The rise of racism and xenophobia in Europe

In May 2008 dozens of foreign Africans were killed by xenophobic mobs in townships across South Africa. A shocked world reacted with outrage and condemnation. Quite rightly so, one could have said if it was not for the blatant double standards being applied. In Europe right-wing extremism, racism and religious intolerance towards Africans and Muslims, and widespread xenophobia have been on the rise in recent years.

Two events have accelerated the rise of this scourge in Europe: The attacks of 9/11 in 2001 followed by the declaration of “war on terrorism,” and by the global recession and the resultant economic crisis in Europe.

A chaotic eurozone breakup could cause what Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, calls a return to the “nightmare scenario” of the 1930s-style political extremism. In an article published on Project Syndicate Rodrik recalls how a popular economic backlash gave rise to Fascism, Nazism and Communism, feeding the anxieties of groups that felt disenfranchised and threatened.

In the latter day equivalent, three substantially different examples perhaps best illustrate the scope of this:

• On 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik attacked and killed 77 of his fellow Norwegians and wounded dozens more. Breivik’s mass killing was motivated by his self-declared support for European “independence”, cultural conservatism, ultra nationalism, right-wing populism, Islamophobia, and white nationalism. He argued for the mass deportation of Muslims to “save” European Christianity;
• A decade earlier, in August 2000, Alberto Adriano, a Mozambican who had been living peacefully and productively in Germany for 12 years, was brutally attacked and killed by neo-Nazi skinheads for no other reason than that he was black and African; and
• At the other end on the scale of European racial and religious intolerance one finds French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Europe’s chameleon politicianhas  remained consistently intolerant towards immigrants, especially from the Middle East and North Africa.

Apart from that, Sarkozy has become the first European leader since Hitler to relentlessly persecute Roma, or “gypsies” as they are also known, having overseen the mass deportation from France of these nomadic people who originally hail from northern India. In 2007 Sarkozy signed a security and immigration deal with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and sold him missiles worth US$230-million.

In return Gaddafi had to police and prevent African immigrants from reaching France. A similar deal had been struck between Italy and Libya. Thousands of African immigrants ended up in often sub-human conditions in Libyan detention camps.

Then last year Sarkozy played a leading role in the West’s military invasion of Libya that led to the murder of Gaddafi, and some of his family members and close associates. Again, as many tried to flee the carnage in Libya, they were ruthlessly prevented from making it to Europe.

In May last year Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a speech in The Hague that her office was “very concerned about the repercussions of recent events (in North Africa) on the rights of migrants, including unlawful and often dangerous interception practices, at sea and land borders, violence, racism, and xenophobia. Thousands of these migrants are fleeing conflict and persecution. A great many of them have suffered violations of their economic, social and cultural rights as well as civil and political rights.”

Sarkozy had previously built for himself the image of a radical immigration and crime fighter, first as the mayor of one of the wealthiest communities in France and later as Interior Minister and finally as President.

He has controversially referred in speeches to “African peasants” and to Muslim youths in Paris housing developments as “scum” and “thugs,” suggesting “cleansing” of these suburbs.
And, a controversial campaign was enforced to ban certain Muslim religious practices in France.

Yet, European and North American leaders have remained silent. Only his anti-Roma campaign drew some criticism from among others the Catholic Church, a United Nations anti-racism panel, and Valentin Mocanu, Romania's minister for the Roma community, who accused Sarkozy of fomenting racism and xenophobia.

The post-9/11 atmosphere allowed Western governments to “legitimise” their sometimes less than subtle support for, or even their practice of blatant discrimination against Muslims and Africans ... all in the name of “the war on terror”. The Western media played along, reinforcing the stereotyping, the prejudices and the intolerance.

When citizens of European countries carried out brutal attacks on foreigners, these were shrugged off by the governments and the media as the actions of madmen or criminals – as when in December 2010, a right-wing extremist in Florence, Italy opened fire on African immigrants killing two Senegalese men and wounding three others.

At a subsequent gathering of Africans in Italy to protest the killing, one man was captured on television saying “don't tell me he was crazy, because if he were crazy, he would have killed both blacks and whites.”

When the US and allies occupied countries, committed atrocities on their soil, abducted civilians and held them in detention centres around the world without access to due legal process, it was justified as a noble part of the “war on terror”.

Yet when Middle Eastern or African groups carry out similar acts and atrocities in reaction to what they view as the illegal invasion and occupation of countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq and an attack on their religion, they are called terrorists and hounded relentlessly.

In such an atmosphere xenophobia, racism, religious intolerance and all their attendant evils could not but flourish, and give rise to the ever growing list of racial, xenophobic and religious attacks on African and Middle Eastern immigrants and visitors in Europe, Scandinavia and elsewhere.

In 2007 an Angolan man was attacked with a chainsaw by two men in Switzerland who said “we don’t need Africans in Switzerland”. In July 2010 French police were captured on TV using excessive violence to arrest African women engaged in a peaceful protest; and after an Eritrean man was stabbed in Zurich last year, Africans living in the city stopped using public transport in fear for their lives.

The list goes on and on and the UN special reporter on racism, Doudou Diene, has declared that racism, discrimination and xenophobia are rife in Switzerland. In November 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked that “multiculturism” had failed in Germany ... breaking a taboo that had existed ever since the fall of Nazism.

It is these kinds of developments, boosted by the threat of an economic collapse and a chaotic breakup of the eurozone, which, in the words of Professor Rodrik “would cause irreparable damage to the European integration project, the central pillar of Europe's political stability since World War II”.

Europe had better wake up before its next bitter nightmare becomes a reality.

Stef Terblanche