It’s one of Europe’s most proudly liberal nations. So why is Denmark banning the burka and threatening to end benefits for migrants whose children don’t integrate?
JUICY pomegranates are piled outside the entrance to a supermarket in Norrebro, a district of Copenhagen. There are queues of customers at the till most of the day and into the early hours, buying Middle Eastern pastries, exotic fruit, dates and ice- cream which remind them of home.
Yet beside the pomegranates is a deep hole in the metal door frame. It was made one night by a bullet fired from a 9mm pistol by a member of a drug gang guarding his trading pitch near by.
Ismail Schbaita, a 55-year-old originally from Palestine who helps runs the supermarket, remembers the chilling moment last March only too well. ‘The gunman was high on drugs. Luckily, his bullet missed the staff and the customers. Gangs are always shooting each other around here.’
For Norrebro is a dangerous area of the Danish capital. A stone’s throw from the supermarket is the city’s most notorious housing estate, Mjolnerparken, where mothers told me this week they are afraid to let their children walk to the sweet shop alone because of the knifings and shootings.
Mjolnerparken, with its drab apartment blocks and shabby streets, has been categorised as a ghetto by the Danish Government.
Across the country, 21 other such places with high crime rates, soaring unemployment and more than 50 per cent non-Western residents have been given the same name. They are due to be ‘eradicated’ by 2030, following the introduction of controversial laws aimed at protecting ‘Danishness’ and ridding the country of so-called ‘parallel’ societies.
Later this year, legislation will force all families living in these ghettos to send their toddlers, as young as one year old, to approved day centres to learn the Danish language and Danish values.
The children will have to complete 25 hours of compulsory state education and, while the primary focus will be on language skills and learning, the plan is to educate the mainly Muslim children in the Danish way of life, as well as to give instruction on religious holidays, Christmas and Easter, and their importance in the Christian calendar.
Parents who fail to sign up have been told they could lose their child benefits.
This is the radical policy of a government that, like so many others in Europe, has accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants over recent years and is trying desperately to tackle the problems of integration. Indeed, the challenges Denmark is wrestling with are replicated across the EU as countries including Greece, Italy, Austria and Germany struggle to assimilate large numbers of migrants.
One disturbing common factor in these countries has been the emergence of strong far-Right political parties, and a return of the kind of ugly nationalism many hoped had died after World War II.
Denmark has long been proud of its reputation as a liberal, tolerant nation. But the fact that it has been forced to introduce tough laws to accelerate integration of migrants shows such tolerance has its limits.
Inevitably, some say the new laws are ‘racist’. They include a burka ban from next month, with fines of up to £1,200 for repeat transgressors. In the inner- city ghettos — where last year two thirds of residents were non-Western immigrants — there will be double the normal penalties for those who commit crimes.
Police will be given the freedom to conduct more intense surveillance of residents in order to curb extremism and violence, while migrant parents who send older children on trips back to their home countries in the Middle East and Africa could face four- year jail sentences if suspected of radicalisation.
The centre-Right Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, says these new laws are necessary because the number of first and secondgeneration non-Western immigrants has grown from 50,000 in 1980 to almost 500,000 today — a sizeable proportion, in a country of only 5.7 million people.
Rasmussen has said: ‘People with the same problems have clumped together. We have (until now) let it go, perhaps with the naive idea that integration would happen on its own over time ... but it hasn’t.’
Inger Stojberg, the hardline integration minister, has gone further. The crackdown on ghettos — a word with awful Nazi overtones, to which the Danish policymakers seem oblivious — is a centrepiece of her legislative reforms.
When Stojberg clocked up her 50th amendment to the laws relating to migrants, she baked a celebratory cake and posted a smiling picture of herself with it online.
All this sounds very un-Danish. Yet more and more people here — even some migrants — seem to agree with her. Mr Schbaita, at the bullethit supermarket, told me: ‘It is too late to stop the problem of parallel societies in my lifetime. But I hope the new laws will help future generations live together.
‘The problems in the ghettos are caused by ignorance about Western ways and a lack of education.’
He says employers won’t hire anyone who says they live in Mjolnerparken. This means the residents are often poor, at a loose end and ‘turn to crime’.
He says migrants were originally placed in Mjolnerparken because the Government wanted to give the mainly Muslim incomers a sense of community. ‘It was a humanitarian act, a kindness. But now the politicians are asking what went wrong in this part of town.’
Mr Schbaita left Palestine for Moscow to train as a pharmacist before arriving in Denmark, where he married a fellow Muslim and raised a family.
His solution to the problems is to pull down the ghettos. But he is concerned that the new laws are being pushed by a small political elite who unfairly blame Muslims for all the country’s wrongs.
He may be right. Yet indigenous Danes have shown remarkable enthusiasm for the changes.
