Rising Racism on the Continent

By John Nielsen

Immigrants face economic hardship and increasing prejudice

Yesterday the Jews, tomorrow the Turks. --Graffito in West Berlin

"We don't want to resort to extremism, but if we are pushed against the wall, we will defend ourselves." --A young Moroccan in Paris

Urgent action is needed if [racial disadvantage] is not to become an endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society. --Lord Scarman's report on the 1981 riots in Brixton, England

They came by the millions when times were good, from backward villages in Anatolia and the Punjab, from the Caribbean and North Africa. For the most part, they were welcome, even sought after. They constituted a willing and indispensable Lumpenproletariat for Western Europe's postwar boom, ready to do work no one else wanted to do. Their large families, their mosques, their exotic costumes and customs were merely transitory inconveniences. One day they would vanish: the "migrants," the gastarbeiters, the travailleurs immigres would simply go home. But they stayed, and a new generation grew to adulthood: dark-skinned youngsters sporting the accents of Provence, Bavaria or the Midlands. Willy-nilly, the societies of Western Europe had become multiracial.

The transformation was largely complete by the mid-'70s. But by then, under the twin prods of hard times and rising unemployment, the immigrant question had become a political issue. Responding to pressure from their voters, governments placed heavy restrictions on new immigration. Too late. A new, alien and highly visible population was already entrenched in ghettos across the Continent: in Kreuzberg, along the Wall, in West Berlin; in large areas of Paris, Marseilles, Lyons; in the old quarters of Amsterdam and Utrecht; in the Brussels communes of Saint-Josse, Saint-Gilles and Schaerbeek; in Brixton, Toxteth and two dozen other working-class communities around Britain.

All told, an estimated 12 million immigrants from less-developed countries live in Western Europe, many of them trapped between old countries that cannot feed them and new countries that no longer want them.

As the Continent's recession has dragged on, many West Europeans have begun looking for scapegoats and have found them among their minorities. Suddenly the Turks, Pakistanis and Algerians are no longer individuals: they are Kana-ken, nig-nogs and bougnouls. Occasionally the prejudice goes from verbal violence to physical: a gang attack, an anonymous bullet, a bomb thrown from a passing car. More often racism comes at arm's length: random insults, hostile stares, racial stereotypes held up as universal truths. "Yes, I suppose I'm prejudiced," says a West London matron. "People my age had nothing to do with the blunders and greed of the upper classes toward the colonies, and I don't see why I should put up with the results now. The first thing the blacks do is go on welfare. And I'm tired of people working in the post office who don't speak proper English."

Inevitably, the animosity has found political echoes. France's far-right Front National probably commands no more than 3% support nationwide, but it has made significant electoral gains in some communities with large immigrant populations. The Netherlands' ultraconservative Centrum-Partij, playing the racial theme to the hilt, finds similar support. In Britain and West Germany, right-wingers in the ruling parties have thundered ominously about racial issues, to the embarrassment of their colleagues.

In a sense, the political rumblings represent a mulish refusal to accept the changes in Western Europe's social fabric. Serious debate has been hindered by rhetoric about immigration, which is all but over, and large-scale repatriation, which is all but impossible. "We haven't come to terms with the fact that black people are really here to stay," says Lawyer Paul Boateng, 32, who was an unsuccessful Labor candidate in Britain's last general election. "We regard black people as immigrants who are transients, or potentially transients. White society wants to believe it's all a bad dream--that they will wake up one morning and all the blacks will be gone. Well, it's not going to happen."

Even in the good years, Western Europe exploited and ignored its minorities, but the long-running recession seems to have stirred a particularly malignant demon in the Continent's psyche. In France last month, a dispute over extensive layoffs at a Peugeot factory outside Paris degenerated into three days of racial violence that left 120 people injured. The clashes pitted striking workers (mostly immigrants) against those still holding jobs (mostly Frenchmen). More than 20 immigrants have been killed or wounded in other incidents in France in the past year. At least seven, including a ten-year-old boy, were victims of snipers in the tense, ethnically mixed housing complexes outside Paris and other major cities. Racist harassment in Britain is so common that nonwhites no longer bother to report threats, insults or obscene letters to the police. In 1981 the Home Office found that West Indians were 36 times more likely to be racially attacked than whites, Asians 50 times.

