I write this because I am appalled. I write this because I find it unfathomable that a Western, civilized country that dares to boast of its “tolerance” (a fable, but people still believe it) and its “openness” (ditto), a country that professes to believe in human rights and human dignity, can be committing this kind of sin against an innocent young man. I write this because I think the world should know.
Mauro Manuel arrived in the Netherlands as a child of nine – frightened, alone, sent off by his parents who feared for his safety in their war-torn homeland of Angola. Their son, they knew, would face a better future in the West.
And so he came to live in the Netherlands, where he has, in the nine years since, learned to speak the language fluently, with the unmistakeable drawl of the province of Limburg, where he now lives with a foster family. He has been a good student. He plays soccer with the best of them. His foster parents gave birth two years ago to a son Mauro calls his brother, and loves as if they had been born to the same family.
But Mauro is now 18 years old. And the Dutch government wants to send him back to Africa.
Dutch Shame: The Netherlands Debates The Deportation Of A Child – Forbes
Read the story at the link. I am not pasting it in its entirety because it’s long(ish).
If you ever wonder why I write what I write and why I am politically involved in this country, here you have an excellent sample of what goes on. And this case is making international media because it is over the top outrageous, however, there are the invisible ones that happen every day, under the pretense that these people are a “threat” to our wellbeing.
I wrote yesterday an extensive post about what the Occupy movement means in a European context and its colonial past (whose wealth do they want to re-distribute exactly?) and THIS is exactly the context in which the Occupy movements are operating in Europe, and more specifically in The Netherlands. This child now, only able to occupy a plane back to a land he doesn’t even know.
But hey, the Empire basks in its past glory and protects its citizens from the “foreign menace”! Really, we should be protected from teenagers who escaped war zones, mind you, created by other members of the European Union (Angola was a Portuguese colony).
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