Racism Growing in Europe
“Many of us agree that Britain is a modern multi-racial society
and welcomed that. Yet, at the same time we think racism is on the
increase,” said Gurbux Singh, Chaiman of the Commission for Racial
Equality, in a recent BBC report. Referring to a recent survey
(conducted by the BBC News Online) on the growing problem of racism
in Britain, Signh bases his statement on the fact that 51 percent
of those responding to the survey felt that Britain was a racist
society.
While many of the survey respondents indicated they felt Britain
was becoming more racially tolerant than it was 10 years ago,
others in other parts of Europe indicate the problem of racism is
increasing, as Singh suggested.
France, for instance, has been dealing with the troubling issue
of racism for several years, and tensions are apparent.
“France attracted tens of thousands of North African immigrants
during the economic boom that followed World War II,” said Craig S.
Smith in a New York Times article. While immigration dropped off
almost completely in the 1980s, Smith said that “the country has
since been troubled by the social strains of absorbing those
immigrants and their French-born children, many of whom are
Muslim.”
Thursday these tensions seemed to come to surface very visibly
again when Aissa Dermouche, who is the first foreign-born and
Muslim person to be appointed as a prefect in France, was the
subject of a bombing campaign. With three bombings directed at him,
these attacks “have raised fears that long-simmering resentment
among the right-wing nationalists could lead to violence,” Smith
said.
The problem of racist attacks is also one seen growing in North
Ireland as well. “Belfast, once the engine of violence between
Catholics and Protestants, is being seized by a new kind of
hostility — racism,” said Lizette Alvarez in a recent article in
the Belfast Journal. For North Ireland, the racism is directed
towards recently arrived immigrant groups from Asia, India,
Pakistan and North Africa.
During “the violent 30-year conflict between Catholics and
Protestants here, few immigrants, no matter how desperate, chose to
settle in North Ireland. That slowly began to change with the 1998
Good Friday Agreement, which ushered in a period of relative peace
and prosperity,” Alvarez said.
With this movement of immigrants into an area that was formerly
99 percent white, the number of racially motivated hate crimes has
increased sharply. According to Alvarez, 212 racist incidents were
reported just last year in Northern Ireland, and incidents seem to
be disturbingly on the rise. “The violence has worsened lately,”
said Alvarez, citing incidents of a violent attack on a Chinese
family, a plank thrown through the window of a Pakastani home and
two pipe bombs directed at houses owned by ethnic minorities as
examples.
Besides these horrible violent crimes against minorities in
Northern Ireland, there is also an increase in verbal harassment as
well. “Forty-four percent of minorities have experienced verbal
abuse,” a report by the BBC states. Perhaps most troubling is the
increase in attacks on children, which has doubled in recent
years.
Many of the immigrants themselves and human rights groups call
for increased attention to this apparently growing problem of
racism in these European countries. Jamal Iweida, a North Ireland
resident who moved to the country from Palestine, suggested in a
BBC report that politicians and church leaders must speak out on
this issue and help start programs early on to educate everyone
about respect for other cultures. “We cannot ignore these issues,”
Mayor Martin Morgan of Belfast rightly said.
As Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations
suggested, a new attitude in which attention is paid to the
wonderful contributions migrants and ethnic minorities have made in
all nations around the globe instead of the negative feelings
towards immigrants that seem to be present in so many communities
today may be key to ending many of these attacks and racist
actions.
Heeding these words, and with education, programs and a new
attitude on immigration, perhaps Europe (and indeed our own
country) will not “be dragged down by bigotry, hatred and
intolerance,” as Mayor Morgan said.
Meg is a graduate student at CSU studying anthropology. Her
column runs every Wednesday.
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