Ten years Croatia: what remains of a flight

Observation

2025 was a hard year for our family. Discrimination at school, unsafe situations in our living environment — things no family should have to deal with. The future of our children mattered more than the place where we lived. So we made the hard decision to move to our holiday home in Zagorje, where our friend Justus Reid also has his small house on a hillside. A beautiful environment, honest people, and a place where we and our children can finally find our way.

Context

It has been ten years since we left Holland. The main reason was the childcare benefits scandal — one of the biggest scandals in the history of the Dutch state, created by their own government. AI automation is not always the way to do lazy work without debugging, testing and monitoring. The Tax and Customs Administration’s benefits department thought they could run a great automated check, with some extreme right-wing thinkers holding the keys — and in doing so created a group of more than 69,000 victim families (registered parents in the recovery operation as of February 2026), without those families ever knowing it until the end was near. More than 3,000 children were taken away from their parents because of claims the government forced through. People lost their jobs, their companies, their houses — and ended up on the street.

The surveillance infrastructure behind the scandal was vast: RAM (Risk Assessment Model, 1998-2018) profiled virtually all taxpayers for 20 years; FSV (Fraud Signalling Facility, 2007-2020) registered ~180,000 citizens as fraud suspects without verification; Heidi (2013-2017) logged portal data from the benefits website; and tax data was shared with RIEC/LIEC crime-fighting centers without citizens’ knowledge.

We got out in time. We ran with our children to Croatia, inside the EU — at the time still outside the Schengen area (Croatia joined Schengen on 1 January 2023), but within European borders where we could make a fresh start. Croatia was the only choice we had.

Reading

Even now, we are still trying to piece everything back together. The losses are real: family, friends, our company, our houses, our income. Four governments have come and gone, and the damage is still there. Mark Rutte walked away into a well-protected new job. The victims are still fighting to get their lives back.

It took me eight years to get my right to vote back.

The injustice inflicted on you — day after day — is simply extreme. Staff lawyers at DG Herstel Toeslagen step over the law without batting an eye, with no feeling and no heart. A struggle was forced upon us, and then we faced an even greater struggle just to claim our rights back.

Now, two years on, there is finally some peace. We left our own home — it is on the market now — and moved to a place where the street is quiet, the surroundings are calm, and the children can walk outside freely. They go to school with pleasure. Real lessons. Real help with their language. Real life.

Notes

The experience of forced emigration within the EU deserves more attention. The image of the ‘voluntary’ emigrant masks the reality of people who had no choice. Institutional support for Dutch emigrant victims of the childcare benefits scandal is structurally inadequate.