EUROPE’S 70-YEAR CRISIS
Terror in Paris. Alleged sex assaults in Cologne. As the refugee crisis continues, a debate rages over Europe’s future and the role nearly 20 million Muslims will play in it. But the dilemma isn’t new. The Post’s Matthew Fisher reports on a culture clash
A CHILLY RECEPTION It’s 10:30 a.m. and the sun has finally crept over the horizon 100 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. Silhouetted against the thin dawn light and bundled in parkas against the sub-zero cold, a line of weary travellers is trudging across an unmarked frontier between northern neighbours.
They are far from home.
From Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, they are coming to the end — for now, at least — of a month-long trek that has taken them by foot, boat, train and bus and from Turkey, through Greece, the Balkans, Germany and Sweden.
Now, in Tornio, Finland, a border outpost more northerly than Iqaluit, about a dozen police officers and border guards await their arrival.
The strangers are taken by bus to be formally registered and begin a series of security checks before being handed over to the country’s Red Cross, which will house them and feed them and help them acclimatize while their asylum claims are processed.
Ali Ahmed Abbas, a Sunni hairdresser from Baghdad, is one of them.
He says he was forced to leave Iraq because Shia there wanted him dead. His wife and child are still in Baghdad and he plans to bring them here the moment that his refugee claim is accepted.
“I was thinking about going to Canada, but I ended up here,” he says.
“What I heard during the month that I was along the way was that Finland was free and gave paper. They are the best in treating asylum seekers.” Whether Abbas gets to stay is far from certain. Finland, with only 5.4 million citizens, took in approximately 30,000 refugee claimants in 2015. On a per- capita basis that is more than seven times as many as Canada plans to take. Over a four- month stretch near the end of 2015, an astonishing 14,000 of those seeking asylum passed through this far- out- of- the- way town in Lapland, on the northern edge of the Gulf of Bothnia.
But unlike Sweden and Germany, which have also taken in a disproportionate share of the more than one million people, most of them Muslim, who claimed asylum in Europe last year, Finland has limited experience with newcomers.
The Finns and a small Swedish minority account for about 95 per cent of the population, making it the most racially and culturally homogeneous place in Europe, aside from Iceland.
Problems that have plagued Finland’s European neighbours since the first modern waves of Muslim immigration began after the Second World War — questions of integration, identity and, increasingly, security — have been relatively unknown here. But that is changing quickly. Hundreds of Finns formed a human barrier at the Tornio crossing two months ago to protest the arrival of so many foreigners.
Stones have been thrown and fireworks set off to try to intimidate refugee claimants who have been accused of taking jobs, of only seeking welfare and of possibly being extremists.
One protester even showed up at an anti-refugee demonstration in Lahti wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
Just a few weeks ago, Finland’s government was forced to denounce a far-right civilian street patrol group calling itself the “Soldiers of Odin,” which has gained prominence in the wake of the alleged New Year’s Eve sex assaults in Cologne, Germany, and other similar incidents across Europe, including some in the Finnish capital, Helsinki.
How such a remote country became one of the most popular destinations for asylum seekers has become the main topic of conversation everywhere.
“It is more than we expected and we do not deny the challenge. But it is an opportunity in the sense that this will give us a more robust workforce while helping people in need,” says Finland’s finance minister, Alexander Stubb, who served as prime minister until this past May.
“We don’t have a problem with this, but we do understand how it could get out of control if it is not managed. We have dealt with it well so far. I am proud of our citizens and of our moderation.”
Raili Vapaavuori, an 85- year- old retiree who lives near Helsinki, approves of how Finland has handled the crisis, but is unenthusiastic about the presence of so many asylumseekers in her country.
“These people require assistance and I have nothing against them,” Vapaavuori says. “But I doubt that it is good for Finland. … Who knows how it will work out in 10 or 20 years?”
“While I am not against Muslims, I am against their cultural ideas. How can we possibly agree with them about their attitude toward women? If they want to be part of our lives, they have to understand us.” Erja Salmela, who lives in Lapland, has similar misgivings. “I am trying to figure out if they really need help,” the 40-year-old housewife and mother of two says. “They have new clothes, the best iPhones. I’ve seen them take out wads of 100and 500-euro notes to pay for a cup of tea.”
