You cannot say that the Rutte I cabinet (2010-2012), a VVD-CDA coalition with the support of the PVV, had much sympathy for Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian president’s dealings with demonstrating citizens were “horrendous,” then Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal (VVD) wrote to Parliament in the summer of 2011. In Syria, the energy of the Arab Spring led to “incredibly far-reaching repression of its own population by the regime.”
“We want to see action,” said PVV MP Raymond de Roon in Parliament three months later. He believed that “the Arab world” should lead the way “in overthrowing President Assad.
Yet Assad remained in power for another thirteen years until he was deposed last weekend. And the irony is: it was mainly the European radical right, ultimately also the PVV, that continued to support Assad all these years.
That was also the surprising thing about the attention this week to the horror prisons and torture practices of the Syrian regime of terror. When Assad’s fight for survival led to hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing their country in 2015, the aversion to asylum seekers in the Netherlands, expressed by Geert Wilders, overrode interest in the Syrian tyrant’s misdeeds.
It can change.
Ali Chemicals
It is primarily US President Barack Obama who keeps Assad in place after his misconduct in 2011.
Due to the horror stories about poison gas, Obama said in the summer of 2012 that Assad was crossing “a red line” when he again used chemical weapons against his own citizens. But as the evidence against Assad mounts, Obama shies away from military intervention.
The Syrian tyrant now knows he has free rein. “The reports about possible use of chemical weapons are worrying,” then Minister of Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans (PvdA) wrote to the House in the spring of 2013. “It has long been clear that Assad belongs in the Ali Chemicals category,” said PVV member De Roon a year later.
The business community is certainly not playing a heroic role. NRC and RTL News revealed in 2013 that Syria is importing a raw material for poison gas from the Netherlands. A few years later, via the South German Zeitung it has emerged that Dutch companies are helping to evade the Syrian regime via a Panamanian detour of economic sanctions. The House reacted lukewarm.
There is more commotion about young people traveling from the Netherlands to the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. The Syrian civil war has created a power vacuum: Assad’s forces are fighting numerous opposition factions, which are often also fighting each other. It also offers ISIS opportunities.
“Assad is the source of the misery,” said then Foreign Affairs Minister Timmermans in the autumn of 2014. If he had taken a reasonable, rather than violent, approach to his critics in 2011, there would not have been 200,000 deaths in three years. “Then we wouldn’t have had to regret the rise of ISIS.”
But thanks to ISIS, Assad can now present his conflict with his own population as an existential struggle against Muslim extremists: it will ultimately strengthen his international position, especially among the radical right.
Allies
In March 2015, Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang became the first radical right-wing politician from Europe to visit Assad in Damascus. “If we want to win the war against Salafist Islam terrorism, we will have to cooperate with the Syrian regime, whether they want it or not,” Dewinter said afterwards.
Six months later, Matteo Salvini of the Italian League drew one similar conclusion. Shortly afterwards, Marine Le Pen also spoke out in favor of Assad: he is the only one, she sayswhich can prevent Syria from falling into chaos.
All allies of Wilders – but he keeps his distance. Then yes. “Assad is a very big villain,” say him at the time.
The European radical right is gradually closing ranks. In 2017 alludes Thierry Baudet on Assad’s stay. In 2018 year a delegation of Alternative for Germany (AfD) with Assad in Damascus because the party wants to investigate whether Syrian asylum seekers can return. In 2019 it appears that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wants the Hungarian embassy in Syria reopen.
Assad is gaining more and more friends. All relations of Vladimir Putin. The same Putin who turned the Syrian crisis into a European refugee issue in the fall of 2015. He says he is fighting terrorists, but his bombs land on moderate groups, hospitals and market squares, writes Minister Bert Koenders (Foreign Affairs, PvdA) the House in November 2015. VVD MP Han ten Broeke at the time: “It is Putin’s cluster bombs (…) that are causing large flows of refugees.”
Testosterone bombs
That angle is doing poorly. During the general reflections, just before the Russian bombing campaign, introduces Wilders a different kind of bomb: “What is it all worth if hundreds of terrorists walk through the streets undisturbed, if our schools are flooded with people who do not speak our language, if Dutch women and girls feel unsafe because of the testosterone bombs that Prime Minister Rutte is importing? ”
It brings him to the end of 2015 instant success in the polls. PVV members repeat ‘testosterone bombs’ endlessly. Current Minister Barry Madlener (Infrastructure and Water Management, PVV) several times. Current Speaker of the House Martin Bosma (PVV). And Wilders himself, again and again, after around the turn of the year incidents of assaults by asylum seekers have been reported in German cities.
In this way, only one dimension remains in the national interpretation of the Syrian crisis – a story of oppression, torture and poison gas: a threat to the Dutch. A gross simplification as the new reality.
It is evident from the story of Mazen al-Hamada that many media, too NRC, bring this week. The man was brutally tortured in 2012 because he protested against the regime. In 2014 he settled in Hillegom as an asylum seeker. He battles trauma and depression and does everything he can to make his story known. He features in numerous international media.
But social services cut his benefits because he has no work. He cannot pay his rent and ends up on the street in 2019. In 2020 he returns to Syria under mysterious circumstances.
Patriotism
The sad thing is: Hamada’s choice is exactly what the radical right has been advocating since 2017. In March of that year, the Syrian population was again attacked with poison gas (and the UN later identified the regime as the perpetrator). But in November 2017, when Rutte III took office, Wilders advocated the expulsion of all Syrians. “I would rather give the money to our elderly than to all those fortune seekers.” Later that month, then PVV MP Sietse Fritsma explained: “The war is over and reconstruction has begun.”
Shortly before, Wilders catches up EW announced a friendship visit to Moscow, where he will visit the Duma in early 2018 and receive a Russian-Dutch friendship pin. He says that “we can still learn a lot from Russia in terms of patriotism.”
The plea for the return of Syrians intensifies. Wilders, 2019: “Finally send those Syrians back!” Baudet, 2021: “Peace has returned to large parts of Syria.” MP Gidi Markuszower (PVV), 2021: “What are those Syrians still doing in the Netherlands?” Former MP Machiel de Graaf (PVV), 2023: “If you are (..) a complaining Syrian, everything will be thrown at you. This country is sick.”
The self-created image of testosterone bombs clouds the view of reality. De Volkskrant, 2020: “Nearly a million Syrians are trapped like rats in Idlib.” NRC2022: “How an Arnhem resident disappeared in Assad’s torture cell.” Etc.
Dice
It becomes apparent once again when Wilders takes the step in early November that most of the radical right allies in Europe have taken before: he advocated in News hour that the government will strengthen diplomatic relations with Assad to facilitate the return of Syrians. “Whatever you think of him – and of course it is not nice – the man will not leave.”
It underlines the poor judgment of the leader of the largest party. Even now that last week the tragic fate of Mazen al-Hamada, a former asylum seeker from Hillegom, became known: he died in the aftermath of Assad in a cell, possibly after new torture.
It reveals what all those radical right-wing pleas for the return of Syrians since 2017 really were: playing dice with human lives.
People may think that things will get worse in Syria after Assad. It may be true, I’m no expert.
At the same time, you hope that influential politicians are sufficiently democrats to weigh their own contributions to these types of debates. Problems with Syrians as they frequently predicted have sometimes occurred. But everyone can now reasonably see that PVV and FVD in particular have been seriously mistaken in their ‘analysis’ that Assad’s Syria has been a largely safe country since 2017.
But Wilders already showed up this week. He avoided the dilemma by saying: Assad is gone, Syrians are happy, let them go back. As if nothing happened.
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Have a nice weekend,
Tom-Jan Meeus