AMSTERDAM, 13 November 2003 — Long famed as a haven of multicultural tolerance, the Netherlands is now searching its soul to ask whether its integration policy has failed.
The recent Amsterdam murder of a homeless German woman by a group of youngsters of mainly Moroccan descent has thrown the spotlight onto immigrant youth and reopened a discussion on their role in the Netherlands. The killing of 43-year-old former drug addict and alcoholic Anja Joos followed several other highly-publicized incidents in which young Moroccans were held responsible for civil disturbances and threatening behavior.
Rita Verdonk, minister for immigration and integration, has said she wants to make parents financially responsible for the damage caused by “trouble kids” of immigrant families. “The limits have been reached,” she said in reaction to a study that showed Moroccan gangs were terrorizing an old people’s home and a mental asylum in the Dutch capital. A poll by the daily Algemeen Dagblad showed 90 percent of respondents wanted the authorities to “act decisively, if needed with the army” against troublesome Moroccan youths.
And an Amsterdam newspaper recently reported that some teachers felt so threatened by an anti-Semitic atmosphere in their classrooms that they no longer dared teach about the Nazi holocaust, in which Dutch Jewry was decimated. Debate about the role of immigrants in the Netherlands flared up last year with the meteoric rise of taboo-busting anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was gunned down just before the May 2002 elections. Though temperatures are no longer quite as high, anti-foreigner feelings have returned as the once-buoyant economy battles with recession and rising unemployment.
Similar factors partly explain the rise of ultra-right parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, Christoph Blocher’s People’s Party in Switzerland and the Vlaams Blok in Belgium.
The Dutch Parliament, stung by criticism from the right-wing about a lax immigration policy, has started an inquiry to see whether the country’s integration policy has failed.
But is there a real problem or just a change in perception?
Public prosecutor Leo de Wit, for instance, said the study on Moroccan gangs exaggerated the situation. And Amsterdam police spokesman Remco Gerritsen said that while police were tackling youth crime and singling out repeat offenders for special attention, data showed a decline in crime.
“The group of youth criminals is a mixed bag of people of all kinds of origin. It is not a special immigrant or Moroccan problem,” he told Reuters. Big Dutch cities boast a large immigrant population. While many churches are closing, mosques are opening up. Of the 735,000 inhabitants of the Dutch capital, 390,000 are Dutch nationals, 72,000 from the former South American colony of Surinam, 59,000 from Morocco and 36,000 from Turkey.
