Introduction

 

 In this paper I will present a view of the current situation of Arabs in Europe. My intention is not to elaborate on legal procedures or new legislation by the European union on ìcombating terrorismî nor I will be trying to define terrorism or propose strategies to deal with it, as I am sure many of the other papers in this conference will be doing that. Instead I will try to shed some light on the socio-political and cultural interactions between Arabs and Europeans and the socio-cultural context prior to the eleventh of September and what changes occurred after it. This is not an academical paper and was not meant to be one. My intention all through will be to reflect the situation out of an Arab-European perspective. The eleventh of September will not be the pivotal date in this paper nor its leitmotiv. I will try to sketch a more comprehensive image of the roots of Islamophobia and anti-Arab feeling in Europe with a political and historical approach. As an illustration case, I will examine closely the situation of the Arab community in the province of Flanders in Belgium, because it is where I live and therefore I would be more capable of giving a personal testimony on the situation there.

This paper is based upon the experience and day to day findings of the Arab European League (AEL), a Belgian based organization that is active in defending the civil rights of Arabs in Europe and a better understanding for Arab causes in general. AEL is more a movement than a lobby; it operates on the grassroots level and is widely represented among the second generation Arabs in Belgium.

  

1-The burden of history

 Not many people in Europe today are aware of the way their role in history has been perceived and experienced by other peoples.  Not many Europeans would like to enter a debate on the repercussions of their colonization on what they call the third world. Neither would they like to admit that many of the worldís conflicts today are a direct result of the mess Europe created wherever it passed. In Belgium for instance the colonization of Congo is barely mentioned in public debate, and the continuous interfering in the politics of that country even after direct colonization had ended (see the Belgian implication in the murder of Lumumba) is also not a favorite subject of discussion. The same goes for Rwanda and Burundi, and the relation between Belgian colonization of these countries and the creation of the division between Hutu and Tutsi. And the direct and indirect fueling of the conflict between the two groups that resulted in the Rwandan genocide and the death of more than a million people, all this is also a subject to avoid.

Europe suffers from selective amnesia, on the one hand it will never forget the Holocaust, never forget even the eleventh of September, but Algeria, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq are all too often forgotten.

The new Europe is trying, however, to cut a new deal with the world. It is trying to be the enlightened partner of the unique super power. It is always looking for nuances, for that good middle way, and often to the frustration of the American big brother and its loyal lackey in London. Europe is playing an important role in what it calls development cooperation, building partnerships with its southern neighbors that are useful, even though they are far from being a structural solution to any problem. That enlightened Europe that is propagated mainly through the institutions of the European union is supposed to bring a message of tolerance and broadmindedness to the world and help healing the wounds of conflicts and war.  Nevertheless, one might wonder if this new message that Europe wants to bring to the world and the role that Europe wants to claim are not a modern-day version of the infamous ìwhite manís burdenî of the past centuries. It is legitimate to pose this question since ethnocentrism still stains policies and minds in the old continent. 

 

 

2-The apogee of fear

 

Europe has a problem with its own history, it is trying to forge an identity out of a conflictual past with as only tools: common interests and values. By doing so, the process of European integration is shaking the foundations of the old identities and making certain populations feel insecure, easily threatened or easy to perceive insecurity in its subjective form.

In a world globalizing and a Europe integrating, a peasant from the Flemish country side or a worker from the port of Antwerp or even a banker from Brussels will easily feel exposed to ìexternal dangersî regardless of their factual existence or the lack of it. These dangers can take the form of economical competition like hostile takeovers by multinationals or European mergers accompanied by what is cynically called rationalization, which means sacking workers to cut down expanses in a more competitive environment. Sabena and Swiss air merged and then both went bankrupt short before Belgium replaced its national currency with the Euro. Economical mutations are being conceived not only as a source of instability on the employment market or a financial adventure in an unknown realm, but also as a loss of national symbols (national airline, national currency).  The danger îthat is coming from outsideî can also be a disease (mad cow or foot and mouth) and once again be expensive to deal with.  The threat can even take more modern and unfamiliar forms like a computer virus (you all remember the I love you virus coming also from outside, somewhere in cyber space). But the biggest threat of them all, despite all innovation and mutation, is the most ancient one of them all: fellow man.

