Fingers in the Dyke: Dutch Fear Rising Ethnic Tensions

[azrom]

The Netherlands may soon witness an outburst of ethnic violence. An official report published last Wednesday states that “tensions between various ethnic and cultural groups of youths are seriously underestimated.” The report points out that the Dutch authorities fail to grasp the gravity of the problem. It warns the government in The Hague that if nothing is done the country will soon witness situations similar to those in France. There violent clashes, which erupted in late 2005, have led to the police abandoning immigrant suburbs to gangs of Muslim youths, who have now taken over effective control of more than 750 French urban neighborhoods.

Following the 2004 assassination of Theo van Gogh by a young Moroccan immigrant the Dutch minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk, installed four so-called “intervention teams for interethnic tensions.” The teams are made up of social workers whose task it is to advise local authorities on ways to deal with groups of unassimilated and criminal youths. In major Dutch cities many of the young people are not of indigenous Dutch extraction. In Amsterdam 55% of those under18 are immigrants, mainly Moroccan, Turkish or Antillean (West Indian). In Rotterdam the number has surpassed 50%. Everywhere this percentage is rising dramatically. Dutch society has failed to inculcate the children of immigrants with Dutch values. Perhaps the latter was simply impossible. There are 1 million Muslims on a total of 16 million inhabitants in the Netherlands. At over 6% of the population this is proportionally the largest Muslim immigrant population of all Western nations, except for France which has 6 million Muslims on a total of 60 million inhabitants. The Muslims are younger than the indigenous population and tend to be concentrated in the cities.

Dick Corporaal, the coordinating president of the intervention teams, told Dutch national radio on Wednesday that “multicultural tensions between youths threaten to lead to an uncontrollable situation.” He warned that the problem is not restricted to cities but is also beginning to affect towns in the more rural areas. “The municipal authorities have no idea about what is going on,” Corporaal said about the rising tension. He advised the government to devote more funds to youth work and to increase the number of intervention teams. He also accused the local authorities of treating all troublesome youths similarly, while according to him different approaches are needed when confronting the various groups: Moroccans, Antilleans, Turks and “Lonsdale youths” [The latter are indigenous Dutch hooligans]. Corporaal also emphasized that each ethnic group itself is not homogeneous and should not be dealt with as such.

The intervention teams recommend an expansion of the social worker approach to defuse the situation. This is a typically Dutch way of doing things, which is widely applied, even among Dutch troops in Afghanistan who prefer to have tea with the Taliban rather than fight them. Last year the police of The Hague sent officers on a “cultural training” trip to Morocco because, as Gerard Bouman, the The Hague police chief (who has meanwhile been promoted to head of the Dutch state security services), said, “Criminal Moroccan youths […] do not behave like indigenous Dutch. They rave about Moroccan culture. Hence, we have to know the latter, too.” In Morocco, the Dutch police officers discovered that their Moroccan colleagues were astonished to hear that the Dutch have problems with criminal Moroccan youths. In Morocco officers are known to beat the hell out of criminals.

Corporaal’s recommendations, however, do not seem to go down well with many ordinary native Dutch. A poll conducted by Elsevier, the largest Dutch weekly, indicates that 80% of its readers prefer a “harsh treatment” of troublemaking youths rather than “sending in more multicultural intervention teams.”

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