Anti-curfew rioters torch Netherlands covid centre

Hundreds of people have been arrested after a weekend of riots across the Netherlands in which shops were looted and a COVID testing centre attacked.

Mark rutte, the prime minister, condemned “criminal violence” Monday after protesters against a coronavirus curfew went on the rampage in several cities. Police used water cannon, tear gas and mounted troops to disperse rioters after protests were banned and demonstrators asked to go home. Around 250 people have been arrested.

Although demonstrations against coronavirus restrictions have been taking place for months, this was the first case of widespread violence.

rioters torched a car, looted shops and — to public horror — pelted windows at a hospital in enschede with stones. The riots were prompted by a national curfew preventing people from leaving their homes from 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., the first since the Second World War.

It was voted through by a parliamentary majority, even though the government last week stepped down over a domestic scandal. Other protests have reportedly been planned for forthcoming Sundays. Trouble flared first in the small fishing village of urk on Saturday night, when police were called in after youths set a drive-in coronavirus test centre on fire. On Sunday, protests spread from Amsterdam to eindhoven, and then 12 other locations by the evening, including The Hague.

“The violence is unacceptable,” said rutte, who is acting in a caretaker capacity until a March general election. “This has nothing to do with protesting: it is criminal violence, and we will treat it as such. I am convinced that 99 per cent of the Netherlands is keeping to the rules and the curfew. We are not taking all of these measures for fun. We are fighting against a virus, and it is the virus taking our freedom.”

Mayor John Jorritsma of eindhoven, where protesters who were told to disperse pulled knives, batons, Molotov cocktails and other weapons on police, branded rioters the “scum of the earth.”

He said on Sunday: “I am afraid that if this is the path we are on together, we are on the way to civil war. Soon we will have to send in the army ... Has our society fallen so far?”

He claimed that groups came into eindhoven with the express intention of causing trouble.

Koen Simmers, chief executive of the dutch Police Association, expressed concerns this was a sign of days or weeks of unrest to come.

“In eindhoven it got so crazy that police were simply pelted with knives and attacked,” he said.

Ab Gietelink, a protester, said: “A pacifist, peaceful organization, because of the government’s escalation, became a kind of violent uprising.”