The newly arrived Abbas appears oblivious to the growing debate over refugees that is roiling this country and others across Europe.
He is already learning about his would-be home, about how difficult it is for cars to brake on ice, about how it is essential to wear reflectors on clothing when outside in the dark.
For Abbas, as for the hundreds of thousands who have fled civil war and terrorism in the Middle East or violence and oppression in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the hope for a better life is all that matters.
“We’re happy to adjust,” he says. “We love the Finns. This country is my country. I will live here in peace.”
GASTARBEITER STILL Sevilay Tan and Galip Daslik seem like a thoroughly modern couple. After all, they met and fell in love on Facebook.
But the 19- year- olds, who do not consider themselves Germans, even though they were born and raised in the country’s densely populated Ruhr region and speak impeccable German, are in a way still living in the past.
Sevilay and Galip are good- natured, but firm: They are Turks, not Germans. Turkey, they say, is “our country.” The feeling is so profound that they intend to marry and settle in Turkey after they graduate from university and have built up some savings.
The couple’s grandfathers had emigrated as Gastarbeiter, a term used to describe “guest workers” who arrived from Turkey in the early 1960s to take jobs in coal mines and steel factories that were still suffering from a dire shortage of workers because of the Second World War.
The original idea had been that the Gastarbeiter would never gain German citizenship or permanent residency and would all return to Turkey when the temporary immigration program ended in the 1970s.
To induce them to leave, the Gastarbeiter were each offered 10,500 Deutsche marks. However, with little work for them in Turkey, only a few left.
Although many of the children and grandchildren of Gastarbeiter took out German nationality when they were finally allowed to do so in 2000, most have preferred to continue to reside in ethnic enclaves that have little to do with mainstream German society.
“When neighbours are Turks and so is everyone at work, you just don’t meet that many Germans,” Sevilay says, sitting down to celebrate her 19th birthday in a Turkish restaurant in Marxloh, a suburb of Duisburg.
“I would never say that I am not German, owing to the fact that I was born here and have a German passport, but I love Turkish traditions and I cannot identify with any German traditions.”
The factories where the Ruhr and Rhine rivers converge continue to employ tens of thousands of Germany’s four million or so Turks. Such figures are approximations because the government refuses to break down the statistics.
The Duisburg suburb is also where Germany’s biggest Muslim place of worship was built, within sight of many of the tall smokestacks that contributed so mightily to Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle.
But for all the cultural accommodation that the massive Merkez mosque suggests has taken place, Sevilay and Galip, like most Turks in the Ruhr, do not think that Germans will ever consider them to be countrymen, no matter how long they live and work in the country.
The question of who is a German has taken on an unpredictable, potentially ominous dimension since Chancellor Angela Merkel tossed the country’s fairly strict asylum rules aside in September and allowed about one million mostly Arab Muslim refugee claimants to enter the country.
A common fear of both Turks and Germans since then has been that the large number of asylum seekers, coupled with more terrorist attacks like the one in Paris in November, could exacerbate existing ethnic tensions.
That fear took on a new dimension after New Year’s Eve in Cologne, when almost 500 women allege they were sexually assaulted while passing through a mob of up to 1,000 men outside the city’s main train station. The police say the suspects are predominantly Middle Eastern and North African, and that many were asylum seekers.
“You can see it ( attitudes) changing,” says Galip. “Germans have actually asked me if I say ‘yes’ to ISIL.”
“They say there were Muslims who do this, so if you are a Muslim you might do it, too,” Sevilay continues. “I am afraid the prejudices will become worse and that Turkish people will have to deal with it.”
Sevilay, who has light- brown skin and jet- black hair, chooses not to wear a head scarf and prefers western clothes. Even so, she says she “always felt Turkish in Germany because Germans look at me as a Turk.”
“They always say, talking generally, that you are a good Turk but that the rest of the Turks are not. They tell me it is weird that my parents can’t speak German. They’ll say, ‘Fifty years have passed and you are still here. Why don’t you go away?’ This is something every Turk has heard.”
Straddling two societies with vastly different religions, cul- tures and codes of behaviour may not become easier, no matter where Sevilay Tan and Galip Daslik eventually end up living.
Before excusing themselves to catch a Turkish film at a local cinema, Sevilay offers a final lament.
