Minorities still struggle for equal status

Date: 18/09/1997

By Simon Coss

DESPITE the fact that the European Union was set up as a direct result of a war which showed only too graphically the horrifying consequences of religious intolerence, the issue of integrating the continent's religious minorities remains a thorny one.

The Union's two largest and longest established non-Christian religions are Islam and Judaism.

The terrible images of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which have been shown around the world since the end of World War II, mean that no one can claim to be unaware of the atrocities committed by Hitler and his followers against the Jewish people.

Consequently, the sort of overt anti-semitism prevelant in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century is now comparitively rare, although the rantings of some extreme right-wing groups are still a cause for concern.

In addition to this general awareness among the population, members of the Jewish community have traditionally played a key role in Europe's political, business and cultural life.

But relationships with the continent's estimated 10 milllion Muslims are often much more strained. They are complicated, many argue, by the fact that the majority of Muslims within the Union have come from third countries, and religious intolerence is often linked with racial prejudice.

“By and large, the faith is seen as an immigrant issue. Hostility in France is mainly directed against Moroccans and Algerians, in Germany there is prejudice against the Turks, and in the UK we have our own problems,” explains an official at London's Islamic Culture Centre. The UK has a large Islamic community, with many of its members coming from Pakistan.

Muslims also argue that following the fall of Communism, their faith has been adopted by the West as the new 'great enemy'.

“We have noticed a rise in prejudice in the wake of the Gulf War, the current situation in Algeria and the Salman Rushdie affair,” says one expert.

For many people living within the EU, Islam is equated with the extreme fundamentalist regime in Iran which continues to call for the death of the British writer Rushdie because it regards his book The Satanic Verses as blasphemous.

Others point to the activites of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) - currently involved in a bloody terrorist campaign in Algeria - as evidence of the dangers of Muslim extremism. The GIA's militancy began in the early 1990s after the current administration in Algiers cancelled elections which the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win. GIA terrorists have also been linked to several fatal bomb attacks in France.

Yet some observers say the West's attitude towards Islamic culture is actually ambivalent.

They call attention to the essentially cordial relations between the Union and the oil-rich Gulf states, even though those countries are run by extremely conservative regimes. They also point out that the 'devil' of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, was - until shortly before that conflict - regarded as an ally because he was at war with Iran.