For ‘Hells Angels’ there’s hell to pay

AMSTERDAM, Holland – From well-mannered Vienna, and Austria, the land which gave the world those lilting Strauss waltzes and the great composers, to bustling, raucous, but tourism-friendly Amsterdam is not just a flight of an hour and a half – it’s a leap of faith.

The airport "Schiphol" (literally translated into "Ship’s Hole") was once under the waters of a huge lake named Haarlemmermeer, but the lake was pumped dry over the century by the many windmills around it (that’s what the folksy windmills are for, to pump water) and a huge mechanical pump named Cruquius. It is still four meters below the level of the adjoining North Sea.

Schipol is served by the giant KLM fleet, a 75-year old airline which now flies daily to Manila – the "Flying Dutchmen" of today – so you can get your tulips, Edam and Gouda chesse daily – directly from the market.

Our old friend, Ambassador Rommy Arguelles, very kindly met me at the airport. One of our country’s most experienced and personable diplomats (he was former Ambassador to Germany, Tokyo, and Peru, among other postings), Rommy runs our Embassy in the Hague where all the 110 diplomatic establishments are. Den Haag is the site of the International Court of Justice and other world agencies, and used to be the headquarters of the old League of Nations which failed to prevent World War I. Not far away is the city of Utrech from where Communist chief Joma Sison still "runs" the NPA.

In case you’re inclined to believe that Amsterdam is a just a fun place – my own baseball park figure is that 18 million tourists converge on this charming, almost promiscuous city from all over the world – think again.

True, Amsterdam has its Sex Museum near the railway station (where over the years I’ve done basic research from the scientific standpoint) and its flamboyant Red Light district, a warren of canal-side streets where Ladies of the Night & Day (prostitutes, by proud self-assessment) display their nudity in large display windows – department store windows of "what’s your pleasure". Those I saw yesterday looked a little shopworn and saggy, but that was the first shift. What’s fascinating is the cute Catholic Church right smack in the middle of those Mary Magdalenes, where one row of display windows directly faces the Church and the girls impudently flaunt their . . . what the French delicately call less belles poitrines . . . at the local Parish priest and his sacristans. How often the good Father crosses the street to hear their confessions is only a matter of speculation. I don’t believe that in a nation half divided between Protestants (Calvinists) and Catholics, plus over a million Muslim immigrants (many of whom insists that women wear Islamic headscarves) the good priest seeks to exorcise any of those working girls.

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If anything, the 16 million Dutch these days tend to be over-tolerant. Everything is neat and tidy, the fields green and well-manicured (it rains much of the time), the trees lined up straight, the countryside picture-postcard pretty.

But in brawling, exciting Amsterdam itself, anything goes. You smell cannabis (marijuana) in the air – it’s no crime to puff, which is openly served in Coffeeshops – better distinguish that name from "respectable" Cafes like the ubiquitous Brown Cafes.

In markets, one stall sells rosaries, crucifixes, religious images, while the adjoining one offers all sorts of cannabis (mary-Js), scented incense sticks, and other types of "harmless" drugs. Cocaine, heroin and the other hard stuff (which, incongruously they call "soft drugs") are, of course, banned.

Four Filipino seamen are currently in jail here for trying to smuggle in such drugs. (For sneaking a few kilos in, with a street value of millions, the syndicates offer sailors a "bonus" of say 20,000 to 30,000 euros – tempting as an incentive). In any event, when you’re caught smuggling and convicted, unlike in Singapore and Malaysia where the automatic sentence is "death," the smuggler may get only two to three years in prison by court sentence here. So, some of our money-eager seamen are tempted to take a chance – to the headache of our consular officials.

Amsterdam, after all, is also where they manufacture that deadly pill Ecstasy which is smuggled into the Philippines. It’s almost a cottage industry, being manufactured in backroom labs across the city.

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But let’s not dun the Dutch.

On the serious side, Holland or The Netherlands – the country’s more official name – trades big bucks with us. The Dutch, through their huge port of Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, import $3 billion worth of goods and products from Manila yearly. These goods are sent off all over Europe by truck and rail. So, the Netherlands are an important trading partner, with the balance strongly in our favor.

The Dutch, after all, are an unusually adventurous race. We forget that they first colonized New York – which they used to call "New Amsterdam"; and some districts like black "Harlem", home to Bill Clinton and the "Harlem Globetrotters" basketball team, still retains the name of Holland’s Haarlem town.

"Wall Street" is the name the Dutch colonizers gave to the wall which bordered their New Amsterdam colony – which is New York’s financial district today.