One of Inger Stojberg’s most popular ideas is for migrants who have lived in Denmark for more than three years to pay for translators’ services when visiting a doctor, rather than relying on the State.
She says: ‘Unless we dare to make demands on foreigners, we will fail to address the serious problems of parallel societies where people neither work nor speak the language and don’t have Danish values.
‘A good place to start is to give back responsibility to those who have come here: learn the language or pay for your interpreter.’
In a poll by the newspaper B.T., 93 per cent of Danes questioned agreed with the minister’s plan.
Miles away from the ghettos, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, there are quiet, wellordered towns where daily life appears, at first glance, untroubled by the controversies over migration.
One of them is Hvidovre, where there is no mosque and the old Protestant church with the Danish flag flying proudly outside on a manicured lawn has a flourishing 7,000- strong membership.
Yet even here immigration is a heated topic.
‘ People are afraid of the consequences,’ said Annette Bjerregaard, 54, who works at the church. ‘If they feel people are integrating, they are positive. If not, they are not so positive.’
Annette’s son went to what was known among local Danes as ‘ the white school’, where all the pupils were ethnic Danes. In this part of town there are neat privately owned homes, shops and pavement cafes.
Yet a mile away in a poorer part of Hvidovre it is very different. Here 5,000 people, both foreigners and Danes, live together in a sprawling council-run housing estate.
Larry Ellis, a debonair 65-year-old resident with a shock of white hair, works as a gardener at the local university. Having finished his shift, he is relaxing with friends outside the estate’s community centre.
They all agree there are too many migrants coming to Denmark. ‘That is the problem and it has not been addressed for years,’ he says.
‘ Even here, we are housed in different parts of the estate to the migrants. The council has put ethnic Danes in blocks on one side of the road and Muslims in blocks on the other. We just don’t mix, and religion is part of it.’
This does not bode well for the Government’s efforts to encourage integration. And indeed, some Danes want to crack down against migrants still harder.
As the mainstream politicians react to a growing sense of disillusion
Danes live on one side of the road, migrants on the other
about mass migration, a new party led by a 42- year- old architect called Pernille Vermund has seized the moment.
The divorced mother of three, who lives far from the Copenhagen ghettos, hopes her party — the New Right — will gain seats in elections next year on a hardline anti-migrant manifesto.
It calls for the residence permit of any ‘foreigner convicted in court’ to be withdrawn and for no more welfare benefits, housing subsidies and other state payments to anyone except Danish citizens.
She told me: ‘ Politicians for decades have let people into our country who do not share our values. They do not assimilate. Now the politicians make a patchwork of rules to try to correct their own mistakes. Forcing Muslim mothers to deliver their toddlers into state-run daycare is not going to make them Danish, or less Muslim. It simply will not work.’
Her views would have been condemned as xenophobic extremism in liberal Denmark a few years ago. But mass immigration has hardened attitudes.
Politicians fear that if they ignore the problem, they will lose ground to parties such as the New Right.
Back in Mjolnerparken, where 1,752 people of 38 nationalities live cheek by jowl, I meet one of the community elders.
An Iraqi Kurd by birth, smartly dressed Taher Mustafah, 59, came to Denmark in 1985. He has worked for years as a civil servant and helped run an Islamic charity.
We stand on a busy street corner to chat, as Danish girls in skimpy shorts cycle past women with veiled faces shepherding children along pavements, closely watched over by their husbands. Truly, it is a stark clash of cultures.
Taher looks at one of the veiled women and shakes his head.
‘I know her,’ he says. ‘She is Tunisian and her husband is an Iraqi. My view is that if you live in a country, you should show respect for the society in which you live. She should not wear the burka here in Denmark and soon she will not be allowed to.’
Yet nearby, in an Iraqi- owned cafe, I hear a different opinion from an Iraqi migrant father called Jaber Saleh, 40, who is eating a pitta bread-and-hummus lunch with his wife Farah, 29, and son Hassan, six.
The Salehs are angry with the Danish Government. Despite living and working here as a truck driver for 17 years, Jaber has still not been granted citizenship.
Since the day he arrived, he has clung to his roots. He sent his son to an Arabic school in Copenhagen until it was closed by the Government, which accused some staff of having links to terrorism.
‘The Government was wrong,’ says Jaber. ‘It was a good school where Hassan was taught in the Arabic language, not Danish, and he learnt the Koran. He speaks Arabic at home and has no Danish friends, and I am pleased about that. I don’t want him to learn from them bad things, the swearing, the low moral code of Denmark.
‘This society is too lax. I will do anything to avoid my son learning the values of Denmark.’
As I help Hassan write his name in the English alphabet in my notebook, I wonder what life will bring for this bright, well-behaved child, growing up torn between two cultures.
His family are not preparing him for life as a Dane and, in a rapidly changing country, he may never be accepted as one even if he wishes to be.
And that surely spells trouble for him and his adopted nation.