In the village where a lot is at stake, hardly anyone seems to be concerned with the cabinet crisis. In a brown eatery in Ter Apel, VVD municipal councilor Klaas Buigel – striped shirt with short sleeves, checkered suspenders – shrugs his shoulders on Friday afternoon. “Politics is no longer alive here,” he says. “People have long since dropped out disappointed.” He hopes that the cabinet will not fall, he says. “Because then nothing happens for another year in the files that hit us so hard in Groningen – asylum, nitrogen, earthquakes.”
In Ter Apel, no asylum seeker had to sleep outside this year. But peace has not returned to the village since then. The source of the fire has only shifted, from the application center for asylum seekers between the vast fields outside the village to the shopping centre. There, a changing group of a few hundred asylum seekers causes a lot of nuisance. They stroll through the streets in groups and hang out in the park smoking pot. “The Hague has pretended for too long that things were not too bad,” says Buigel. “That has caused a lot of bad blood.”
The municipality confirms that these are young men from countries that are considered ‘safe’ by the ministry: Morocco and Tunisia. They form a group with which it is difficult to communicate. They are defensive or have little or no command of the English language. “Can’t talk,” says a boy with a green keycoard from the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers around his neck.
Other municipalities opened new shelters after last summer’s crisis, but set requirements for the people they want to take care of. Women, children and young families are welcome. But above all they don’t want safelanders. Problem cases without a future in the Netherlands remain behind in the application centre, where all asylum seekers entering the Netherlands must first report. Some municipalities even put difficult asylum seekers on a bus back to Ter Apel.
Also read this article: Which coalition parties will benefit from a fall of the cabinet?
Incidents
“We’ve noticed that here in the center for a long time,” says Monica Veenstra, sitting at a table in café Enjoy. She therefore hopes that the cabinet will fall, she says. “Maybe the eyes in The Hague will open a little more about what is going wrong here.” She says what dozens of villagers in and around the shopping square also say: real refugees are welcome. Her neighbors have fled Congo and now have a residence permit. Their children go to the same primary school as her daughter and learn the language very quickly. “Fantastic people, who make something of it.”
But then she points outside, to a group of boys with a can of beer in their hands. “That is the problem.” While one of the private security guards addresses the boys, Veenstra lists a series of incidents that she herself experienced last year. She’s scared, she says. Like many fellow villagers. “At home and in the car I always have a stick to defend myself with,” she says, somewhat embarrassed. Her daughter: “If someone asks what it is for, mom always says we are renovating.”
At first glance, everything has been done to prevent problems in the village centre. There are private security guards in the supermarkets, neighborhood coaches walk on the square and vans with boas and police officers pass by at a walking pace. They play a game of cat and mouse with the young men – most of them dressed in tracksuits. In between, the inhabitants do their daily shopping.
But in Lidl, the villagers say, there were five thefts in four hours last Saturday alone. These often end in skirmishes between asylum seekers and security guards. It creates an increasingly grim atmosphere, say residents in the center and along the route to the asylum seekers’ center. In the village, doors are secured with extra locks, residents have cameras to monitor their cars and detectors around their house that warn them if someone is walking.
Civil Guard
Some of the inhabitants have united in a vigilante group, whose members warn each other in app groups in the event of incidents. “Whoever can, comes to help immediately,” says founder Harry Siemers. On paper, they are “the eyes and ears of the police.” In practice, they also act hard. “We respond to violence with violence,” says Siemers. When asked if he was involved in the recent incident in which an asylum seeker ended up in the canal, he starts laughing. “I’m not commenting on that.”
In the parking lot in front of the Jumbo, where Geert Wilders recently addressed a crowd of a few hundred people with a megaphone (“There must be an asylum stop!”), house painter Scholte Boekholt gets out of his car. His wife Liesbeth normally does the shopping, but she no longer wants to go out alone. “In the supermarket they crawl in front of the checkout and stand against you. Really annoying.” The solution? “Finally tackle those troublemakers. Those are the problem, not the people who are really on the run.”
Boekholt nods. He likes to see Rutte IV fall. “Now the whole country is standing still.” He has pinned his hopes on Caroline van der Plas and her BBB. “An ordinary woman who understands us.”
Also read this article: Unrest in Rutte IV is growing about asylum and migration: time is running out for the cabinet