Samenvatting

This article describes the subsequent waves of contract killings in the Netherlands since the twentieth century. Contract killings appear to happen especially within ethnic groups which are newcomers to Dutch society. The Chinese community in Amsterdam fought two internal ‘wars’. The first one was from 1918 till 1935 and circled around the trade in opium and arms. The second one took place between 1969 and the mid-seventies and was fueled by conflicts about the heroin trade. Then Turkish criminals took over the heroin trade, which resulted in a wave of Turkish victims of contract killings throughout the second half of the seventies and into the eighties. The cocaine trade came up in the eighties and was run first by Chileans and later by Colombians, which resulted in several murders within the criminal circles of these communities. While contract killings of (by birth) Dutch criminals had always been very rare, this changed from the mid-eighties. These killings not only took place in Amsterdam, but also in the southern provinces of Limburg and Brabant, as well as in Rotterdam. Most Dutch criminals specialized in cannabis growing and trading. In the nineties the number of contract killings reached a peak. By then Yugoslavs had entered the criminal scene in the Netherlands. They cooperated with Dutch criminals and offered their services as hitmen. From 2000 onwards the number of contract killings has been dropping constantly and has now reached a more or less constant level of around twenty yearly. In the last couple of years many young Moroccan Dutch criminals have been killing and killed in conflicts on drugs trade. The author signalizes a lack of ‘professionalism’ in contract killers today and draws a parallel with the period when Chinese criminals were fighting their wars in Amsterdam. The hitmen are young, have little experience, are not intelligent and use far too many bullets to do the job.