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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A week in the world
The Moor that meets the eye
By Peter Snowdon
Last week saw yet more evidence of Europe's ambivalent, not to say contradictory attitude towards the non-European world. The entry of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party (FP) into the government of Austria continues to provide the EU with an opportunity to validate its liberal credentials. At a meeting of employment and social affairs ministers in Lisbon on Friday, France's Martine Aubry and Belgium's Laurette Onkelinx pointedly left the room before the FP's Elisabeth Sickl stood up to speak, in protest at the intrusion of "racism and xenophobia" into such an august assembly. Aubry opened the meeting by reading a passage from the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, in which the Austrian writer described how in the 1930s national socialism has contaminated the continent "by progressive doses, one pill at a time, until finally Europe died of it". While not yet terminally ill, the united front in the face of Haider's coup has certainly caught a bad cold. German Minister Walter Reister described Aubry and Onkelinx's gesture as "unconstructive", while his Dutch colleague Klaas de Vries judged it "completely ridiculous". Sickl, for her part, delivered a speech of such overwhelming and unexceptional blandness, that the European Parliament's Michel Rocard could describe it -- albeit with some irony -- as "a hymn to democracy".
Also in good voice this week were the plain people of Britain. No sooner had the hijack of the Ariana Airlines jet stranded at London's Stansted airport come to an end without bloodshed, the hijackers having decided to give themselves up to the police, than radio phone-in programmes up and down the land were flooded with calls from members of the public, insisting that the passengers should under no circumstances be permitted to remain in the United Kingdom. Eyes were rolled at the £200-a-night hotel rooms to which they had been temporarily moved, instant experts pronounced the gunmen and the passengers to have been in cahoots with one another, if not actually all members of the same family, and voices were to be heard insisting that if any of them were allowed to stay, then they should instantly be sterilised, to prevent any further undesirable proliferation of relatives.
This casual white hysteria would be laughable, if it were not both vicious and increasingly insistent. The government's recent policy of splitting up refugee applicant groups and bussing them around the country, so as to relieve the disproportionate burden that had hitherto fallen on the port county of Kent, seems to have been hasty and ill-prepared, and has clearly stirred up a hornet's nest of ill-thought out resentment. The fact that the Afghan hijack victims were not desperate boat people fleeing oppression or economic hardship, but middle class businessman trying to get from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in time for lunch, was apparently not an extenuating circumstance. Nor was the quality of mercy much in evidence in the small town of El Ejido in southern Spain, when violent rioting broke out this week following the murder of a 26-year-old local woman by a young Moroccan man. The motives for the murder are unclear, though it appears that the assailant was receiving psychiatric treatment. The particularity of the case, however, was soon obliterated by the blunt weapons of generalised racism and long-smouldering hatred. By Saturday, 84 people had suffered significant injuries, 42 had been arrested, and 18 were already in prison, as local people decided to take, if not the law, then at least the mechanics of punishment, into their own hands.
El Ejido lies at the centre of the Almeira region, whose greenhouses produce over $1.5 billion-worth of tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines a year. This highly profitable business relies upon the labour of around 10,000 North African workers, most of whom have no work permits and no rights. They earn around $300 a month for their pains, living in hovels with neither running water nor electric lights. The Moroccans of Almeira, moreover, are merely the tip of Spain's immigrant iceberg: the country as a whole is home to around 150,000 of their compatriots, not to mention countless other migrants, the majority of them "irregulars". Popular feeling was well-displayed in the cries of "Fuera moros!" (Moors Out!) that rang through the streets of El Ejido last week, as local people ran rampage through immigrant neighbourhoods, setting homes on fire, looting shops, wrecking the offices of organisations known to be sympathetic to the workers, and generally just tearing the place up, without any particular regard for whose property or health might suffer. Meanwhile, the centre-right mayor, Juan Enciso, bemoaned the fact that "it is impossible to control all these people" -- meaning the Moroccans, not the rioting Spaniards. As the police were slow to arrive, and even slower to act, armed farmers patrolled the streets, while many workers sought refuge in the town's Catholic church. An official representative of the Madrid government who had come to mediate was attacked in the street by a group of local men, and kicked repeatedly in the head. Without the Moroccan workers, of course, there would be precious little business for the local men who patronise El Ejido's 49 banks to transact. Migrant labourers make up some 20 per cent of the town's population of 50,000. And without many more like them, the future of southern Spain as the Mexico of the European Union would surely be in doubt: the country has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and few native-born Spanish citizens would be prepared to work for such a pittance. Yet doubtless many of the locals who threw themselves into last week's attacks with so much venom were themselves victims of another kind. The economic "opportunity" which has drawn the Moroccans to this arid land is just one expression of the catastrophic, generational dislocation of the European peoples' relationship to their own land. Even the lushest countryside has been turned to desert, as agriculture has been transformed from a way of life into a multi-billion dollar industry. Policy bias towards factory-scale farmers who can generate the greatest amount of activity for their friends in the road haulage and supermarket industries, along with worldwide imbalances of "supply" and "demand" which have brought ruin to many smaller growers, cheap food to the global middle classes and famine to many parts of the South, have all contributed to the implosion of rural life, from Stavanger to Seville. Farming boasts the highest suicide rate of any European profession. Meanwhile, monetary union seems destined simply to reinforce the economic dominance of the centre over the periphery, even though doubtless some tax money will return in the form of soft loans to places such as Almeira. Still, even when they get their spaghetti western theme park, the local war lords will still need their 17,000 acres of greenhouses -- and the thousands of "foreigners" who make them work.
