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[Dragonball (POL)]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspa.000792,00.html

February 14, 2004

Is it the end of the Duch liberal experiment?
By Anthony Browne
The Netherlands has seen a shift in attitudes, with multiculturalism blamed for a host of ills

EVERY morning Talin, an Iranian, waits for the letter she had hoped never to see. A doctor with a husband and a six-month-old baby, she has lived in Rotterdam for seven years with her parents and grandmother. But this week the Dutch Government passed a law ordering 26,000 failed asylum-seekers, herself among them, to return home, no excuses accepted.
“I can’t sleep. They say I must go back to our country, but it is not possible because we are political refugees,” she said in a quiet, desperate voice. “The Government admitted it cannot guarantee my life if I go back. I just don’t know what I can do.”

She and her husband fled Iran in 1997, but they will have just eight weeks to leave, from the time the letter arrives, or they will be sent to a camp from which they will be forcibly deported.

Her friend, Farideh, who arrived from Iran in 1996 with four young children, is also about to be sent back, even though her children are now more Dutch than Iranian. “I am really worried for my children,” she said. “They grew up with freedom of thought and speech. They could not go back to Iran, they would be arrested for having bad thoughts.”

Just across the street from their place of employment, where they help other immigrants to integrate into Dutch society, is the former home of Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration campaigner whose murder two years ago by a left-wing activist sparked the political upheaval that is about to ruin their lives. “I can’t understand. How can you do this to a human being? It is not democracy,” said Talin.

Unfortunately for her, however, it is. Despite a storm of protests, the law was approved by Parliament and is backed by most Dutch people.

Outside Fortuyn’s house stands a life-sized statue of him, surrounded by fresh floral tributes. In two short years, Europe’s traditional home of liberalism has turned itself into a cauldron of conservatism. The murder of Fortuyn, who declared that the Netherlands was full and that Islam was a backward religion, broke the taboo on speaking out against immigration and a host of other social issues. As liberal pieties crumbled, the Netherlands has been forging ahead with a new right-wing agenda.

It now has the toughest immigration laws in Europe, and has been adopting powerful law-and-order policies. A compulsory ID card is being introduced for everyone over the age of 12. Cannabis cafés are being closed by the hundreds. Prostitutes are being cleared off the streets, the generous benefits system severely curtailed, and even free contraception has been abolished for everyone except teenagers. Longer sentences mean prisons are so full that for the first time inmates are being forced to share cells.

Such is the seismic shift in the political landscape that even left-wing politicians often support “the new politics”. When a government commission declared last month that multiculturalism in the Netherlands had been a failure despite some successes, it was condemned from Left and Right for being too positive.

Peter van Heemst, a socialist MP from Rotterdam, said: “People are fed up with crime, fed up with the influx of immigrants. The pendulum is swinging completely to the other side of the spectrum, but that’s the result of ignoring people’s concerns for so long.”

Michiel van Hulten, a Labour MEP, said: “There is a reactionary movement sweeping the country. There is a growing feeling that the permissive society of the 1970s and 1980s got out of control. There is a feeling that society got the balance wrong between rights and responsibilities.” Rotterdam, where nearly half the population are impoverished ethnic minorities, is at the forefront of the political shift.

The Leefbar Rotterdam party, of which Fortuyn was a member, controls the city council. Surrounded by pictures of the murdered populist in his office in the grandiose Gothic town hall, the party leader, Ronald Sorensen, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, said: “The only thing that Pim Fortuyn did was produce an intellectual argument for what everyone was thinking.

“We are trying to be more honest. Before people just turned a blind eye, but not any more. It is the death of political correctness.”

The change hits you when you arrive at Centraal Station in Rotterdam. It used to throng with drunks, beggars and drug dealers. “People stopped using the trains because it was a jungle,” van Heemst said. Now, Centraal Station is almost Swiss in its cleanliness and safety. Police officers wander around, moving people on if they are loitering suspiciously. Pick-pocketing is down 70 per cent, boasts Huub Veeneman, a police official. “A tourist came back after a few years and asked us what had happened, it had changed so much.”

Young men causing a nuisance on mopeds now get their mopeds confiscated if convicted of two offences. Judges are handing out six years in prison where they used to give two. Police are going through neighbourhood after neighbourhood sweeping prostitutes and drug dealers off the streets. People with large houses and expensive cars must now prove that their money came from legitimate sources.

“We always used to protect the villains. Now it is victims first,” Mr Sorenson said.

Rotterdam’s zero tolerance policies are being copied across The Netherlands. Anyone causing trouble is automatically ejected from cinemas, swimming pools and buses. In Amsterdam, the number of cannabis cafés is down from 2,000 to 700.

Arjan Roskam, the leader of the Union of Cannabis Retailers, said: “Each coffee shop gets raided by police a lot, looking for any evidence to close you down. If any hard drugs are found, you are closed down instantly.”

But it is in the area of immigration and integration that the Netherlands - and Rotterdam in particular - are generating most of the controversy arises. Welfare recipients, however long they have been in the country, will now have their benefits cut if they do not learn Dutch. New immigrants have to learn Dutch within a year of arriving, and the Government is planning to demand that any non-EU immigrants learn Dutch before being allowed to enter.

Asylum-seekers receive an initial screening, and no- hopers are deported within 48 hours. To curb Islamic arranged marriages, Dutch residents under 24 are no longer allowed to bring spouses into the country.

Rotterdam recently declared that it would accept no new asylum-seekers for five years, and that only people on good incomes could move to the city. The council is demolishing social housing for people on benefits and building executive flats in their place. “We have too much poverty and high unemployment. We want a five-year break so we can solve housing problems. If there are smaller communities of immigrants they will have to mingle with the Dutch more,” Mr Sorenson said.

In the Grote Visserijstraat Market, where most customers are members of ethnic minorities, a Dutch cheese seller called Bob welcomed the new policies. “It’s good not to have too many foreigners now. There are so many of them. When there are a lot of them, you can’t integrate people.”

Pieter, a young Dutch vegetable seller, said: “This used to be a rich country with no social problems and no crime. Now, because of the socialism, it has become full of social, ethnic and political problems.”

But Mustafa, a Turk who came to the Netherlands aged three and now runs a clothes stall, said: “It is good for the Dutch, but not good for the immigrants. What will happen in ten years? Where will it stop? Will they say next year they don’t want any black people?” For many, the expulsion of 26,000 failed asylum-seekers, many of them well settled, is a step too far. Eric Dykhuyzen, director of Bureau Mederlands, where Talin and Farideh work, is deeply alarmed at the direction his country has taken. “What the Government wants is integration, but what they are doing means integration is stopped. The communities are growing apart from each other. The Islamic communities don’t feel welcome any more and are becoming defensive, but also aggressive.”

Mr van Heemst recognises the need for change, but worries about where it will end. “A silent revolution is going on. All types of authority are taking back responsibility for problems. It has been neglected for 25 years; it will take 15 years to get it back again. There is a big change going on, but it is very uncertain what the outcome will be.”

[Totila]

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