The Hindu Business Line : Dimming the Red Lights of Den Wallen

Mayor Job Cohen has launched Project 1012, an ambitious programme to rid Amsterdam’s red light district of crime and illegal businesses. While some quarters have welcomed the news, many are opposed to the idea.

— J. Srinivasan

Now, a more sober view.

J. Srinivasan

If Mayor Job Cohen has his way, the sinning days of Amsterdam would be over. Armed with a new zoning code, he wants to dim, if not put out, the red lights of Amsterdam’s famous Den Wallen. The City Council has decided to clean up the historic but notorious district which, Cohen says, has become “bloated with sleaze”. So, the city has bought, in the first tranche, 18 brothels, and given the windows and the rooms for one year to fashion designers and photog raphers. Instead of the usual skimpily-clad women, these windows showcase mannequins and easels.

Project 1012

On a January morning, Cohen’s deputy, Lodewijk Asscher, walked the Damrak-Rokin strip, popularly called the Rode Loper (or the Red Carpet) of Amsterdam, with top Dutch designers to inaugurate “Red Light Fashion” — a year-long extravaganza commissioned by the city and the Dutch fashion agency HTNK. Then, the same evening, he launched Project 1012 — Den Wallen’s pin code — an ambitious programme of ridding the red light district of crime and illegal businesses.

While some quarters have welcomed the news, many are opposed to the idea, and tout the city’s history and economics to term Cohen’s moves ill-advised.

Taking the second first, all day long, and far into the night, the less than half a square km district attracts crowds of tourists, men and women, moving along canals and down alleys, lined with brothel display-windows, peep shows, live-sex theatres, and shops selling erotic films and sex toys. Brothels were legalised in 2000 and, according to city statistics, there are now 142, with some 500 display-windows.

Many more brothels that work with illegal immigrants also operate surreptitiously. By official estimates, the sex trade alone fetches Amsterdam the equivalent of about $100 million every year.

The city council hopes that post-Project 1012 people will flock to the art galleries, boutiques, upscale restaurants and hotels in the city’s oldest quarter that also boasts of seven medieval churches and hundreds of historic buildings. But the ‘working residents’ and landlords are not as sanguine. They have formed action groups and hired lawyers to defend “the unique character” of the neighbourhood.

Licensed, and paying taxes, they see themselves, as “normal businesses,” with offices and computers, but also beds, a washing machine and lines to dry towels. They blame the diamond dealers, the hoteliers, and the banks for wanting to drive them away, though they do not think the former set’s business is very clean either.

‘Fashion workshops’

Yet, this attack of prudishness is not new to the city. For, though the Netherlands legalised in 2000 what has been a key part of Amsterdam’s life since the 16th century, the oldest profession had faced a ban in the 19th Century too. Most brothel owners then had renamed their businesses “fashion workshops” and continued with the business. Also, in earlier times the business was better regulated and allowed only in certain areas. Brothel-keepers trying to rent a house outside this area faced live burial and the women conducting their trade in ‘illegal’ territory could lose a ear.

But a century later, Amsterdam’s magistrates decided that the city needed its women and even the church reconciled itself to “love for sale” but not without regulation. Prostitution was legalised in the sense that the Bailiff and his police force could run the brothels. The police, however, had to give up this ‘business’ after Amsterdam came under Calvinists. But even the Calvinists had left alone establishments that did not cause much trouble.

Sleazier, meaner

‘Trouble’ seems to be what is bothering the present city council. Cohen was quoted by Amsterdam Weekly as saying that “… this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities. We’re not banning prostitution, but we are cutting back on the whole circuit: The gambling halls, the pimps, the money laundering.”

The expanding sex business has spawned cheap hotels and smoky coffee-shops (these are mainly outlets for marijuana whose sale in small quantities is legal in the Netherlands) along the once-elegant boulevards, and the City fathers are worried by evidence that criminal gangs and international sex traffickers, including East Europeans and Russians, are taking over Den Wallen, making it sleazier and meaner.

Corroboration comes from a report about the sex trade by Karina Schaapman, a former prostitute and now a City Council member. The report, Amsterdam Weekly says, counts some 80 “violent pimps” and that more than 75 per cent of Amsterdam’s 8,000 to 11,000 prostitutes, including 1,000 men, were from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

According to yet another report, this time by a task force set up by the mayor’s office, the marijuana cafes (coffee shops) and the licensed brothels were providing legal outlets for crime. “The marijuana and the women have to come from somewhere, and organised crime fills much of this demand,” the study said. The money earned in this lucrative trade is pumped back into the area, widening the criminal circle, it said.

More closings

By all accounts, more closings of brothel windows will follow as the city applies tough new zoning codes and runs tax audits on landlords and brothel owners. “Right now people seem more eager to sell rather than fight,” Project 1012’s manager was quoted as saying. Reducing crime and trafficking is good, but closing brothels could be worse for women, fears Metje Blaak, who runs Red Thread, a support group for prostitutes. They, she told Amsterdam Weekly, “may end up in a back room somewhere where we can’t reach them.”

With the red light district gaining notoriety Amsterdam may have no choice but to change the bulbs in Den Wallen but then the city will lose, what appears on surface at least, its endearing quaintness.

(The author is a Business Line Deputy Editor on sabbatical in the Netherlands.)