People are more than ever afraid of other people, especially when that other is coming from outside. When he is a stranger, a foreigner. With a world losing its boundaries a foreigner has become more threatening for many reasons. He is more likely to come from ìoutsideî to ìinsideî as boarders are becoming vague and redundant in Europe and people can travel almost as easy as goods. He is more likely to claim the same rights as local, European citizens can now vote in municipal and European elections in Belgium and discussions are ongoing to give even non-EU residents that same right. He might be more skilled and more capable of finding a job in the new economy that is based upon communication skills and technological literacy. He is very likely to take advantage of tax facilities while withdrawing money from the national market and transferring it to his home country. He will bring with him new ideas and new traditions that might not be consistent with the nature of the country and its people.

Cocooning within the safe boundaries of ones own community and country is no more a possible dream except in few cases.

These reasons make a Flemish individual from Antwerp mistrust and even dislike a priori any Dutch person who moved to live and work in Antwerp (thousands of Dutch people indeed took that step and are met with similar attitudes). 

So here we are talking about what this situation can do between two white Europeans speaking the same language and very likely practicing the same religion and sharing similar values. Let us now imagine that this ìotherî is a bit more different than a Dutch man is. Letís say he is dark skinned, with black curly hair, that he comes originally from Morocco, speaks Arabic and practices Islam. But also, that he is a manual worker, not very skilled and struggling to survive and forced often to use the welfare system and social security funds as finding a job is already more difficult than ever, even for more skilled people. It is needless to say that the fear and mistrust will be far greater.

  

3-Islam-phobia, racism or just xenophobia?

  Xenophobia is not strange to human nature whether you are Arab, European or Chinese. Actually it is a natural reflex that has deep going roots in the human psyche since we first left our caves and took to the fields and steppes and started encountering other human groups. But in Europe it is accentuated by another more malice and less general attitude: racism. Racism is an ideology and a state of mind prescribing the supremacy of ones own race over all other races. A racist person does not believe in productive coexistence and interaction and can only conceive one relationship with people from other races and that is exploitation. In other words, if one can exploit or at least use another racial group than one can tolerate its presence and in all other cases that racial group has to disappear, because if it were useless than its mere existence would be harmful. Making another racial group disappear can be achieved through ethnic cleansing, deportation or even genocide.

No where in the world did racism flourish more than in Europe. Racist paradigms evolved and mutated but never disappeared. From slavery, to the ìwhite manís burdenî and from ìmissionary evangelizationî to the ìmessage of Europeî. From Hitlerís ìfinal solutionî to Le Penís ìrepatriation of all non European strangersî.

Racism added to xenophobia is an explosive cocktail. If you want to make the equation even more complicated than you have to bring Arabism and Islam into the picture.

Europe has never digested its defeat in the crusades nor did the Arab world forget the atrocities committed by these ìsavages coming from the northî and their holy war to retrieve the tomb of what they see as their god. Islam for Europeans is not only another average unknown world; it is historically and psychologically a hostile one and a dangerous one.

In the middle-ages, the fear of a superior Arab-Islamic empire and civilization trying to expend its territory into the heart of Europe was more than just a phobia, it was a geopolitical reality.  Nowadays, components of this same fear are still present in European popular culture and are more and more infiltrating the political spectrum. The only difference is that the image of the Arab-Islamic culture and world is not that of a superior foe but rather a weakened and wounded one. At the same time it is a foe contesting the status-quo and using the dynamic and mobilizing nature of its religion to revitalize itself and regain its ancient status.

This paper did not start with the buzz sentence ìafter the fall of the Soviet Unionî because we all know that it is when the communist danger was defeated that Europe and the west started to be haunted by its old demons of Islam-phobia. And unlike anti communism, Islam-phobia could perfectly be combined with racism and xenophobia. The result was that in the beginning of the nineties anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discourse started to become trivial mainstream discourse in many milieus. And this all coincided with theories about an unavoidable clash of civilization that the west and Islam will be its main protagonists. The polarization of the world was then reestablished, with the West and its Judeo-Christian civilization on one side and the Arab and Islamic worlds and Islam on the other. It is the Middle Ages revisited.

