TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.0 KB | 257 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

EUROPE

Racisme


As Europe's ethnic mix begins to change, some countries discover
they are not as tolerant of foreign cultures as they once thought
they were

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by Margot Hornblower/Paris and
Robert T. Zintl/Rome with other bureaus


    Black-clad German skinheads from both parts of the newly
united country parade through the streets of Dresden to mourn
their hero Rainer Sonntag, killed by a gang of pimps in a
dispute over turf. Silent onlookers and 1,500 police watch as
the 2,000 neo-Nazis raise their arms and shout, "Sieg heil!" and
"Foreigners out!"

    -- Bands of young Arab men attack the highways of southern
France, setting up barricades, occupying tollbooths,
fire-bombing buses. They are the sons of Algerians called
Harkis, who served the French colonial government during the war
in Algeria, and they are demanding jobs and better living
conditions.

    -- In a sterile, high-rise housing project in southeast
London, Rolan Adams, a black teenager, steps out of one of the
neighborhood's few youth clubs. A gang of whites jump him and
stab him to death. Of the nine whites arrested, five are
acquitted, and four still face trial. The Adams family is
receiving phone calls from people who say they are glad Rolan
is dead.

    -- Mulie Jarju, 33, a migrant worker from Gambia, starred
last year in a prizewinning film, Letters from Alou, about the
plight of Africans employed illegally in Spain under conditions
close to those of slave labor. Today Jarju cannot find work in
Spain as either actor or laborer and faces deportation.

    The collapse of the Soviet empire let the lid blow off
Eastern Europe's ugly assortment of old ethnic hostilities. At
the same time, for different reasons, countries in Western
Europe are becoming increasingly aware of the pressures
generated by their own changing racial mix. As their Muslim and
African populations have increased, Europeans who for decades
delighted in accusing the U.S. of bigotry and violence have
discovered they are not nearly as tolerant as they thought they
were.

    Altogether, 8 million legal and an estimated 2 million
illegal immigrants live in the 12 nations of the European
Community.* These numbers are about the same as they were 10
years ago, but the proportion of dark-skinned, poor Africans and
Arabs in Western Europe is significantly higher now. Even though
the overall numbers are not increasing, E.C. governments have
decided they have reached the saturation point -- what French
President Francois Mitterrand calls "the threshold of
tolerance."

    Looking toward 1992, when the community's borders will
become even more permeable, E.C. countries are working to
tighten their immigration rules. The focus on immigration is a
reaction to a popular belief, often fueled by incendiary press
reports, that migrants from abroad are taking jobs and houses
away from needy citizens or living handsomely on welfare
payments. There is little or no evidence for such claims, but
resentment is building in one country after another.



    GERMANY

    No sooner had the Berlin Wall fallen than it became
obvious that there were other barriers for many former East
Germans to overcome. Isolated from the world, trained to
distrust everyone unlike themselves, alienated German youths
lashed out in a fit of xenophobia. Often their targets were
workers imported by the communist regime from other Marxist
countries, like Angola and Vietnam, but sometimes they were
simply anyone of another race.

    In Dresden last April, neo-Nazis threw a Mozambican to his
death from a moving streetcar. In May they invaded a tenement
in Wittenberg, forcing two Namibians off a fourth-floor balcony
and critically injuring them. Two weeks ago, 50 skinheads
stormed a center for asylum seekers from the Third World,
smashing windows and pummeling residents. No one with a dark
skin, police officials say, can feel safe on the streets of
eastern Berlin.

    This phenomenon is really "antiforeign sentiment without
foreigners," says Liselotte Funcke, former Federal Commissioner
for the Integration of Foreign Workers. In the five states that
used to make up East Germany, foreigners account for only 1% of
the population. Half of the 60,000 Vietnamese who once worked
there have gone home, as have the 8,000 Cubans and all but 3,000
of the 15,000 Mozambicans.

    "We have to differentiate between racism and xenophobia,"
says Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leftist leaders of the
student revolt in Paris in the late 1960s, who now heads the
city multicultural affairs office in Frankfurt. "I would deny
that the Germans are more xenophobic than other countries."

    The surge in hate crimes in eastern Germany occurred just
as the 1.6 million Turks in western Germany were becoming
accepted. There is no longer widespread anti-Turkish prejudice,
says Barbara John, the Berlin commissioner for foreigners. "The
contrary is true," she says. "West Germans have taken to
defending the Turks against antiforeign slander coming from the
east."

    One possible reason, officials say, is the fact that
Turkish workers, most of them young and healthy, pay more into
the German social-welfare and pension system than they take out.
Turks opening businesses in Germany have created at least
100,000 new jobs, and their investments in the country total
$2.7 billion.



