The Chronikler

Zero tolerance=zero difference

By Khaled Diab

Belgian media hysteria over crime and calls for zero-tolerance policing miss the real issue – social exclusion in the inner city.

16 February 2010

To the outside world, the scariest thing about Brussels is probably its bureaucracy. In Belgium, however, Brussels has something of a reputation for being an unsafe city where criminals of Moroccan and other immigrant extractions rule its mean streets and certain neighbourhoods are no-go areas not only for law-abiding citizens but also for the police.

Three recent incidents, including a dramatic one in which a police officer was shot with a Kalashnikov during a getaway after a thwarted armed robbery, have confirmed this perception in the minds of many.

The predictable media frenzy – with a tone that would be familiar to a British audience – about street crime and the need for "zero tolerance" followed hot on the heels of the tragic shooting, and voices of reason and nuance have been drowned out. The police even took to the streets to call for more resources and pay, as well as stiffer sentences and faster judicial procedures.

In addition to idle musings about who polices the police during such a protest (a friend suggested that perhaps anarchists and activist should get the chance to stand on the other side of the barricades), I wondered whether the Belgian capital's image is deserved and whether more draconian security measures are really the answer.

According to available statistics, Brussels has, by northern European standards, a high petty crime rate and it is top of the European league when it comes to domestic burglaries but is one of the safest capitals in the world – and possibly the safest in Europe – when it comes to violent crime, particularly murder. And despite the current media stampede, in the first half of 2009 Brussels registered the lowest crime rate in almost a decade.

Like many Brussels residents, my wife and I lived for years without problems beyond some minor annoyances, on the edge of what is regarded as one of the city's more dangerous neighbourhoods.

The public debate, carrying as it does racial and religious undertones, has not surprised locals in Brussels's problem areas but it has caused widespread disappointment. "The violence we hear about in the media is the exception and not the rule," Kamal, a 32-year-old Moroccan, told me. "With all this talk of zero tolerance, respect has reached zero level. We need a public debate, but one based on mutual respect and acceptance."

The sense of disillusionment is pervasive, especially in Kuregem, which is regularly portrayed as some kind of urban "war zone". Eric Gijssen, a video artist and social worker who has lived in Brussels for two decades and works with young people in Kuregem to help them find their voice through the medium of film, has noticed a growing apathy among his charges.

"The youth I work with and other locals are becoming increasingly apathetic," he said. This is a far cry from the active and engaged young people we met some years ago at the Alhambra centre who were keen to challenge stereotypes and misperceptions. "They no longer believe this will make a difference, and have turned their backs on the media to find their own information sources and forums online," Gijssen added.

While he acknowledges that there are plenty of problems, he finds that the sensation-seeking elements of the media and self-serving politicians are only making a delicate situation worse. "Instead of stigmatising entire communities, we must first of all engage with the youth and offer them alternative perspectives," he said.

Gijssen and others with grassroots experience see the fixation on security aspects of the Brussels question as short-sighted and even counterproductive. Instead of attacking the symptoms with a fist of steel, what is required is treatment of the root causes: poverty and social exclusion.

While it is not inevitable that poverty will lead to crime, ignoring the strong correlation between the two is disingenuous and an easy way for politicians and society to cop out of their responsibilities to create opportunities for the marginalised.

In Brussels, the contrast between wealth and poverty is extremely stark. As the country's main economic dynamo, Brussels has a per-capita GDP that is 233% that of the EU average! However, most of the wealth generated in the city is earned by people who live in its plusher suburbs or who commute there from other towns.

In contrast, inner-city Brussels, unlike most other capital cities, has the highest unemployment rate in the country (17.6%) and, according to Gijssen, in places like Kuregem, youth unemployment can be as high as 50%. Unsurprisingly, this chasm can often lead to feelings of resentment on one side of the wealth divide and fear on the other.

"In places like Kuregem, young people have very little or nothing, and not much of a future to look forward to," explains Gijssen. "One thing is essential: more investment."

But rather than investing more, the authorities have been siphoning off funds from community projects in Kuregem and other poorer neighbourhoods in Brussels and, at a time when everyone is feeling the pinch of the economic crisis, immigrant neighbourhoods have fallen off the political radar when it comes to employment and education.

"If jobs and other opportunities are found, then this security problem will vanish," Kamal told me. "We need to combat social exclusion through better socio-economic integration."

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 8 February 2010. Read the related discussion.

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Closing the ‘hijab murder’ file

By Khaled Diab

The life sentence imposed on Marwa al-Sherbini's killer shows that European Islamophobia exists but is not institutionalised.

16 November 2009

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Murder at rush hour

By Khaled Diab

A murder trial is delving into the mystery of why and how a young Belgian was stabbed to death for his MP3 player during rush hour in the capital’s busiest train station.

September 2008

In the UK, youth knife crime has received a lot of attention recently. A high-profile murder trial in Belgium has refocused public attention here on the issues of senseless violence, law and order, public apathy, immigration and racism.

