Wrote the TIMES’ Roger Boyes: "The right-wing Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated last night in a killing that shook a Europe already reeling from right-wing gains in France.
"The killing came just nine days before Dutch general elections in which he was expected to make big gains."
The Financial Times of London, in almost as bold banner headline print (across five columns) declared: "Dutch Politician Assassinated." The two major dailies ran huge photographs of the shaven-headed populist right-winger giving his characteristic salute, nattily-dressed and exhibiting the flamboyance that had brought him to almost within reach of the Prime Ministership of the Netherlands. Only last Saturday (May 4), another well-regarded British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, had called the ex-Marxist professor, but now hard rightist Fortuyn "Holland’s high-camp hero of new politics" and Europe’s enfant terrible. And now he’s dead.
The murder occurred just as Fortuyn was leaving the premises of a 3FM radio network in Hilversum, some ten miles southeast of Amsterdam, where he had given an interview.
The gunman fired six shots at Fortuyn, 54, hitting him in the chest and neck. The police, it's said, have arrested a "Dutch national" for questioning. If the suspect had been a Muslim, there would have been riots everywhere.
The shocked Dutch authorities and police, however, are still trying to determine the motives behind this high-profile murder. Radical and resentful Muslims remain suspect. Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, edited in Paris and printed here, headlined: "Rightist in Dutch Election is Murdered: Assailant shoots gay who railed against Muslim immigrants."
The Netherlands’ acting Prime Minister Wim Kok mourned that this was a blow to "Dutch democracy" in a tolerant country "where political disputes should be settled with words, not guns."
Coming from a land where, too often, political disputes are settled with guns, I can only say that this is a tragic day for peaceful Holland. But those agonizing ululations all over Europe that such things don’t happen in their "civilized" societies is flawed with some hypocrisy. Of course such things happen. That they do so rarely is a tribute to education, consensus, and strict law enforcement. Yet, as Fortuyn’s fate warns, this civility and adherence to law has begun to deteriorate. It’s a wake-up call.
Fortuyn had published a best-selling book entitled: Against the Islamisation of our Culture. He strongly opposed, he declared, "the onslaught of backward-looking and intolerant Islamic culture." He vowed to stop the immigration of Muslims. His book described by The Daily Telegraph as "selling like hotcakes", highlighted "the warning that radical Islam, creating fortresses in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, is a mortal threat to Holland’s easy-going way of life, its feminist emancipation, and tolerance of homosexuality."
"The Muslims, if they come to power," Fortuyn would boom, "would throw me in jail!" (He was, openly, a homosexual.)
He would point out that he wasn’t, really, against Muslims who were already "in", or citizens of Holland. He used to assert: "Those who are in, stay in. For the rest, the portcullis comes down. We’re going to restore control over our own borders, as in a civilized country like Great Britain," he said, regardless of the Schengen Treaty on open borders. "We’ll try to interpret Schengen in our own way, but if that’s not possible, we’ll step out of it, absolutely."
He railed against the fact that, due to immigration, two million of the 16 million citizens were "not Dutch". Alas, this reminded me of the old schoolboy song we used to belt out in our far less politically-correct teens: "The highland Dutch and the lowland Dutch, the Rotterdam Dutch, and the other damn Dutch . . . " Sorry, but those were insensitive times. I guess, for the outspoken Pim Fortuyn, whose "charm" obviously lay in being provocative, those who were not "damn Dutch" comprised a threat not only to the nation’s homogeneity but its peace of mind.
Many Dutch voters must have been listening to Fortuyn’s assertions that the drug trade was being pushed by foreigners, there was need for stronger police methods, and that education had deteriorated. Said Barry James of the Tribune: "Part of the rising tide of hard right, anti-immigration politics in several European countries, Fortuyn’s party came out of the blue to win 35 percent of the votes and 17 of the 45 council seats in municipal elections in the Netherlands’ second city, Rotterman, in March."
His "List" was tipped to win at least 23 percent of the vote in the coming May 15 elections, and was expected to unseat an eight-year Labour coalition that had seemed to fizzle out overnight when Holland’s "over-heated economy" turned from boom to bust.
Now, six bullets have ended Mr. Fortuyn’s end run.
It’s a good thing (or is it?) that the Abu Sayyaf were not blamed for the rub-out.
Will Holland’s policy of tolerance be changed by this terrible event? The Dutch have long been hospitable when it comes to ideological refugees (though never generous with cash). Witness the fact that Utrecht, Holland has long been the headquarters of those anti-Philippine government Communist rebels: Joma Sison and ex-Father Luis Jalandoni.
Predictably, there will be more "barriers" set up along the Dutch borders in the backlash to Fortuyn’s brutal and very public assassination. When you throw your portals open to murderers of every stripe, then you bring murder into your own neighborhoods.
But it still swings.