Holland: Organised crime
01 November 1993
The Dutch media are giving great prominence to organized crime which shows all the characteristics of a government-orchestrated campaign. With the spring 1994 elections in sight and the Ministry of Justice annual budget on the parliament's agenda, there has been a week-long series of TV documentaries with "live" footage of covert surveillance, house searches and arrests. Police chief Drs Eric Nordholt, of the Amsterdam force, disclosed that several political parties had experienced attempts by members with organized crime connections to infiltrate decision- making bodies on local and national levels. Also several employees at the Rotterdam public prosecutor's office and the Amsterdam court house were discovered to have underworld affiliations.
This has resulted in a behind-the-screens power play between the police and the BVD (the internal security service) over the question who will become responsible for keeping the civil servants and politicians honest and beyond temptation. While the BVD has the formal mandate to alert public authorities against "subversion" attempts, in reality the organization lacks the contacts to properly monitor all potential threats. Most infiltrations so far have been discovered in the course of police investigations. The police, and more specifically the Regional Criminal Intelligence Services (RCIDs), do have the antennae and the contacts to detect potential threats. The CID however is carefully shielded from the public domain, and formally the police chiefs are not allowed to provide anybody outside the strict police and public prosecutor spheres with the soft and often unverified CID information. The stakes in this turf battle are obviously high: countering the organized crime threat appears to have replaced, in seriousness and magnitude, terrorist and espionage scares. The role of the Regionale Inlichtingen Diensten (the RIDs, the police intelligence services, ie: the BVD branches in the police that have replaced the PIDs under the current police regionalisation) could become crucial here as they combine the BVD affiliation with excellent contacts in the police world. The loyalty of the RIDs to either the BVD or their regional grass roots remains to be established.
The BVD meanwhile has taken up its task of detecting subversion with a familiar vigour reminiscent of days gone by: in Amsterdam, personnel of the local "Maatwerk" bureau who coordinate programmes to get the unemployed back to work again have been asked to supply information on all of its clientele to the BVD in order to spot potential troublemakers. The BVD had obviously not anticipated the solidarity of some of Maatwerk's staff, themselves formerly unemployed, who have reported themselves on sick leave and are now considering ways to expose what they perceive as a new McCarthyism.