That Asian Monetary Fund scheme is no news.... Actually, I brought up that story on this thread a coupla months ago or so. I'd condense it in a zinger: Mr Charlie was driving his spruce 1945 IMF limo with Mr Chink in the backseat.... Now, we all know how frustrating it is to play backseat driver, don't we?? So, after the 1997 swerve (ie the so-called Asian flu) Mr Chink told Mr Charlie, "enough is enough! I want my own car!" And suddenly Mr Charlie freaks out and tells Mr Chink, "Hey bro! We're team, aren't we? Kissing cousins! I mean, I'm Asian too, after all! You'll let me have a ride in your car, won't you bro??"
Now, I've got another topical, thought-provoking story for you:
November 13, 1995
Fear, racial crime deepen as immigrants redefine continent
By Mort Rosenblum Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Immigrants are changing the face of Europe. And new fears are deepening fast: fears of racial warfare, extremist politics, terrorism.
Bombings in France, blamed largely on Algerians, have echoed through the continent. New cultures and colors are not melting in the pot.
The mood is clear in Molenbeek -- a piece of Morocco in Brussels -- where riots flared over the summer. For all the gay colors of fruit in the market, the air is sullen.
"All they can do is sit like that, all day," Mohammed Temsamani said, nodding toward a knot of Arabs in white caps, squatting on a stoop. "There are no jobs. What other choice do they have?"
Temsamani, who came from Morocco in 1964 and married a Belgian, sees a sharp turn for the worse. Now a cab driver, he cruises the streets and frets over drug dealing, police harassment and racism.
"Look," he said, pointing to dark-hued kids emerging from class. "They learn, but they'll go nowhere. They'll get job interviews by phone, but when the guy sees their black hair, that's it." His fears are reflected at the top levels of the European Union headquarters, not far away.
"Of course, I'm afraid of increased violence and conflict," said Anita Gradin, the EU commissioner who watches immigration. "That is very likely."
The face of Europe began taking on new color in the 1950s, after many colonies were set free and Europe welcomed former subjects who fled the subsequent turmoil. In the 1960s, workers streamed in from North Africa, Turkey and beyond, and their families followed.
Demographers noted the implications for Europe's racial makeup: Among native Europeans, birth rates were stable or even dropping. Immigrant families expanded quickly.
Authorities have tried to limit immigration since the 1970s, but numbers keep rising. Today, citizens and residents of non-European stock may total as many as 25 million in the wealthy nations of Western Europe, 6 percent of the population.
No one has definitive statistics. Gradin estimates "Third World immigrants" at 10 million within the European Union, but that does not include clandestine residents, a widely disputed number -- also in the millions.
Large communities do coexist peaceably with native cultures in France, Germany, England, Holland and Belgium. And elsewhere, smaller immigrant groups blend into the local scenery.
But racial clashes are increasing. And with unemployment in the EU at 12 percent and intolerance on the rise, sociologists warn of broadening problems and dangers:
* Illegal Third World immigration: Fleeing poverty and politics at home, Arabs, blacks and Asians are crossing across the Mediterranean or over the borders of the EU's eastern members in growing numbers. Mostly jobless, they hide from police checks in crowded slums.
* Religious extremism: Many young Muslims in ghettos are rejecting the model of Islamic communities that have integrated into European nations. A few want urban guerrilla war to press demands for respect and opportunity.
* Crime: Some locally born members of long-time immigrant families are turning to crime, bitter at being excluded from societies they consider their own. They are recruited by drug traffickers, gang lords and terrorists.
* Right-wing extremism: Fear and resentment of newcomers are fanning anti-immigrant sentiments among ethnic Europeans. Young thugs assault Arabs, Africans and Turks, provoking immigrants to strike back.
A summer movie hit in Paris, "Hatred," examined the tensions in immigrant suburbs, powder kegs awaiting a spark, and portrayed police brutality based on actual incidents.
"Young foreigners live in an ecology of danger," said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University criminologist who just visited Europe. "They are vulnerable, fearful and easily manipulated."
A hostile environment hardens teen-agers who see no future in Europe but no longer have ties to their parents' home countries.
A psychological profile of Khaled Kelkal, a bombing suspect [actually a patsy set up by Algeria's secret service] shot to death by French police outside Lyon on Sept. 29, fits many thousands: A young rebel in search of a cause, culture and country, a desperate militant with little to lose.
"You really can't control a society when its young people have no prospects and therefore no interest in abiding by anybody's rules," Fagan said. This, he added, will intensify as their numbers rise.
Few specialists expect tough immigration policies to stem a tide of newcomers from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East over the next few years.
"The distances are too short, and the borders are too long," said Jean-Claude Chesnais of France's National Demographic Studies Institute. "Governments cannot keep people out."
Eased customs regulations within the EU mean an immigrant sneaking across a border of any one of the 15 member states can move easily to the others, he noted.