Ironically, the Netherlands covers only 41,547 square kms., roughly one-tenth the size of California. However, from this small country, a few million Dutchmen in their ships of war once dominated the seas during their Golden Age, 1600 to 1700 A.D.

The Romans were once here. The mighty Rhine, Germany’s storied river bisects the country, emptying into the sea.

Amazingly, almost half the provinces of North and South Holland were once under the sea, but were reclaimed and kept productive "polder" fields by an unending battle to keep the sea out. This excessive effort, a Hydraulic engineering feat, gave rise to the expression: "God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland."

In the 17th century, Dutch warships and traders also made themselves a vast empire, contesting control of the oceans with the Spaniards and the Portuguese. The Dutch tried to invade Manila, but the Spanish warships bested them in the famed naval engagement, in which the Dons claim the Holy Virgin intervened against the "evil Protestants", which is why Our Lady in Sto. Domingo Church is venerated as La Naval.

The Dutch, however, colonized the 3,000 island archipelago of Indonesia, calling them the Dutch East Indies, and their capital Batavia is now Jakarta. They colonized South and West Africa, too, including Surinam. Today, outside of the 13 Dutch provinces, 20 million people in the world speak Dutch, although the Flemish in Belgium’s Flanders call their language Flemish (Flamms), while the original Dutch settlers and former rulers of South Africa, the Voortrekkers, spoke old-fashioned Dutch called Afrikaans. (They’re the doughty fellows who fought the British in the Boer War, and "captured" the young Winston Churchill – but he escaped to win fame as a war correspondent).

In short, God made the world, the Dutch made Holland, then they made themselves an empire. Only a handful of six million Dutchmen (and women) in those days, from a small land. We 84 million Filipinos still call ourselves "small" and are engaged in our petty, small political wars. What a contrast.

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The murder of Hacienda Luisita labor leader Ricardo Ramos and the killing of four activists is, of course, cause for great concern. We’re gaining the reputation of Murder Inc. throughout the world, sad to say.

I won’t engage in the usual lecture about the police and military getting the killers. Crime, alas, is everywhere.

Here in Amsterdam last Sunday night, some 1,000 Dutch policemen barrelled into the headquarters of "Hells Angels," in Amsterdam itself and five other club facilities around the country, as well as 64 homes. The main entrances were forced open by bulldozers and heavily-armed riot police entered and secured each location. Dogs searched for explosives and forensic experts investigated each building stringently.

There were 45 arrests, two hand-grenades, a flamethrower, 20 firearms, some drug plantations and a great amount of cash were confiscated. The Prosecution Service (OM in acronym) has virtually identified the motorcycle bunch, "Hells Angels" as a "criminal organization", suspected of drug dealing, weapons and gunrunning, and its detectives are also looking "into several disappearances."

In 1994, an investigative commission (the Van Traa Commission) labelled the Angels for the first time as "a criminal organization." When TV journalists Frits Barend and Henk van Dorp referred to them as such in their Talk Show in 2000, a group of Angels entered their studios the next day and assaulted them inside their dressing rooms just before their program started! The terrified TV presenters then went on the air to "apologize" for their insult to the Hells Angels, and assert they were absolutely not a "criminal organization" – but, as the newspapers commented later, "their noticeable black eyes gave away the reason for their reversal." The attackers, indeed were "filmed" but not charged in court – until last Sunday’s raids. The angry authorities are hitting back. It’s payback time.

In 2004, the Hells Angels scored headlines again when three members of The Nomads, a club affiliated with the Angels, were found dead near the Southern town of Echt. The men, including the president of the Nomads Club, were obviously murdered by their fellow Nomads after an argument broke out over a drug deal, according to prosecutors. Ten men were convicted for that murder and were "sentenced to up to six years in jail." Only six years for a murder! No wonder the Dutch government is now being forced to show some teeth.

The most notorious among those arrested had been, naturally, "Big Willem," the tough guy who had founded the Dutch Hells Angels in Amsterdam in 1975. Big Willem was booted out of the Angels last year when it was discovered he had taken a contract to kill Willem Holleeder, a friend of the Amsterdam Hells Angels and one of the men involved in the infamous kidnapping of Freddy Heineken in the 1980s. (A total of 32 Hells Angels, as an offshoot of the Sunday raids, are now awaiting arraignment in prison!).

So. Amsterdam’s great, it’s fun, it’s sparkling with entertainment. But we’re not so badly off in the Philippines. Here, too, Crime never sleeps.