 Soon after, the west sent its first modern-day crusade to save a friendly vassal prince from the evil and madness of a megalomaniac and bloodthirsty Saracen dictator.

     

4.      Paving the way of pain 

  Even though the Gulf war of 1991 was clearly an American war and that most European policy makers conceived it as such, and even defined their implication in it and their strategies in function of one goal: tempering the American outburst and ambitions. On the popular level the Gulf war was lived and experienced differently. If we put aside the traditional protest of pacifist and leftist Europe that is by no means representative of the main stream, the average European citizen bought the American version of the story and looked at Iraq as an empire of evil governed by a mad man plotting to control the world.

Reaganism is a very simplistic doctrine that can easily gain support among masses. Its populism is the key to its popularity, and this is true in Europe, as it is true in the U.S.

Bush senior, a loyal disciple of the third rank actor -who obviously acted good enough to make it to the white house but never to Hollywood- knew that very well and stayed loyal to the almost religious polarization methods practiced by his predecessor. The demonization of the enemy leader is an essential step in the process of dehumanization of his people. Both processes have been thoroughly executed during the gulf war in a way that allowed the murder of thousands of Iraqi civilians while only speaking of collateral damage. In the street of Brussels the polarization was strongly felt. On the one hand the Belgian population was completely terrified by the possibility of an Iraqi missile attack reaching to the heart of Europe while the Arab immigrant community, that is strongly present, was bitter about the war and did not hide its sympathy with Iraq and its despise of the Americans.

The Arabs in Belgium were then looked at as the ìfifth columnî of the evil enemy.  These immigrants who were invited to come in the sixties when Belgium experienced a shortage in cheap labor, and who worked hard and helped building Belgiumís infrastructure and industry not to mention working in mines under barely human conditions, have became useless after the economical crisis of the seventies and early eighties. But what the Belgian government did not anticipate is that most of them decided to stay, especially since their children were born in their new country. And as we already mentioned while talking about racist mechanisms, a useless different ethnic group can not be tolerated or accepted, it has to disappear. This was exactly how Moroccans in Belgium were perceived, and unfortunately, this is still the case today. One might argue that this has to do with the racist white supremacy attitude of the average Belgian accentuated by the economical crisis, and that is indeed true. The statistics of the European Union (Euro barometer 1997) single Belgium out as the most racist country in Europe. But it is also true that the islamophobic reflex that was revitalized by the gulf war added extra fuel to the whole explosive equation. After the defeat of Iraq the bitterness of Arabs in Belgium turned into frustration and the fear of the fifth column did not vanish.

It is by no means a coincidence that 1991 is the year that witnessed the most violent clashes between the police and Arab youth in what looked like intifada scenes in the street of Brussels and that was only weeks after the gulf war ended. The reason of the clashes was that the far right racist party ìVlaams Blokî was allowed to hold a political rally in Molenbeek, a neighborhood of Brussels where predominantly Arab immigrants live. Vlaams Blok was already campaigning on a strong anti immigrant platform very similar to that of Le Pen in France. Among its slogans one could read ìIslam outî or even ìhalt Islamic invasionî. To allow a party like this into the streets of Molenbeek in the spring of 1991 is definitely asking for troubles. The clashes were very violent and lasted for days and they ended only when the minister of interior issued an official apology to the Arab community and promised not to commit such mistakes in the future. A couple of months later the same racist party scored a sweeping victory in the national elections and even became the biggest political party in the important city of Antwerp.

  

5.      The other side of the medal

                            

It is because Europe has to do the most with racism that Europe talks the most about anti- racism. And it is there, in European anti-racist strategies, that the most dangerous mistakes were committed and that racism is building its most impressive shrines.

 The electoral victory of Vlaams Blok shocked and surprised their friends and foes alike. No one could imagine that a party with such an archaic message ìthe immediate deportation of all non-white immigrantsî could gain so much support. The whole political establishment felt the ground shaking under its feet, not only because the Blok was racist but also because the Blok is openly an anti-Belgian party and calls for the immediate independence of the Flemish provinces.  An urgent need was felt to deprive this party of its main theme, namely the immigration issue. Solutions were supposed to be worked out in order to solve the existing problems among the various groups of the population.

