk along the Amstel river. It seemed to get worse and worse the closer I got to seven hundred year old inner Amsterdam.
I like to step along at a good pace. I’m used to city walking. But annoying the shoe leather out of me is the practice of those who decide to stroll three or four abreast. Whether they are ahead of me or not, I make like a human wedge and divide them.
Truly, if they appear to be upscale Dutch and are snobbishly acting as if they own the concrete, I’m determined to ‘bust them up’. I’m like a bowling ball streaking down the lane at ten pins.
I used to wonder why I felt heated and edgy in the Netherlands city clogged with banks bursting from canals and cash. Then I found out about prison ships for refugees. Across the town of a million residents, Indonesian, Aruban, Surinamese and other former colonial peoples have to occupy the bottom rung of society. The Dutch government also is part of a crew of military forces in Afghanistan, and behind all of the guns and bombs Dutch Shell Oil isn’t thinking of leaving Iraq without extending the profit haul. But an Iraqi or Niger Delta sufferer better think twice about arriving in Amsterdam or Rotterdam harbor seeking political and humanitarian asylum.
I don’t put my finger on one aggravating factor.
The links to Suharto, East Timor, the White-first regime in Johannesburg and the African captives in New Amsterdam (later New York City) give this man no cheer.
What I believe it must be is an amalgam.
I put it down to the years I have absorbed experiences and related my own in a number of Europe’s metropoles.
For one item, I’m not in any misty illusion about Europe’s historical tether to Africa.
Not a few Europeans, dissidents in their own right, have aided my partner and I in exile. This sets them apart from those that insist that America isn’t so bad–and who try and decry the fact of African people in America having a Human Right to cultural and political Self Determination like any other people.
The courageous and the sincere get their propers; I have been impressed by a certain breed (often under age thirty) that have begun to see what a oozing heap Western society is. Their parents’ generation, ‘leaders’ and their people in general contaminated the globe and still they have gone into battle for a better world. Life’s twists have enabled me to meet inspiring people.
I can count Amsterdam as one place that some of these youthful visionaries, imperfect and sometimes in short lived pulses, came forward to put action first. An age gap, sometimes separates these self described autonomist and anarchists from another group, elderly, Left or ex Leftists that brought about 1950s and 60s social change. People born between 1955 and 1975, ironically those my age, are the ones often missing in action. There was a period when the West shook with internal rebellion. Imperialistic and Cyclops-like, it slipped from total domination. Yet in Europe there remain the animated ones coming of age and coming on board with energy and drive.
That warms my heart.
But probably knowing that repercussions of hundreds of years of Dutch capitalist, religious and just plain oppressive power across the world continues to do harm gives me the neck prickles.
It’s alarming to me that girls and women in Dutch and Belgian refugee camps and centers are raped routinely, according to a UNHCR study in 2008. A third of the accused rapists are Europeans, staff that are supposed to be providing a haven for the victims.
As I move along, sidestepping others walking the Amsterdam streets, I can think of these incidents and causes of inequity. The Dutch East India Company building is preserved and stands as a grim reminder.
But I also have a destination: an active role in making sure that it ends, and soon.
19 February 2008
From Exile,
Bankole
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