AUSTRIA: Racism on a Sharp Rise

• by Pavol Stracansky (vienna)
• Wednesday, July 01, 2009
• Inter Press Service

While extremist political parties' popularity is 'surging' in the country on the back of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim campaigns, the ruling centrist People's Party (OVP) and Social Democrat (SPO) parties' approach to immigrants may be little better.

'There is a serious problem with political debate on immigration,' Sonya Ferker from the ZARA anti-racism organisation in Austria told IPS. 'It is entrenching polarisation and producing an 'us and them' view on immigration.

'Politicians across the board present it as a problem of 'they', the immigrants, having to do something in order for immigration to work. But it is not just a case of what 'they' need to do but what Austrians need to do as well. The political parties need to change their debate to include both sides - Austrians, and the immigrants.'

Official figures show a dramatic rise in racial, anti-immigrant and anti- Semitic crime, with reports of institutionalised racism in the police and judiciary. Recent polls show that large numbers of people believe immigration is linked to a perceived rise in crime.

Figures from the Austrian Interior Ministry show that between 2006 and 2008 reported racist and anti-Semitic crimes rose from 419 to 831 for the year.

The EU's Fundamental Rights Agency reported last week that there was a 79.5 percent rise in racist crimes from 2006 to 2007 - the latest year for which the agency has figures. It reported an 87 percent rise in anti-Semitic crimes over the same period, with a more than 100 percent rise between 2001 and 2007. The agency said the real picture could be worse because of poor collection of data.

Amnesty International issued a report in April saying that Austrian police and the judiciary had done nothing to address institutional racism which was rife within their organisations. It said authorities racially profiled people, and often assumed that ethnic minorities were perpetrators of crime rather than victims.

In a recent survey published in Austrian media, 77 percent of Austrians said they had noticed a rise in crime, and 63 percent of those said the rise was linked to growing immigration.

Far-right political parties have seen their popularity rise alongside waves of immigration in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s as a large Turkish immigrant community grew, mainly in Vienna, and people moved from war- torn former Yugoslavia.

Last year saw 110,000 foreign migrants arrive in Austria, according to the state statistics agency Statistik Austria. Austria has a population of a little over 8 million.

The far-right Freedom Party (FPO) and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO) are currently enjoying massive voter support. Together they won 30 percent of votes in national elections last year, and in last month's European Parliament elections took 17 percent. The FPO's election campaign was virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, with slogans such as 'The West in the Hands of Christianity' used to appeal to voters.

Both the FPO and BZO were led by the controversial right-wing icon Joerg Haider, who was killed in a car crash last October. There was an international outcry and condemnation of Austrian authorities by the rest of the EU when Haider's FPO was included in a coalition government following elections in 1999.

Political experts say the parties' new leaders are even more right-wing than Haider, and their policies more extremist. Apart from openly anti-immigrant policies including calls to expel hundreds of thousands of foreigners from the country, they also want to repeal legislation dating back to 1947 which bans the promotion of Nazi ideology.

Some of their politicians are members of 'Burschenschaften' - secretive nationalist fraternities widely thought to be linked to neo-Nazi groups. Nazi leaders Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler were members of Burschenschaften, and one of the fraternities has entertained known Holocaust-deniers.

With the rise of these far-right parties, debate on immigration has also become more public. But some analysts argue that while the FPO and BZO are fuelling anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, politicians with mainstream parties are doing little to encourage positive views on immigration.

'There is a growing anti-immigrant feeling among people,' Thomas Hofer, a Vienna-based political analyst with the European Association of Political Consultants told IPS. 'Social tensions are increasing, and political parties are stoking those tensions for their own gain. There has been a surge of support for populist parties.

'The whole political landscape in Austria, and obviously the population, as election results show, clearly has moved to the right. The way the centre parties view immigrants is also influenced by the successful campaigns from the far right. What the mainstream parties are trying to do...is to go in a more strict direction towards immigrants.'

Austria, which has seen either the SPO or OVP in some form in all post-war federal governments, has some of the most restrictive immigrant legislation in Europe.

There are quotas for immigrant workers from non-EU countries. When the EU was expanded in 2004 to admit ten new states - some of them Austria's neighbours - Austria kept its labour markets closed to new EU citizens. Many other EU states opened their labour markets fully. Austrian officials have said they will keep the labour market closed until 2011, the longest possible allowed under the terms of the expansion.

Immigrants in Austria cannot actively participate in local government politics, unlike in many western, and some new Eastern European member states. Qualification rules for Austrian citizenship are also very strict, and children born to foreigners are automatically classed as foreigners and not Austrians, even if they are born in Austria.

Tough new immigration legislation brought in by lawmakers in 2006 which tightened rules on residency sparked demonstrations. Critics said ministers were acting 'inhumanly' towards immigrants.

Ahead of parliamentary elections later that year, then chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel of the People's Party demanded immigrants learn German, and said foreigners wanting to settle in the country 'must be ready to accept our culture.'

Rights watchdogs say that inaction on racism by successive SPO and OVP governments is partly to blame for the rise in right-wing parties' popularity.

Heinz Patzelt, head of Amnesty International in Austria, told IPS: 'During the European Parliament elections the Freedom Party ran a clearly racist, anti- Semitic and Islamophobic campaign.

'But these kind of parties can only be of interest to voters if a government has failed to address problems with racism and integration. The better job a government does of protecting human rights, the fewer problems there are with them.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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