Holland to deport thousands of asylum seekers

[Other News - Roberto Savio / IPS <soros@topica.email-publisher.com>]

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Art Speaks Up for Immigrants
   By Fitzroy Nation

AMSTERDAM, Feb (IPS) - It was on the cards for months, and this week it
became official. Beginning mid-year and continuing over the next three years,
the Dutch government will deport roughly 26,000 asylum seekers.

   A majority of parliamentarians from the ruling centre-right coalition
approved
the deportations, ignoring mass protests and pleas for humanitarian concern.
Some of the asylum-seekers have been in The Netherlands for five years,
awaiting processing of their applications.

   This is the latest instance of a dramatic change in policy, and in public
attitudes towards ethnic minorities that have triggered a sometimes agonised
national debate.

   In this political debate, the voice of the immigrants is being heard more
often in
the cultural sphere.

   A play called 'Spong Gumus Hirsi Jahja Tuur' opened at the Cosmic Theatre in
Amsterdam last week. It features monologues by five migrants whose names
form the title.

   A lone actor prowls the stage talking to himself and to the audience about
his
innermost thoughts. Those thoughts open a window into the migrant world.

   "The aim," says director of the play Khaldoun Elkmechy, "is to give a new
view
of the problems of integration in the Netherlands."

   Last year a television series 'Najib en Julia' featured the love story of a
Moroccan pizza delivery boy and a Dutch hockey player. 'Romeo en Farida', a
children's opera, was about an affair between a headscarf-wearing Turkish
shop girl and a Dutch boy.

   The film 'Polleke' about a relationship between a young Moroccan girl and a
Dutch boy raises the same question: Can the Dutch find accommodation with
migrants in their midst?

   Immigration was thrust on to the agenda a few years ago by the charismatic
university professor Pim Fortuyn. He founded a political party that campaigned
for an end to immigration. "Holland is full," he claimed.

   Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, but his ideas -- including the need for
ethnic minorities, especially Muslims, to adapt to Dutch norms and values --
have taken root within the centre-right coalition led by the Christian
Democrats
which was elected to office in January 2003.

   "Fortuyn made it okay to speak out what you feel," says Memdouh Baridi from
Changing Course, one of several initiatives set up to help ethnic minorities
integrate into Dutch society. "It is fashionable to be intolerant, to be
impolite to
immigrants."

   Attention has focused largely on Moroccan Muslims, widely seen as least
integrated.

   There are more than 284,000 Moroccans in the Netherlands in a population of
more than 16 million. Most came through labour recruitment schemes in the
1960's. They extended short-term contracts, and eventually brought over their
families. Now there is a second generation of about 125,000 more at home in
this country than in the land of their parents.

   But are they really Dutch?

   The film 'Shouf Shouf Habibi!' (Look, Look, Darling!) set "in a big city
somewhere in Holland" centres on the experiences of a Moroccan family torn
between the attractions of their physical home and the one to which they feel
emotionally bonded.

   The film has drawn record audiences since it opened at the end of January.
Critics say it echoes burning questions in the public debate.

   "'Shouf Shouf Habibi!' makes us realise that (the integration debate) is not
really so much about integration but emancipation," writes Anil Ramdas, a
migrant himself, in the Rotterdam newspaper 'NRC Handelsblad'.

   In a dramatic scene, the policeman Sam of Moroccan origin and his colleague,
a blond Dutchwoman, kiss passionately in a police car. When they pull apart
they are shocked as much by guilt (both are married) as an awareness of the
cultural chasm their affection threatens to breach.

   The borders explored in the film are cultural and religious, political and
generational. They divide families, and eventually pull them apart.

   The sentiment in cinema mirrors the sentiment on the streets.

   More than 2,500 asylum-seekers and their supporters staged a protest outside
the parliament building at The Hague Tuesday against immigration policy. They
said the government decision was harsh, and a violation of human rights.

   They said many of those facing deportation will return to imprisonment or
persecution. They said most of them had settled in the Netherlands, and spoke
the local language. The children of many were born in the Netherlands. But the
government was unmoved.

   Those affected are mainly asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola,
Somalia, Iran and China. Ministers say these countries are safe and stable
enough to return to.

   A group of asylum-seekers facing deportation held up protest banners in the
visitors gallery. A 35-year-old Iranian among them said he had been arrested in
Tehran seven years ago during a demonstration, and fled while on bail.

   "I tried to integrate," he said in fluent Dutch. "I have work, it is
illegal, but I can
make do. And in a short while, I will be a father. If I go back to Iran, I'm
certain my
life will be in danger." (END/IPS/


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Other News" is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that
should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It
welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on
global issues, north-sutrh relations, gobernability of globalization. The
"Other News" motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of
Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003:”What
walls utter, media keeps silent”. Roberto Savio

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