Integration was all of a sudden prescribed as the magical remedy for all the illnesses of racism and hatred in society. A whole strategy of integration was prophetically revealed by two prominent individuals, Johan Leman and Paula Díhondt.  But instead of looking at integration as a process involving the whole population, immigrant and indigenous alike, and that must lead to a multicultural organization of society and to the abolishing of discrimination, integration as understood by Leman and Díhondt was a process that must lead to abolishing all differences between the majority and the immigrant minority through the way of total assimilation of the minority.  In other words, diversity was considered to be the problem and not the incapacity of Belgian society to deal with it. So instead of making a more diverse societal structure one must eliminate diversity and go back to a mono-cultural situation. This logic is the other side of the racist medal, it is also calling for the disappearance of the ìotherî through eliminating all what it makes him an ìotherî, his culture, his language, and even his religion. The only thing that it is willing to accept is for him to have different physical characteristics, and even on that level they were not ashamed to say that ìmarrying a Belgianî was the ìhighest level of integrationî.

Not having a problem with a person of another race as long as he speaks your language, have your culture, and believe in your values is maybe not completely racist, it is just three quarter racist and one quarter hypocrite, and that was exactly what the integration policy of the Belgian government was.

Another very important characteristic of that policy is that it just doesnít work.

Assimilation is now farther than ever, and let me be clear on the fact that this is a positive fact because cultural diversity and the right to preserve ones culture and language are sacred human rights. The immigrant community experienced the integration policy of the government often as an attack on its values and existence as a minority group. As a reaction to that it started to organize itself in self-organizations with as main task the promotion and preservation of the culture and religion. Mosques flourished and Arabic classes reached most of the young immigrants and gave them a necessary tool to keep the link with their culture. On the political level, the failure of the integration policies generated a false impression that no solutions are possible for the genuine problems facing any multicultural society, and that impression gave extra arguments to the Vlaams Blok that the only solution was and still deportation. After ten years, the immigrants are more Moroccan and Muslims than ever, the Belgian public is more Islamophobic than ever and the Vlaams Blok is stronger than ever with 15 percent of the national vote and 33 percent in the city of Antwerp. The Leman- Díhondt strategies did not only fail, they backfired.

 In the neighborhoods where Arabs and Belgians live next to each other, the tension is raising and a storm is looming on the horizon. This time when the wind will blow, the 1991 riots will look like a fresh breath on a sunny morning.

 

6.      Towards a human rights approach

 

 Almost two years ago in may 2000, the Arab European League published two articles in one of the most respected newspapers in Belgium calling for a halt to the integration policies and to approach the whole issue of majority-minority relationship through a human rights perspective. We said that the concept of integration as applied in Belgium is undemocratic and racist, and that equal rights and multiculturalism are the only way towards harmonious coexistence. Putting integration as a precondition to basic rights is an outrage, the only condition to enjoy human rights is being human.

Our position at the time came as a shock to many people who still believed in the old paradigm and were unable to see that it is a fiasco.  We were accused of being fundamentalists because we were in favor of preserving our identity, we were accused of being communists because we appealed for equal rights and we were conceived as being a danger because we declared that we are taking the matters into our own hands. But our articles did start a debate and provoked Leman and his disciples into admitting many shortcomings in their policy. They could call us ìThe Arab Panthersî but they couldnít deny that what we were saying was true.

In Belgium, and especially in Flanders, an Arab can barely rent a house, and even social habitat firms who are linked to the state are operating with exclusion lists baring every Arab name. Arab children are rejected at schools and quotas are being implemented to limit their numbers. And the ones who do make it through the primary schools are canalized by the administration into technical branches. The ones who do succeed despite of all the obstacles to obtain a university degree find it impossible to find a job. The only jobs that are available are in the social sector, that is known to be more tolerant, and for the rest in the interim circuit.

With no proper housing, no proper schooling and no access to work, three of the most basic human rights are systematically violated. Discrimination is not an occasional malfunction of the system but a structural mechanism infesting a whole society. Second-generation immigrants who are born in Belgium and know no other place as their home mainly feel this situation. It has created a generation with no future and nothing to lose. And instead of dealing with the main problems that racism and discrimination are causing, government policy is a combination of assimilation-oriented action and police repression.

