For Dutch Moroccans, a campaign of fear

AMSTERDAM — Beyond the ring road that circles central Amsterdam, tall terraced houses give way to boxy gray housing estates. Here, the definition of what it means to be Dutch is challenged. The residents of the Nieuw-West district are multicultural. Waiting for the rumble of the next tram, blond hair stands next to pink hijab.

In the Netherlands — a country that once had a reputation for tolerance — racism is on the rise.

“The situation has changed, it’s very bad,” says Abdou Menebhi, his hands clasped on the table in his Amsterdam office. Menebhi, the head of a Moroccan interest group known as Emcemo, has lived in the Netherlands for 40 years. Watching this election campaign has made him worry about the future, he says. “We’ve always faced racism but never to the level we are facing today.”

Ahead of elections scheduled for March 15, Geert Wilders and his anti-Islam, anti-EU Party for Freedom (PVV) have shaped the campaign’s tough rhetoric on religion and migration and precipitated a sharp turn to the right. Unlike other European far-right parties — such as in France or Germany — which have broader agendas, Wilders has funneled political discontent toward very specific targets: Islam and people of Moroccan descent.

‘Unsafe streets’

Wilders’ campaign promise to limit the number of Moroccans in the Netherlands landed him on trial for inciting hatred. Despite being found guilty last December, he has continued to hone in on the country’s Moroccan minority. Last month in Rotterdam, he claimed “Moroccan scum” were making “the streets unsafe.”

Demonstrators protest against Geert Wilders PVV Party | Robin Utrecht/EPA

There are more than 380,000 people of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands, representing 2 percent of the population, according to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics.

In a 2010 report, researchers at Groningen University found that 54 percent of Moroccan youth had been charged by the police with one or more criminal offenses by the time they were 23 — a statistic that still ricochets around the internet, reinforcing a reputation for crime, gang violence and antisocial behavior among the Moroccan-Dutch population. The root causes are heavily debated; reasons range from deprivation and police profiling to a culture of resistance toward central government.

“I referred specifically to the Moroccans not because I have anything against them generally but because they are one of the largest immigrant groups here and are overrepresented in our crime and welfare statistics,” Wilders told The Wall Street Journal in 2014, defending his position on the so-called Moroccan issue.

The bleached-blond 53-year-old is careful to say “not all [Moroccans] are scum,” but his policies run contrary to the Muslim minority’s interests. He has proposed ending immigration from Muslim countries, encouraging “voluntary repatriation of non-western migrants” and closing all mosques in the Netherlands.

The PVV did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

“It’s not that crime is exclusive to Moroccans,” says Ineke van der Valk, the author of “Half a Century in the Netherlands: the Moroccan Labor Migration in 50 Stories of Moroccan and Dutch People.” Other groups might commit white-collar crime, but “Moroccans’ crimes might be more visible, such as mugging.”

‘We were received warmly’

Wilders is currently polling second, behind liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte, on the strength of his anti-immigrant platform. On his Facebook page, supporters vent their frustrations. One supporter complains that Moroccans harass their daughter on her way to school; another, that they take advantage of state support. But the relationship between the Dutch and their Moroccan neighbors has not always been so strained.

Large-scale migration of Moroccan guest workers to the Netherlands started in the 1960s in response to a labor shortage, and they were largely expected to return home at some point.

Omar El-Miloudi was 21 when he arrived in the Netherlands from northern Morocco in the mid-1960s. It was different then, he says. “We were received warmly and openly. The Dutch wanted to help us.”

Large-scale migration of Moroccan guest workers to the Netherlands started in the 1960s in response to a labor shortage, and they were largely expected to return home at some point. But as soon as he arrived in Amsterdam, El-Miloudi, sporting slightly tinted glasses and a salt-and-pepper mustache, says he realized his future was here. “I wanted to stay. We had economic and political freedom,” he says. “We would have missed that if we went back.”

He was not the only person to feel that way. When the Netherlands granted workers the right to family reunification in 1974, the community settled and grew.

He feels a sense of duty toward his adopted home for the opportunities it gave him, El-Miloudi says, but admits the current climate is discouraging. “What Wilders says is hurtful. It’s deceitful. In fact, he’s for ethnic cleansing. Not just of Moroccans but of all people who are not ethnic Dutch,” he says.

El-Miloudi met van der Valk, the academic, 40 years ago. Both were social justice activists at the time. Sitting side by side at the café in central Amsterdam El-Miloudi now owns, they laugh at the picture of a young, suave El-Miloudi lying in the grass. Van der Valk agrees that the country has drastically changed. “At that time, they were not defined as Muslims,” she says.

Something shifted in the early years of this century. “In the space of several years, a lot of things happened, among them 9/11,” she says. Two high-profile politically motivated murders also sparked intense debate about Islam in the Netherlands.

In 2002, Pim Fortuyn, a member of parliament, was assassinated by an environmental activist who claimed to want to stop the exploitation of Muslims as “scapegoats.” In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a dual Dutch-Moroccan citizen after he released a film criticizing Islam’s treatment of women. Fifteen months later Wilders founded his Freedom Party.

New normal

Van der Valk believes the internet also played a role in Wilders’ surge in popularity. “In the ’80s and ’90s, there were forms of racism but they were much less dominant; the extreme right was always on the fringe,” she says. “But with the internet, it became possible for these messages to spread like we’d never seen before.”

Language that once would have shocked the Dutch has become mainstream. And the shift in the political atmosphere has affected more than words. There were 54 attacks against mosques in the Netherlands in 2016, a rise of 26 more than the previous year, van der Valk’s research found.

Even if Wilders wins the election, he is unlikely to be able to form a government. Dutch governments are formed by coalitions, and the major parties have said they will not collaborate with the PVV.

But Wilders has already had a profound impact on this country of more than 16 million: He has edited Dutch attitudes, altered their reputation.

Floris Vermeulen, associate professor of political science at Amsterdam University, says: “To me, the anti-immigrant sentiments are quite surprising considering the history of the Netherlands. We consider ourselves to be very tolerant and progressive. That has completely disappeared.”

“Every day in the media you read, Muslims are bad, Moroccans are bad. You start to believe it. It poisons your mind” — Dutch policewoman Souad Boumedien

Souad Boumedien, a policewoman whose father left Morocco in the 1970s, was born and raised in a small village in eastern Holland. She understands that people are worried about jobs, education and health care, she says.

“Our social infrastructure is under a lot of pressure. People are scared, and I understand that, but foreigners aren’t the problem.”

Drinking tea in her partner’s Nieuw-West house, she stares out of the giant glass windows, toward the houses across the road.

“Every day in the media you read, Muslims are bad, Moroccans are bad. You start to believe it. It poisons your mind,” she says.

As much as she loves her country, she says, she feels the strain of the 2015 terror attacks in France, which worsened people’s attitudes in the Netherlands. “Already I was an immigrant, never an expat,” she says. “But after those attacks, I was not a Moroccan, I was a Muslim.”

Her world — next to her police work, she is also an advocate for LGBT and Muslim minority rights — is not immune from Wilders’ impact. The election has emboldened colleagues to speak out on their political beliefs and their more extreme views, she says.

“I do so much to make this spot — the Netherlands — better but still, I have to apologize [for extremism],” she says. “Sometimes I wish I could give my skin to someone else.”

Morgan Meaker is a freelance human-rights journalist covering minorities in Europe and the Middle East.