The violence has chilling resonance in West Germany, where small neo-Nazi groups have seized the race issue and made it their own. Turkish immigrants regularly receive threatening letters telling them to leave Germany or be hounded out. An outfit calling itself the Prince Eugen Battle Group (named for a brutal Austrian field marshal who led a major assault against the Turks in the late 17th century) has set its sights on Turkish teachers in West Berlin schools. "Can't you understand we [Germans] don't want anything to do with you," says one of their milder letters. "Pack your things while there is still time... before your apartments and kebab stalls go up in flames." All too often, the threats are carried out. In West Berlin, a group of teen-age German thugs, screaming abuse at foreigners, attacked a Turkish shop last November, roughing up the owner and his family and ransacking the rooms. In Heidelberg, scores of right-wing fanatics assaulted migrant workers and paraded through the city shouting neo-Nazi slogans. Police arrested 25.

Football and bigotry seem to go hand in hand among some West German youth gangs. Fans for Dortmund's Borussia soccer team regularly sing Nazi songs and chant Heil, Hitler! in the stands and terrorize immigrants after matches. At pressent, 37 members of the group are being investigated on charges of racial incitement, theft, assault and breach of the peace. When West Germany played Turkey last November in a qualifying match for this year's European championships, police posted 6,000 men at West Berlin's Olympic stadium. Turkish shops were given special protection after neo-Nazi groups threatened that the Kreuzberg ghetto would "go up in flames" on the day of the game. The anti-immigrant atmosphere caused Chancellor Helmut Kohl so much embarrassment that he flew in from Bonn to attend the game.

Not long ago, Tara Mukherjee's job as a manager with a British mutual fund took him to Belgium. Although born in India, Mukherjee, 54, has lived in Britain for 35 years, and is permitted to enter and leave the country freely. As he was departing this time, an immigration official quizzed him closely about his new passport, apparently looking for grounds to detain him as a suspected illegal. To the official's embarrassment, Mukherjee's documents were in order. "I watched his face redden as he stamped my passport," Mukherjee remembers. It was an example of what he calls "lace-curtain discrimination. It's where you discriminate in subtle ways without being detected. It's in all walks of British life."

The curtain, of course, is by no means solely British. Customs officials around the Continent routinely single out dark-skinned travelers for special scrutiny. Taxi drivers in the Dutch city of Nijmegen refused to accept black customers after one Surinamese failed to pay his fare. Brussels abounds with signs that say FOR RENT with a NO FOREIGNERS footnote.

The message, which is illegal, normally does not apply to Europeans. The owner of a sidewalk cafe on West Berlin's Kurfuerstendam excludes Turks because they "lower the tone" of his establishment. Says Brahim Chanchabi, 29, a Tunisian student in Paris: "You see it in people's eyes. It's not so much a look of hatred as of fear. The other day an elderly woman just started yelling at me, saying, 'Go back to your own country!' "

Mass migration is nothing new in European history. The Continent's religious, dynastic and economic upheavals have uprooted people for centuries: Eastern Jews to the West, French Huguenots to Germany, and, most recently, Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians to the factories of the north. Every wave of emigres has met resistance.

Today's non-European immigrants come from alien cultures; some are descended from Islamic ancestors who struggled to the death with Christendom, while others bore the brunt of attitudes hardened by a long history of colonialism. "There is a notion of racial superiority in Britain, and it relates to the myth of empire," says Malcolm Cross, deputy director of the Research Unit on Ethnic Relations at Birmingham's Aston University. "The empire was a reality. In 1939 this country controlled a quarter of the world's population. But the myth was based on a spurious notion of racial superiority." With some minor adjustments for fact, the statement can be applied to Western Europe as a whole.

There are other tenets in the anti-immigrant canon, and like the myth of white supremacy, they do not stand up to close examination. For example, that immigrants take jobs from local citizens. Although there is some competition for lowpaying jobs, there is no correlation between unemployment rates and immigrant populations. A West German Labor Ministry official insists that largely due to unemployment and mechanization, Germans are more and more attracted to jobs they once considered too menial, like garbage collecting. But a recent study by the city of Duesseldorf showed that it would grind to a virtual halt if the foreigners withdrew their labor. Garbage would remain stinking on sidewalks, hospitals would not be able to cope, and there would be some closure of schools. In addition, the city would lose $3.6 million in taxes and $6.1 million in pension contributions. Says French Sociologist Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux: "The attempt to substitute a national labor force for immigrant labor has largely been a failure. Even in times of economic crisis and unemployment, there are certain jobs that nationals will just not take." Official studies show that "fewer than three foreign workers in ten could be replaced by French workers."