“I am torn between being a German in Turkey and a Turk in Germany,” she says. “In Turkey they always call me a German girl and do not accept me as a Turkish girl, and when I am in Germany they do not accept me as a German girl.”
CITY ON A KNIFE EDGE Frictions between Christians and Muslims in Europe are as old as Islam itself.
The Moors brought what was then a new religion with them when they conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711, eventually establishing a capital in Cordoba, which became the most important and advanced city on the continent.
When Cordoba fell in 1236, the Castilian King Ferdinand III quickly ordered that its spectacular Grand Mosque be consecrated as a church, and a cathedral was wedged into the heart of the structure.
After hundreds of years of fighting, Christians finally succeeded in expelling the Moors completely in the 1500s.
More recently, it has not been advancing armies but a series of immigrant waves that have brought Islam to western Europe’s shores.
The down-at-heel port city of Marseille has been both a gateway and an incubator for the complicated relationship since the end of the Second World War, when the first influx from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco settled around the Vieux Port.
A larger, second wave arrived during France’s savage seven- year colonial war in Algeria. Some stayed, but many scattered across the country. Today, there are 4.7 million Muslims in France, making up 7.5 per cent of the population, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the EU, save Bulgaria.
The failure to integrate those millions is written across Marseille.
In gritty, crime-ridden banlieues such as La Bricarde and La Castellane, North Africans known as Maghrebis represent 80 per cent or more of the population. Youth unemployment is said to be above 40 per cent and taxi drivers regard about 25 per cent of the city as “les zones de non droit,” or no-go zones.
The divisions were in evidence one day last month, when a woman in a black chador came running down La Rue du Bon Pasteur shrieking that I was “not authorized” to be in the Arab quarter, and that a Postmedia photographer with me had taken her picture without permission.
Even after the photographer showed the woman and the crowd that quickly gathered that there were no images of her in his camera, she smacked him twice in the head, kicked his camera and threatened to attack him with a knife for trying to humiliate Arabs.
The tensions were made even worse this month when Jews in the city were warned not to wear the kippa after a Jewish teacher was stabbed in the street by a teen who police say claimed allegiance to ISIL.
WHILE I AM NOT AGAINST MUSLIMS, I AM AGAINST THEIR CULTURAL IDEAS. HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY AGREE WITH THEM ABOUT THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD WOMEN? IF THEY WANT TO BE PART OF OUR LIVES, THEY HAVE TO UNDERSTAND US. — HELSINKI RESIDENT
“We’ve had enough. We are saturated by Arabs and things are boiling over,” says Pascal Moulin, who works for a transportation company and supports Marine Le Pen’s notoriously xenophobic National Front party, which has found fertile ground in the Marseille- Nice region. “But it is pointless to speak about this because there is no solution. “
Hadj Jellal, who manages a coffee shop, was an infant when he came to France from Algeria in 1966.
“The dream of the Arabs is to be French, but with my face and my name I can’t ever be French in this country,” he says.
“We are so used to discrimination and stigmatization that we are no longer shocked by it. Our community cannot go any lower than it already is.”
The clashing perspectives in Marseille suggest the depth of the crisis Europe is facing.
How can France and other countries absorb hundreds of thousands of new Muslim refugees when the failures of the past are evident everywhere? What is the blueprint for the future when second-generation youth already feel alienated in their birth countries, and some are turning to extremism?
In December, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte compared the EU to the Holy Roman Empire, warning it faces an existential threat and will “go down if the borders are not well protected.”
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has shared an equally apocalyptic view of the Old World’s future. Absent stringent external border controls, Valls predicted that voters would say “enough is enough” and toss out all their elected leaders.
These tensions and the chaos and mayhem that they portend can be felt everywhere in Europe today.
THE FACE OF THE FAR RIGHT Tatjana Festerling reckons that every one of the approximately one million refugee claimants who have arrived in Germany abets her cause, which, to put it starkly, is to rid Germany of Muslims.
The 51-year-old novice politician has become the darling of Pegida — the German acronym for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.”
Festerling and others who think like her in Germany and across Europe are making big political gains as part of a backlash to the Continent’s refugee crisis.
Twenty- four hours after a rally in the cold and the rain of Dresden’s Theaterplatz, where perhaps 10,000 protesters heard speakers rail for several hours against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, Festerling agrees to a rare interview with a foreign journalist.
