Racism: Gandhi Statue Vandalised: Mahatma Gandhi's statue in Amsterdam vandalised
AMSTERDAM: A statue of Mahatma Gandhi has been vandalised here in the capital of Netherlands by unknown miscreants with graffiti and spray painting,
amid a wave of attacks on controversial figures following the protests
around the world after the custodial killing of African-American George
Floyd, according to media reports. The statue of Gandhi on the Churchilllaan in Amsterdam
was covered with red paint and the pedestal has 'racist' and an
abbreviation for an expletive against the police chalked on it, Metro,
the Dutch newspaper, reported.
According to alderman Rutger Groot Wassink, the municipality will file a declaration for daubing.
"Obviously,
we are opposed to any form of vandalism and daubing of these things is
completely unacceptable," the city official was quoted as saying by the
AD.nl.
"It is logical that we will file a declaration, the image will be cleaned," Wassink said.
It
is not yet known who is behind the daubing. An employee of the
Kunstwacht, who provides maintenance and repairs, says that the cleaning
work can take hours.
A 75-year-old man saw the daubs on Wednesday
and called the municipality. "I have lived here for forty years and I
have never experienced this. I have been watching the statue for years,"
the man said.
Since the death of 46-year-old Floyd on May 25 in
Minneapolis, US, and subsequent worldwide Black Lives Matter protests,
there has been much debate about street names and statues of people with
a colonial past. All over the world, statues of controversial
historical figures are brought down or defaced.
Recently, images and
buildings have been defaced in various places that refer to the
colonial past of the Netherlands, including the Tropenmuseum in
Amsterdam and the statue of Piet Hein in Rotterdam. These are
anti-racist expressions that follow the death of Floyd through a white
police officer, Metro reported.
Gandhi was known as a champion of human rights
and non-violence. But in his twenties, which he spent in South Africa,
he still called black people "troublesome, very dirty and they live like
beasts" and found that the white people were the "dominant race". Later
he renounced those ideas, the report added.
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