Chesnais predicted serious, worsening ethnic conflict over the long term, but added: "It is already happening now. This is not science fiction. It is the present."
A glance at local newspapers reveals the seething tensions in urban neighborhoods and working class suburbs across Europe. Rampaging skinheads clubbed to death a young black in Lisbon, Portugal. Thugs linked to France's rightist National Front killed three Muslims in three months. Racial violence erupts periodically in Britain.
In May, 250 Arabs and Jews spilled into the streets of Belleville, a mixed-race section of Paris, united against police. Officers had insulted and roughed up an Arab resident, demanding identity papers.
When a Jewish grocer tried to intervene, witnesses said, police hit him with a truncheon and shouted, "That's for you, dirty Jew."
A recent survey in France found that two of every three respondents admitted to racist feelings. Many said they particularly distrusted North Africans, even those with French citizenship.
Even before the Paris bombings, a poll suggested that half the Muslims in France expected "violent actions" to be committed against them. Hostility has spread to traditionally tolerant areas like the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In Denmark, a neo-Nazi radio station is fighting for air space. Swedish skinheads beat up foreigners.
Dutch authorities counted 1,200 racist incidents during the first half of 1995, a level that is 15 times higher than five years ago.
"Most of these are only threats, and there are no killings, like in Germany, but the increase is very high," said Jaap Van Donselaar of the University of Leiden.
In fact, the murder of foreigners has abated in Germany since neo-Nazis firebombed a refugee shelter in Solingen in 1993, burning to death three girls and two women from a single family. The youngest was 4.
But a recent Human Rights Watch report said that while right-wing attacks are down in Germany, police brutality and harassment has increased to four times the level of 1990, before reunification.
"Let's face it, many Germans don't like foreigners," said Kader Daki, a Moroccan who came to Germany 25 years ago and now runs a fleet of eight taxis. "You can find work, but life is very hard."
Authorities across Europe fight hard against right-wing violence, but ultraconservative parties from Britain to Austria show electoral strength. They influence governing parties, nationally and locally.
The village of Ampus in France's Provence region has 500 voters, without an immigrant in sight. In the first round of the presidential elections last spring, a third voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front who campaigned on a toughly anti-immigrant platform.
Emerging from voting booths, villagers told a reporter they feared foreigners would take their livelihoods and dilute their culture.
Nearby, in the city of Draguignan, large scrawled slogans reading "Le Pen or Islam" and "Send Home Non-Integrated Immigrants" stay for months on roadside walls.
Across France, Le Pen won 15 percent of the presidential vote. Municipal elections put a National Front mayor in office in the port city of Toulon. The mayor of Nice quit the National Front only in 1994.
In Austria, meantime, Joerg Haider's right-wing Freedom Party was supported by a fourth of people in a recent poll, giving it comparable standing to the country's two biggest mainstream parties. Opponents view Haider as an extreme right-winger whose rhetoric appeals to xenophobia and neo-Nazi sentiment.
"Mostly, the trouble is economic," Chesnais said. "People feel the pinch and need a scapegoat. They do their accounts at the end of the month and become xenophobic."
Van Donselaar disagrees. He blames unexplained and unconnected waves of simple human intolerance. Many Europeans fear that their Christian societies and traditions are endangered by outsiders with strange ways. Others blame foreigners for robberies and drug dealing.
Gradin says immigration can be slowed by helping to develop poor countries. People are less drawn by the lure of Europe than pushed by desperation at home, she argues.
Foreign aid budgets are shrinking, however, and available funds are more often given to Eastern European neighbors than to poor countries in Africa and Asia.
Gradin also wants more programs to help foreigners fit in. But she acknowledges the job is enormous because few minority leaders speak for large numbers, and many try hard to keep their communities separate.
France alone has 3,000 Muslim groups, from ones that are comfortable with a secular state to militant Algerians who promise an urban guerrilla war if President Jacques Chirac does not embrace Islam.
In most European countries, authorities are divided on whether to bring newcomers into a national mainstream or create separate spaces to allow parallel cultures.
Such issues as whether Muslim schoolgirls can wear head scarves in school trigger fierce debate. In Belgium, a judge compromised: Scarves may be worn in the schoolyard but not the halls and in class if the teacher is male. Not, however, in gym class.
Anil Ramdas, a Surinam-born Dutch commentator, regards the question of cultural identity as crucial to Europe's future.
Immigrants are here to stay, and numbers will grow, he says. The challenge is to find common ground but also help Europeans learn to live with what is different.
Immigrants must adapt to new societies, but they should not be shorn of the familiar customs that give them dignity, confidence, discipline and a sense of purpose, Ramdas says.
So far, he says, major conflict has been averted because most immigrants retain a memory of their culture's value systems and restraints. But a new generation is growing up without that.
"The moment that memory is lost," Ramdas said, "it will be catastrophe."
Copyright 1995, The Detroit News
From: detnews.com |
