Immigrant mayor fights for racial peace in Dutch city riven by hatred
The mayor of Rotterdam was doing what mayors do. In wellingtons and hard hat last week, he was touring his city's main railway station, an icy, muddy work site, on a fact-finding tour.
But Ahmed Aboutaleb is no ordinary mayor. As the first immigrant mayor in the Netherlands, he is unique. He has taken charge of Rotterdam, Europe's biggest port and a multiracial melting pot. By 2020 more than half the 600,000 people of this city are predicted to be of immigrant origin. Rotterdam is also the place that gave Holland Pim Fortuyn, the maverick libertarian, poodle-loving populist politician accused of Islamophobia by critics and murdered by an animal rights activist seven years ago.
Fortuyn's legacy is a right-wing party with fierce rhetoric about immigrants that still wins a third of votes. No one doubts the high stakes Aboutaleb is playing for, or the high expectations that his unprecedented appointment has engendered: inevitably he has already been dubbed "Obama on the Maas [river]" by one columnist.
Born the son of a Moroccan prayer-leader, Aboutaleb arrived in Holland aged 15. Now 47, he told the Observer in his first interview as mayor that he hoped to be judged on results, not his "origins or colour".
He said: "My job is to build bridges and Rotterdam is a good place to do that. This is the city of big projects where the sky is the limit, but also a city with high levels of poverty. My job is to be mayor for everyone from the businessmen to the kid from Surinam just trying to earn a living."
He has few illusions: "There are many who expect me to fail." Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician with a history of provocation, has said he should be "mayor of Rabat", the capital of Morocco. "If I can succeed, I will be a key element in persuading immigrant communities that they can have access to power; if I fail, it will have huge consequences for those coming behind me afterwards," the mayor said.
Aboutaleb's emergence is a clear landmark in the recent improvement in community and race relations in Holland since the tense days after the murder of Fortuyn and the killing of controversial film-maker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim militant in 2004. But the new mayor is far from being a classic Dutch liberal. His message to immigrants is "stop seeing yourself as victims, and if you don't want to integrate, leave".
"This is not about ethnicity or religion," said Dominic Schrijer, councillor for social affairs and labour in the city, "it is about poverty and how to break out of poverty. For the good of everyone, immigrants need to know what is acceptable and what is not and we all need to make an effort. We are not going back to the 1950s, but in the 70s and 80s things went too far."
The recent political history of Rotterdam has been turbulent. In 2002, decades of unbroken rule by the Dutch Labour party were broken when the party of Fortuyn, who called Islam a "backward culture" and a "hostile" religion, won in a landslide at local elections campaigning on a strong law and order and anti-immigration platform. His subsequent murder - like that of van Gogh - provoked a spasm of angst-ridden self-questioning in Holland. Fortuyn's party, Leefbar (Livable) Rotterdam, lost power in 2006 but still has 14 of the 45 city council seats.
The current leader of Leefbar Rotterdam, Ronald Sorensen, said the party opposed Aboutaleb, who served his political apprenticeship in Amsterdam. "There are whole areas of this city that have been overrun by foreigners. All the Dutch people who live in this city who have seen the city changing in a bad way... having a Moroccan-born mayor makes them feel totally overrun," the former teacher said, stressing that the mayor held dual Moroccan-Dutch nationality and that raised issues, given his responsibility for security and policing. Sorensen admitted support for Aboutaleb's tough line on integration of immigrants. "If we said what he says, they'd call us racists," he said.
In fact, recent statistics are relatively positive. Professor Jan Latten at the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics said that, though they still lagged behind, second-generation immigrants in Holland are achieving better educational results and better jobs than before. Equally, more are speaking Dutch, watching Dutch television and "feeling an emotional attachment to Holland".
The process is long, however. According to Edwin Huizing, director of the Dutch Refugee Council, "it is only over generations that this will change".
Mohammed Bibi, director of the Rotterdam Immigrants' Association, hopes for "a beautiful multicultural society in Rotterdam where there is room for everyone regardless of colour, ethnicity and sexual orientation".
In the De Grootsle Slok bar by the docks of Rotterdam's Delfthaven area, Peta van de Burg serves foaming pints of beer to an eclectic clientele. "We have 60 nations drinking here from everywhere in the world, and we have two rules: no national songs and no discussion about politics or religion," she said. "After all, we have English, Scots, Irish and Welsh all coming here. You can imagine what it would be like if they didn't get on."
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