Racisme

By Bruce W. Nelan

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.

FOOTNOTE: *Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

With reporting by Margot Hornblower/Paris and Robert T. Zintl/Rome with other bureaus