    FRANCE

    During the 1960s and 1970s, labor-short French businesses
imported planeloads of workers. Now the welcome has waned for
these immigrants, particularly for the 3 million North and West
Africans and their French-born children. A government study
released in June showed that 71% of French citizens said the
country had too many Arabs, 45% said too many blacks, and 94%
acknowledged that racism is "widespread."

    Every month brings new controversy. A school expels two
Muslim girls for wearing head scarves, sparking a national
debate over religious freedom. Hundreds of youths, mostly Arabs,
riot in a suburb of Lyons over charges of police brutality.
Off-duty paratroopers attack Arabs in Carcassonne, injuring
five. "There's an overdose of foreigners," the conservative
mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, charges. Jean-Marie Le Pen,
leader of the anti-foreign National Front, seizes the
opportunity to claim that France is heading for "civil war."

    Prime Minister Edith Cresson, who has proved herself quick
with a cutting quip about foreigners, is emphasizing a tough
immigration policy that is certain to reduce the number of North
Africans in the country. All those judged illegal immigrants by
"French justice," she says, "will be sent back home." Mitterrand
agrees. "Enforcement of the law must be strict," he said last
month. "Clandestine immigrants must go home."



    BRITAIN

    A poll published in July by the Independent on Sunday
indicated that a majority of British consider their country
racist. While a third of the respondents thought the United
Kingdom was a bit more tolerant than a decade ago, 79% of
blacks, 67% of whites and 56% of Asians regarded the nation as
"very racist" or "fairly racist." A four-year study by the
European Parliament accuses Britain of creating and exporting
the "racist and violent subculture of the skinheads."

    Strict immigration policy makes it difficult to move to
Britain; only 49,000 newcomers were admitted in 1989. In the
past decade, the nonwhite population rose only from 1.9 million
to 2.6 million out of a total of 57 million residents. But those
facts seem to make no impression on the country's racists.
Between 1988 and 1990 alone, the number of racially motivated
incidents of harassment or violence reported to the police
jumped from 4,383 to 6,359. "Racism is on the increase and is
becoming more violent," says Asad Rehman, a caseworker in
London's poor East End.

    Still, some believe race relations in Britain are not as
bad as they are on the Continent. "There, blacks are seen as
second-class citizens with few rights or none at all," says
Bernie Grant, one of four black Labour Members of Parliament.
"In Britain, most black people are citizens." And they can
muster some political weight. More than 500 elected members of
local city and town councils are black. Nevertheless, the
tabloids keep whipping up their working-class readers with
improbable tales of immigrants living in luxury at taxpayer
expense. In fact, says David Dibosa of the Greater London Action
for Racial Equality, "White middle-class citizens have much more
access to the benefits of citizenship than blacks."



    ITALY

    At a subway entrance in central Rome, a Senegalese street
vendor displays his wares. He lives with 20 other foreigners in
a three-story house with no hot water. He thinks the Italians
are racist because "when we get on a bus, they move away from
us."

    To the Italians, these immigrants are known sneeringly as
vu cumpra, a distorted form of the phrase Vuoi comprare? -- Do
you want to buy? Africans and Asians can be seen everywhere,
selling cheap goods on the streets, pumping gas, trying to
clean windshields at intersections. According to Italy's
brand-new Ministry of Immigration, 662,047 registered foreigners
from outside the E.C. are in the country, and probably another
600,000 are there illegally.

    Racial incidents are now commonplace. In May, Somalians
demonstrated in Rome's Piazza Venezia to protest overcrowding
and poor housing. A shelter for immigrants near the Colosseum
was burned last January, and in December two gypsies were shot
and killed at their campsite in Bologna. Under tougher
immigration laws that went into effect last year, Italy expelled
more than 6,000 illegal immigrants and turned back 13,435 from
its borders in the first four months of this year.

    A national poll last month showed 75% of respondents
opposing further immigration. Many Italians, citing their
traditions of tolerance, say they are shocked at the rise of
anti-foreign feelings. But, insists the Rev. Luigi di Liegro,
head of the Caritas charity in Rome, "racism is the same
everywhere. It just takes shape differently in different
cultures."

    Among the ironies in this wave of racial hostility is that
the birthrate in major West European countries like Italy,
Germany and France is flat. A government-funded study published
in France last month suggested the country may be forced to
import more immigrant workers to fill empty jobs after the year
2000.

    Massimo Livi Bacci, a professor of demographics at the
University Cesare Alfieri in Florence, predicts that while
populations on the Mediterranean's European north coast will
barely increase over the next 30 years, those on the African
south coast will rise more than 100 million. The numbers add up
to an inescapable conclusion: if Europe is to find workers for
all its industries and services in the years soon to come, it
will have to raise its threshold of racial tolerance.