Over a dinner of heavy Saxon fare at a restaurant run by an ardent Pegida supporter, Festerling denounces “our woman chancellor for having brought Muslims into Europe.”
Mixing excellent English and elegant High German, she blasts those who “say we are Nazis without any discussion. I am not right wing. I am a libertarian. My problem is one of civilization. They do not want to integrate.
“I have tried to read the Qur’an but this is not a book that allows for self-reflection. I see women who aren’t free and I see this demanding attitude while always claiming they are the victims. I do not make a distinction between Islam and radical Islamists.”
Citing reports from French police that at least a couple of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris had passed through Germany with their arsenals “on the so-called Balkan route from the Middle East,” Festerling says that “grandmothers must get rid of their nail files at airports, but you can transport weapons throughout Europe because there are no checks anywhere.”
“We fear to lose our freedom, our liberty, our values, our culture. It is not only Germany that will be destroyed, but all of Europe. From the outside Germany still looks normal, but if you look behind the scenes society is collapsing. Within five or 10 years Germany will be completely changed. Our systems, whether it is health care or education or other structures, will be falling apart. Our schools are already a mess.”
But Festerling faces a backlash of her own — most Germans detest her views and treat her as a pariah, even in her political base of Dresden, a former East German enclave that did not have access to as much as a TV signal from the West while it was behind the Iron Curtain.
“They are crushing our beautiful city’s reputation,” says Carolyn Hendschke, an employee at the Dresden tourist office fed up with Pegida’s weekly demonstrations in front of the magnificent Semper Opera House.
“Foreigners become afraid here. They have changed the climate in the streets. They are not a majority but a lot of people who lost their jobs after reunification do not see what we have in Germany. That we are so rich and so blessed.”
As apprehension about immigration grows, however, there are signs that it may be Merkel who faces the greatest political test.
Bild, the influential populist German tabloid, published a poll in December that found that 48 per cent of those asked wanted her out at the next election and 47 per cent thought the chancellor had handled the refugee crisis badly.
The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), established less than three years ago with the goal of abolishing the euro, has suddenly become the country’s third-strongest political party by using anti-immigrant sentiment and fears of terrorism as a cudgel. Polls show that AfD has moved well ahead of the Green party and now has the support of more than 10 per cent of the voters.
This month, Merkel faced a new rebellion within her Christian Democrat party, when 40 MPs signed a petition urging her to revisit her immigration policies and shut the country’s borders.
Festerling was already a member of AfD when she joined Pegida last fall. She made the switch after losing her job as a press officer for a German railway company because of Facebook postings she made about a Pegida demonstration that turned violent in Cologne last fall.
She ran for mayor in Dresden in the spring, securing about 10 per cent of the vote, but her profile has only risen since then.
On Jan. 12, Festerling was one of the main speakers at a rightwing anti-migrant rally in Leipzig, where dozens of protesters were arrested after she reportedly accused Muslim asylum seekers of declaring a “sex jihad” against “blond, white women.”
WE FEAR TO LOSE OUR FREEDOM, OUR LIBERTY, OUR VALUES. IT IS NOT ONLY GERMANY THAT WILL BE DESTROYED, BUT ALL OF EUROPE. FROM THE OUTSIDE GERMANY STILL LOOKS NORMAL, BUT IF YOU LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES SOCIETY IS COLLAPSING. — TATJANA FESTERLING
Festerling’s views, which she is convinced are shared by a growing number of Europeans from Hungary to France and Scandinavia, have not come without a high personal price.
She confides that she is no longer with her half-Syrian boyfriend. Her daughter, she says, does not agree with her views and her father is so strongly opposed to them that he has not spoken to her in months.
Festerling’s apartment in Hamburg was spray-painted with graffiti denouncing her as a Nazi and a fascist. Police advised her to move and to hire bodyguards, and she did, settling 500 kilometres away in Dresden.
Surprisingly, Festerling regards Canada’s points-based immigration system as a model. “What we need,” she says, “are Canada’s immigration rules.” “I see Toronto as a wonderful melting pot. You are a Canadian, no matter where you are from. You have put the barriers to getting in so high for immigrants and you have kept them there. There is a sense of freedom and respect for yourselves that does not exist here.”
