Europe Uneasy As France's Riots Spread

by Paolo Pontoniere

(PNS) -- France's unrest is spreading throughout Europe. Though the scale of the French riots has not been equaled elsewhere on the old continent, in the past weeks rioting erupted and cars were torched in Germany, Holland, Belgium, Greece and Italy. European media are asking what this means for the future of Europe.

Since the beginning of the Paris banlieue's revolts the most serious incidents outside France have been registered in Belgium. Like France, Belgium's immigrant population is composed mostly of people of Moroccan origin, and the country register double-digit unemployment among youths.

The incidents, which have now lasted almost two weeks, have resulted in the destruction of hundreds of cars. The cities of Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Lokeren have been the focal points of the unrest, but tension among locals and immigrants is reported to be now widespread across the country.

"What is happening in France provides us with an indicator of the depth of the social problems we're facing," wrote Belgium's De Staandard just a few days after the beginning of the riots. "Let's recognize that the challenges are huge, and we don't even know how to talk to each other."

In Germany, Berlin's Tageszeitung, the city's main daily observed that similar riots could happen as easily in Germany as in France.

"The policy of social Apartheid affects primarily, though not exclusively, immigrants' descendants,'" the newspaper wrote, adding that the adoption of this policy in today's Europe amounts to a dogma.

Confirming Tageszeitung's analyses last week, in Berlin and Bremen groups of youths set an unspecified number of cars ablaze.

On Nov. 12 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, three cars were torched in the Vreewijk quarter, a neighborhood in the vicinity of the port, and the police signaled some confrontations with groups of marauding youths.

Complacency marked the reaction of Greek media. Even though it recognized that the dramatic developments of Paris were reason for concern in Athens, Kathimerini, Greece's largest daily, wrote that "similarities between Greece and France are very limited." The daily's editors believed that because Greek immigrants come mostly from neighboring Balkan countries they're void of religious fanaticism and that in due time they would fold into the Greek melting-pot.

It must have come as a surprise when in Athens groups of anarchist and immigrant youths in two separate incidents across a few days set fire to two auto dealerships, burned police vehicles outside the city university and marched on the French Embassy.

In Rome, Romano Prodi, former EU president, was sharply criticized when he predicted that riots would take place in the suburbs of Italian cities. Even the Democrats of the Left, the main party in Prodi's coalition, rushed to dismiss his fear.

But on the night of Nov. 12 in the suburbs of Rome, in what many believe to be an act of desperation by illegal immigrants protesting their abysmal housing conditions, a shelter housing immigrants was set on fire. Two Senegalese men believed to have started the blaze were wounded and 140 immigrant families of African origins were displaced.

"To escape rat invasion many times the immigrants resort to igniting small fires," explained La Repubblica, Italy's leading daily. "One of those fires could have gotten out of hand, forcing the two men to jump through the window."

Further north in Bologna, one of Italy's most prosperous cities, garbage containers were set on fire and graffiti supporting illegal immigrants and denouncing their living conditions appeared all over town.

Slogans such as "Bologna come Parigi" (Bologna like Paris) and "La rivolta e' necessaria, Solidarieta' ai casseurs Parigini" (Revolting is necessary, solidarity with Paris' demonstrators) screamed from Bologna's historic walls.

Bologna had experienced a marked influx of North-African immigrants recently, and following the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, relations between locals and non-EU residents have been strained by an influx of refugees coming from the Balkan region. Mirroring the proposal advanced in France by Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, Italian conservatives are calling for the deportation of all aliens caught protesting against their host nation.

The current outburst in France across Europe should have come as no surprise to European media and policy makers. It has been preceded by ample warning signals.

Less than a week before the Paris explosion, in Denmark thousands of young Muslims took the streets to protest a cartoonist's rendering of the Prophet Mohammed. In October in Birmingham, England, racial riots involving Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities -- spurred by allegations of the rape of a black teen-ager by Asian men and marked by the desecration of 30 Muslim graves -- ended in two deaths.

Racial and anti-immigrants uprisings have marred Europe since the beginning of the new millennia. Clashes based on race, religion or ethnicity include those in Madrid in 2000, Manchester in 2001 and clashes in the Netherlands following the assassination of Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Often targeted at Islam and Islamic symbols, these events bespeak a troubled future both for Europe and for Muslims living on the continent.

"Either Europe develops and supports the idea of a mixed culture, or has no future," declared Abdelkarim Carrasco to Spain's El Pais, a progressive daily. Carrasco, a leader of Spain's Muslim community, believes that when it comes to integrating racial diversity, Europe could learn from the United States, "a country," in Carrasco's words, "which has taken in people from all over the world."