The story, in this case, really does begin with a “regular Joe”. Joe van Holsbeeck was a popular, friendly and laid-back secondary school student looking forward to a bright future. On 12 April 2006, the 17-year-old and his best friend were waiting for a girlfriend in Brussels’s busiest transport hub, the Central Station.

At around 4.30pm, two teenagers approached them, ostensibly to ask for directions, and then demanded that Joe hand over his MP3 player. When Joe refused, one of them took out a knife and, amid the rush-hour crowds, stabbed him seven times, including a fatal blow to the heart, according to the court doctor.

Adam Giza, the killer, expressed remorse for his deed. “I am sorry for what happened. I didn’t want to kill him. I ask Joe’s parents, his brother, and [his best friend] Gil for forgiveness,” the 19-year-old said in his closing testimony.

On Tuesday, the jury found Giza guilty of violent theft which led to death but did not find that he intended to murder Joe. The dead boy’s father, Guy, described the verdict as “a slap in the face”. This reaction is understandable from the grieving parent of a young man who was described by his best friend as “someone you only meet once in your life”. Although justice has been served, this verdict is bound to add to the controversy surrounding the case.

That a young man should have died for a music player and that it happened in a busy public place caused public shock and outrage – not to mention, fear – at the time. Many people started calling for more policing and tougher punishment for offenders.

“We can’t continue to sweep minor offences under the carpet. We need to take a ‘zero tolerance’ approach,” one resident told De Standaard. “There aren’t enough police agents? There are plenty of unemployed people around. Or why not use the army?”

The then Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said that the government must step up its fight against juvenile crime. But others questioned this fixation on policing and wondered how it was possible that Joe was murdered in a train station through which some 200,000 commuters pass each day and how his attackers managed to get away?

Cardinal Daneels, the country’s top Catholic clergyman, condemned what he saw as society’s growing apathy and materialism.  “Hundreds witnessed the murder but no one did anything,” the archbishop said in his 2006 Easter sermon. “God asks us: where is your brother? Where is your Abel? We must not answer like Cain: ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’”

Glenn Audenaert, a Brussels police chief, echoed the Cardinal’s message, albeit in less Biblical terms. “The police cannot be everywhere at once. Safety is a collective responsibility,” he said.

While the cardinal and the police chief have a point about public apathy, what they overlook is that, in our modern, well-oiled, mechanical societies, we expect the ‘system’ to take care of everything and many people find the potential consequences of intervention highly risky.

On a personal level, I find myself far more confident and comfortable about intervening in societies where collective intervention is something of a norm. It is far less threatening for the individuals involved if an entire group of people break up a fight or mediate a confrontation than if it is left to a lone passer-by. If enough people cared, then getting involved would become less a question of heroics and more one of good citizenship.

The trial has shed light on another possibility. The events occurred so fast on a busy platform that commuters had little time to notice, let alone react. Once the situation became clear, a Red Cross volunteer and a commuter quickly rushed to Joe’s aid. “For a moment, it seemed like he would regain consciousness,” she said in her testimony. “But then I saw him slip away again.” According to the court doctor, the wounds Joe suffered meant there was little anyone could do to save him.

But that still leaves the question unanswered of how it was that the two youth involved in the attack managed to run away, unchallenged, through the station and towards the town centre.

Right-wing commentators focused on the apparent ethnicity of the attackers, who were at first described as being of “North African” appearance.

“Belgian citizens realise… that the murder has nothing to do with ‘indifference in Belgian society,’ but everything with a group of North African youths terrorising Brussels,” Paul Belien wrote in that chronicle of far-right “enlightenment”, the Brussels Journal.

But Joe’s family refused to have their son’s plight used for xenophobic grandstanding. “Nobody should come to me, asking me to hate all Arabs,” his mother said in an interview with La Dernière Heure. “The youths who killed my son were scum… Scum can be found everywhere.”

Jean-Marie Dedecker, who has subsequently broken away from the Flemish Liberal Party to form a Flemish nationalist party centred around himself, claimed rather surreally: “You will sooner get punished for riding a bike without the lights on than for stealing a bike… Policemen look the other way in order to avoid being accused of racism... They behave in exactly the opposite way when they suspect decent citizens of some misdemeanour.”

The way Dedecker describes it, you’d think that Belgium was no country for middle-aged white men. But this has become a fairly typical tactic of victimhood used by bigots: “these brown people not only come here and steal our jobs, but also our rights and security”.

Some members of the far-right Vlaams Belang (VB) even went so far as to suggest that gun ownership laws should be relaxed to allow citizens to “defend” themselves.

The fact that Joe’s attackers turned out to be Polish Roma left the envoys of social intolerance with egg on their face. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before some focused on the attackers’ “gypsy” identity – and, hence, illegal immigration – as somehow accounting for the violence. But they are obviously unaware that Giza feared the verdict of his own community, who never allow the re-admittance of rapists and murderers in their midst, to that of the court.