Because of Germany’s dark past, including the tyranny of Hitler and the horrors of the Holocaust, her country is “an open psychiatric ward,” Festerling says. “We need to develop a new self-esteem. To make decisions with self-respect and to watch out for ideologies and terrorism. The chancellor says we are a cold people full of hate and must be avoided. Nobody actually looks at what we say. Nobody in the ivory towers want to put any of this up for discussion.”
THE CHALLENGE AHEAD The Christmas trees outside the town hall in the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek cannot dispel the gloom revealed in signs that flatly declare “everything that divides us, weakens us.”
At the far end of the square, the family home of Brahim and Salah Abdeslam sits shuttered. Brahim, one of the gunmen who opened fire on cafés in Paris in November, died when he set off his bomb vest at the Comptoir Voltaire restaurant. Salah, suspected of criss- crossing the continent while helping to organize the attacks, evaded capture twice in Belgium and is thought to be in Syria.
The damage to already-jittery relations between Muslims and Christians that the Abdeslams and their accomplices have wrought across Europe can be seen in the hard stares that non-Arabs get on the cobbled streets of what is one of the most densely concentrated Muslim communities in Belgium.
It may seem far-fetched to Canadians, but many Europeans and especially many French and Belgians fear that the situation is now so precarious that the fault line they live on could erupt into civil war.
“We don’t want it and they don’t either, but it is possible that there could be a religious war,” says a fourth- year Moroccan-Belgium medical student who will only give his name as Osama because he says he fears trouble from the authorities. “Belgium and France could hit us and win, but what happens later?”
Like a fair number of young people in Molenbeek, the 24- year- old has grown a beard and is wearing Islamic robes to demonstrate his piety.
“There are far more tensions today than a few years ago. I feel that Belgians are becoming Islamophobes. Some of them are very hard on Islam,” Osama says, after attending evening prayers at a mosque five minutes’ walk from where the Abdeslams lived.
Nearby, Zhour Lamraoui stops shopping to declare that she, too, dreads the possibility that war might erupt one day.
“It is taboo to speak of Islam in Europe today,” Lamraoui says, cutting to what was for her the heart of the matter. “If you do, they immediately call you a terrorist.
“I fear for our future because all Arabs are being attacked because of the actions of a very small number. This touches me, my husband and my children. People feel free to insult my religion, but my religion means everything to me.”
Since emigrating to Belgium six years ago, Lamraoui, like many Muslim immigrants, has had trouble finding meaningful work. Although she has a university degree in classical Arabic, a diploma in hotel management and speaks excellent French and English, no hoteliers in Belgium have hired her because they do not recognize her qualifications.
“The jobs the Belgians allow us to do are basically the jobs that they don’t want to do,” Lamraoui says. “This fuels great resentment.”
Europeans of every political and religious persuasion now speak bleakly about how some kind of point of no return may have already passed.
“How can we live together? That is the question,” says Hamza El Mouden, a 28-year-old imam at a mosque in Molenbeek who seems wise beyond his years. “The key is integration and following the laws and rules of Belgian society.
“Our problem is that we can’t reach those who are causing the problems. Obsessed with what they read about jihad on the Internet, some young men here refuse to listen to what learned scholars say about our religion.”
Unlike in France, there have been tentative attempts here to repair the rift between what are called “old stock” Belgians and “hyphenated” new Belgians.
“To cross the bridge, it is necessary for Muslims to be given a little liberty, while at the same time punishing extremists by keeping them in jail or executing them, if the law allows it,” says Osama, the medical student. “At least there is a conversation about these problems today, so I am an optimist. We have to get deep into the person to find out why they think the way they do and attack it from this base.” As Lamraoui sees it, coexistence is the only option. “We are well here and we will stay,” she says. “This is the country of our children. Why should we leave?”
I FEAR FOR OUR FUTURE BECAUSE ALL ARABS ARE BEING ATTACKED BECAUSE OF THE ACTIONS OF A VERY SMALL NUMBER. THIS TOUCHES ME, MY HUSBAND, MY CHILDREN. PEOPLE FEEL FREE TO INSULT MY RELIGION, BUT MY RELIGION MEANS EVERYTHING TO ME. — BRUSSELS RESIDENT