Professors Ludo Walgrave and Kris Kesteloot from the catholic university of Leuven concluded in a four years study over youth and urbanism that white Belgian youngsters have a ten time higher percentage among all drug dealers. Moroccan youngsters are, however, ten times more arrested than Belgians for drug dealing. This means that the police are ten times more likely to arrest a Moroccan than a Belgian for committing exactly the same crime. In the city of Antwerp, where 33 percent voted Vlaams Blok and a bigger percentage sympathize with that party, the police commissioner Luc Lamin admitted that his police corps is heavily infiltrated by far right militants.  ìOne third of my policeman at least are Vlaams Blok sympathizersî he said to the media. Now please imagine how fair a police patrol would be when it comes across a group of Arab kids in the streets of Antwerp.

The term that Belgians use to describe an Arab is ìmakkakî which means ìwhite apeî, would it be a crime to contest the authority of a police officer calling you that? The answer is no. Contesting a discriminatory authority is not only legitimate; it is a democratic duty.

Two years after our first appeal to equal rights, we are still receiving, daily, tens of complaints and registered cases of racial abuse, mistreatment and discrimination. We try to use our good access to the Flemish press to confront decision makers with this fact, our lawyers try to pursue legal steps in some of the cases, but we are limited financially to the strict minimum necessary. Next to the complaint of a community looking more to us as its sole defender, we are receiving the hate mail of a majority that is unable to conceive that a makkak is just another human being. And of course the occasional life threat is a familiar guest of our mailbox or answering machine.

   

7.      A day like any other

 

Let us put something straight, if there is something to conclude of all the former paragraphs it will be that Europe did not need the eleventh of September to be islamophobic or anti-Arab. Sure, right after the events we registered a higher frequency of incidents and racial abuse in most European countries. I was myself arrested on the 16^th of September together with 50 other members of our organization. We were told by police officers things like ìtogether with the Americans we will smash your brainsî, but I was also interrogated weeks before the events by an officer of state security who gave me his card and I was amused to read on it ìIslam and terrorism cellî.  What happened in New York made it less politically incorrect to use terms as terrorist-Islam and allowed the far right parties to be more assertive in their discourse but it did not create the syndrome itself. The eleventh of September in Europe is an act of language more than action. It has taken the debate into another level, maybe sharpened an existing situation to a limited extent, but the situation was already dramatic enough before. After the eleventh of September an Arab has difficulties to find a job, to rent an apartment or to send his children to school, but this was exactly the case on the 10^th of September.

For asylum seekers Europe was a fortress already and asylum policy was already designed to expel as many as possible and accept as few as possible. Security was the hot-item on the 10^th of September and even a small gathering of Arab children on a sidewalk was considered a security issue, it still is.

New European policing measures are not of a magnitude that can be compared with what is going on in the United States itself. So does that mean that the situation in Europe has been stabilized? Or that the potential of islamophobia is exhausted? We donít believe this is the case. The fact of the matter is that Europeans are very aware of why the U.S. have been targeted and not Brussels or Berlin, just like every body else is aware of these reasons. Europe does not feel the real urge to take similar measures as the Americans did, and will not risk destabilization by pushing a very young, dynamic and numerous Arab second-generation into a radical path. When in 1993 far-right extremists tried to start intimidating Arabs in the city of Antwerp, and burned a mosque and a tearoom the reaction was swift. Several cafÈs known to be far right minded were flattened and their headquarters in Antwerp a place called ìthe Lion of Flandersî was invaded by masked Arab youth and totally destroyed.

The Arab community in Europe is to be compared with the black minority in the US and not with the Arab community there. It is socially, politically and economically excluded, aware of the fact of discrimination and racism, feels exploited and used and has produced a futureless generation with nothing to lose. That generation also developed a sub-culture of rebellion and is ready to take its cause to the streets at any moment. In Paris, in Marseille, just like in Brussels and Rotterdam or London, Trying to oppress Arabs and Muslims will mean a street war that nobody wants.