Interestingly, a racially inspired shooting spree by the nephew of a far-right politician in Antwerp less than a month later caused the VB to plea insanity on the part of a “lone psychopath”, even though the shooter was deemed to be in full possession of his mental faculties and a jury found him guilty of being a “racist murderer”.

In a symbolic response to the charge of public apathy, 80-90,000 people took part, less than a fortnight after Joe’s death, in a ‘silent march’ in Brussels against senseless violence. It was the biggest public demonstration in Belgium since the ‘white march’ against the paedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux.

The brainchild of Fouad Ahidar, a Flemish politician of Moroccan descent, the silent march was well-attended by minorities to show that street violence and crime should not be forced into an ethnic pigeonhole.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 24 September 2008. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

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Hijab and dagger

By Khaled Diab

Egyptian outrage at the brutal murder of Marwa Sherbini, the ‘hijab martyr’ is understandable. But If Egyptians want better justice for Muslims in Europe, then they should demand more justice for non-Muslims at home.

7 July 2009

Marwa el-Sherbini, 32, died a tragic death – tragic because it was so pointless and so unnecessary. The tragedy was multiplied by the fact that the young Egyptian expat was three months pregnant and leaves behind another child.

el-Sherbini, a pharmacist and the wife of an Egyptian academic on a scholarship in Germany, was murdered by her 28-year-old Islamophobic neighbour, identified by the authorities only as Axel W, an unemployed Russian of German descent.

The murder took place in a courtroom in Dresden where Axel was appealing a fine he had imposed on him for insulting el-Sherbini – in 2008, he had called her “a terrorist” because she wore a headscarf. “It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf,” said Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden.

In Alexandria, where el-Sherbini’s body was repatriated, hundreds of mourners turned up to the funeral of the “martyr of terrorism” on Monday 6 July. Many carried placards asking: “What crime was she killed for?”

The murder has prompted anti-German sentiment in Egypt and, like with the Danish cartoon controversy, some Egyptians are calling for sanctions against Germany. For example, the Egyptian Pharmacists' Association, of which el-Sherbini was a member, called for a boycott of German drugs.

Egyptians have been outraged not just by the murder but by the relative lack of attention it has received in the European media, especially considering the amount of space dedicated to hate crimes perpetrated by Muslims. Hicham Maged, an Egyptian blogger, wrote: “Just imagine if the situation was reversed and the victim was a Westerner who was stabbed anywhere in the world or – God forbid – in any Middle Eastern country by Muslim extremists.” Other commentators pointed to the uproar that followed the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

While the media attention grabbed by the Van Gogh murder was partly a function of his notoriety and celebrity, there is a point to be made that this brutal murder should’ve attracted more media attention.

But to play the same ‘what if’ game as Hicham Maged above, I also have a hypothetical question: “What if a western  or local woman were attacked or murdered in a Muslim country for not wearing the headscarf, would her case attract much attention in Egypt or other Muslim countries?”

Yes, there is prejudice in Western countries against the hijab, and Muslims are understandably incensed by this, especially when it is institutionalised in law. But what about Muslim prejudice against bare heads? In the interest of fairness, why aren’t more Muslims openly outraged by attempts to force women to wear the headscarf against their will, such as in Saudi Arabia?

The ‘mutaween’, the Saudi morality police, routinely arrest and beat Saudi woman out alone or not wearing a headscarf, and have been known to pester Western women and arrest them up on trumped up charges of “prostitution”. In an extreme manifestation of their puritanical attitude, they caused, in 2002, the death of 15 schoolgirls who were not allowed to flee a burning building because they were not dressed in decent Islamic fashion and barred male passers-by from rescuing them.

Respect for local mores and customs, I hear some say in defence. Well, if that’s the case, surely then there should be nothing wrong with the reverse occurring and European countries banning the hijab because it goes against their customs? Personally, I believe in freedom of conscience and freedom of faith, so I don’t think that any government has the right to tell people how they can or cannot worship.

Egyptians rightly criticise the Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslims in Europe. But this criticism overlooks two pertinent facts: that Muslims often have more freedom of conscience in Europe than they do in Egypt, and that non-Muslims can also be the victims of enormous prejudice in Egypt.

Copts have to deal with a lot of unofficial prejudice and even some institutionalised discrimination in Egypt, while converts to Christianity are ostracised and sometimes even persecuted, as the current case of Maher el-Gohary illustrates. This does not mean that all Egyptian Muslims are anti-Christian – in fact, most are pretty tolerant. The same can be said of European attitudes towards Muslims.

I’m as outraged as any Egyptian by the ugly murder of Marwa el-Sherbini. But if Egyptians want better justice for Muslims in Europe, then they should start at home and demand more justice for non-Muslims in Egypt.

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Tainted honour

Rana Husseini's book about honour killings

By Khaled Diab

The taboo surrounding the cruel murder of family members in the name of honour is slowly being broken.

May 2009

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