Sometimes the newcomers' rage boils over, as it did in Brixton, Liverpool and Lyons in the long, hot summer of '81. More often it is sublimated into sadness, disillusionment and steely resentment, or it sinks back into the ineffable apathy that seems the most common defense against a harsh life. In Britain, the unemployment rate among blacks is twice that of whites; similarly, joblessness among immigrant Turks in West Germany is twice that of native Germans; among immigrants in France, it is one quarter higher than for native French.

The prospect of long-term idleness is roughest on young immigrants, as it is for all youngsters, blighting their lives when they should be taking wing. The hopelessness can sink deep roots. Young blacks in Britain point to their unemployed elders and ask why they should even bother to try to find jobs. "How long does a person go on knocking on the door?" asks Aaron Haynes, a black sociologist and the director of community affairs for Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. "Unless there is some degree of success, you are just adding one more round to the syndrome of failure--and that's what the black community is suffering from at the moment."

Drug abuse, prostitution and assorted other crimes--minor and major--flourish in many immigrant ghettos. Young Turks and Surinamese are deeply involved in the narcotics trade around Amsterdam; addiction is common among young North Africans in Paris. Says Nordine Iznasni, 21, a resident of the notorious Cite Gutenberg, a collection of ramshackle, barrack-like buildings in the Paris suburb of Nanterre: "When you've got nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, it's a way to hide from reality, just as French kids do. Young North Africans are sick of rejection, unemployment and disrespect. Unless you have a strong character, it's easy to fall into." Studies by France's Social Affairs and Solidarity Ministry indicate, however, that immigrants are no more delinquent than native Frenchmen of equivalent age and social situation.

There are, of course, many Europeans committed to promoting racial understanding. Some have even begun to redirect national policies. France's Socialist government has cracked down heavily on illegal immigration, but it has also given priority to job training and housing programs for minorities. To ease the pain of the Peugeot layoffs, for instance, authorities are considering a program of retraining for workers who choose to stay in France and payments--perhaps as much as $4,700 each--to those who choose repatriation. Britain's Conservative government, whose anti-immigration policies have been denounced as "oppressive" by its Labor Party opponents, is trying to head off a repeat of the 1981 Brixton riots. Police have abandoned some of the antagonistic practices of the past and have moved to establish better community relations, and modest amounts of money have been earmarked for the most blighted urban areas. The mayor of West Berlin has appointed a commissioner for German-Turkish relations. In The Netherlands, the Anne Frank Foundation (established in 1957 to save the house where the young Jewish fugitive wrote her famous diary) supplies 2,500 schools with antiracist study materials.

Experts in both countries are studying the American experience in coping with ethnic strains. "The U.S. model is important because the country has traditionally had a large immigrant population," says Georgina Dufoix, France's Secretary of State for Families and Immigrants. "One thing that has interested me most is the effort to see that there are always blacks in [responsible positions] in order to give the black population an image of itself and its role in American society." Says Britain's Boateng: "America still has deep-rooted racism, but at least there has been a recognition of that fact and a political will to do something about it. Here society as a whole doesn't recognize racism, and there's no political will or machinery to change it."

Meanwhile, a number of time bombs are ticking. Racial tensions are palpable in the big cities of Britain and France; both countries, and some others as well, are worried about possible explosions. Says Zafir Ilgar, 35, the leader of the Turkish community in West Berlin: "Bonn must recognize that we Turks are here to stay. The whole climate is one of fear and unease. The careless speeches of some politicians are causing Germans to direct their aggression against foreign workers." The strains will not go away by themselves. In Britain, 45% of ethnic minorities were actually born there. In Brussels, foreigners will make up 40% of the population by the year 2000. In a recent report on immigrant youth, French Government Demographers James Marange and Andre Lebon predicted that within 15 years, more than half of those under 25 in France will be of foreign origin.

Many of them, moreover, will be citizens, voters with the potential ability to swing elections. Second-generation immigrants are beginning to grasp that possibility, and they too are drawing a lesson from the U.S.

"The Americans brought slaves from Africa; the French brought our parents here from Algeria, weak and ignorant, just like the blacks," says one young man in the Cite Gutenberg. "If we start to think, improve ourselves and make demands, it could lead to something like this .. ." As he speaks, he gestures toward a photograph of Jesse Jackson, then finishes his sentence, ". . . to political power." --By John Nielsen. Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn, John Saar/London and Thomas A. Sancton/Paris

With reporting by Gary Lee/Bonn, John Saar/London, Thomas A. Sancton/Paris