We have succeeded in keeping our community relatively calm through the years, we are intending on continuing to canalize its legitimate grievances into political and civil action, but Europe must be willing to make our task easier, and till now we feel that they are aware of that.

 

 8. Conclusion

 

I am aware that this paper did not sketch a very positive image of the interaction between Arabs and Europeans, but it is my deep conviction that it has sketched a realistic image. If we ever want a solution to these problems we have to start by naming things by their names. Political correctness is not a valid reason to avoid the naked truth, no matter how difficult and hard to bare that truth might be. Europe can have better intentions than the United States, and can have a more balanced stance on the middle-east conflict but this all will not change the fact that it is oppressing and discriminating its Arab minority. The situation I sketched is not exclusively Belgian, in Denmark the situation is even worse, in Austria and in France similar situations are lived by our youth. The latest outbursts of racial violence against Moroccan immigrants in the south of Spain testify of similar patterns. In Italy the government is in the hand of the Islamophobic Berluscuni and his far-right allies. In Britain the streets of Birmingham and Oldham witnessed recently very violent racial riots between Muslim Asian youth and white far-right extremists. In Germany racial attacks are registered daily especially in the east of the country.

America might be bullying the world on the international level but it had certainly a better approach to its own race relation problems. The events of the eleventh of September changed that for the Arab community there and forced them into a civil rights battle that they were never willing to enter. Arab-Americans realized lately that they need the support of other minorities when they never really gave these minorities their support because their socio-economical position allowed them to enjoy a better standard of living than them. In Europe our community is among the poorest and the most oppressed, we have always been in the thick of a civil rights battle and the eleventh of September has nothing to do with it. Since 1991 we are stigmatized as terrorists and a fifth column and screened and infiltrated by all kind of security agencies. Our mosques are monitored and our offices are bugged.  The only difference is that Europeans know how to hide their Iron fist with a silky glove while Americans just wave it naked in the air. A question of more refinement one might argue.

But still, we believe in a solution and that is the respect of the international declaration of human rights and its application in a proactive and concrete way. We do not need our rights if we can not exercise them; the abstract form of a right has no value if it is not met with its practical fulfillment. Racism should no more be considered as an opinion but as a crime, and discrimination should be rooted out. The existing gap that is the result of years of discriminating policies on many levels should be closed by affirmative action policies, and this should not be mistaken for positive discrimination, it is just correcting what discrimination caused.

Culture should be considered a private matter just like religion is, law is the only set of rules and values that are binding to everybody in a modern society, and all the rest is a matter of individual choice. Multiculturalism should be the norm and all cultures should be treated equally and given the space to be promoted and preserved. Preserving ones culture is not limited to culinary art and music; it is also reaching every other aspect of life. Also all minority languages have the right to be taught and preserved regardless of whether they are an official language of the state or not. The existing of a lingua franca does not imply the disappearance of every other language.  Political representation should be guaranteed to all residents, one could not have all the obligations without having all the rights. The concept of a citizen should become colorless and cultureless. Not only justice should be blind but also the police and the administration and school directors and employers and landlords.

 

At the same time, and on another level, Europe should exorcise its demons and deal with Islam like it deals with any other religion. Islam will make forever a part of European culture and it has contributed enormously to the foundation of European civilization and it still can contribute. Europeans from Arab and Muslim descent can and should become a bridge for a better understanding between two of the greatest civilizations in history. Europe needs our help to dissociate itself from American hegemonic ambitions and to sail on its own course. And we need Europeís help to break the international isolation of our rightful cause in Palestine and to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people under the criminal and illegal embargo.

The academical community in Belgium is now reexamining the two articles that the Arab European League has published in May 2000, and that have caused a huge controversy. The University of Antwerp decided after taking our permission to publish them together with the other articles that came as a reaction to them in a special book in French and Dutch. What was politically incorrect less than two years ago is now becoming academical material, and even politicians are admitting that they have missed the point on certain issues. This gives us hope for the future and makes us continue to believe in dialogue. A dialogue that can not take the form of a dictate, and it can not be held while we keep on avoiding the facts whenever they are hard to assume. Only an honest and frank dialogue can lead to results.  Only the truth can and will save us.