Intelligence

Inter-racial hatred pits local migrants against 'dirty' newcomers

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Burhan Wazir
Asylum-seekers arriving in Britain are being met by violence and hostility - but it comes from established ethnic minority communities, not far-right white groups
THE ghost of Christmas Past haunts Mahmoud Mustafa. An Iraqi Kurd asylum-seeker who has lived in Cambridgeshire for the past three years, he was with friends last Boxing Day when they were set upon by a gang of young racist thugs.

He and his friends were strolling through the city centre when a car carrying a group of youths sped up, forcing them off the pavement and into a pool of water.

“When my friend shouted at them, the boys got out and started beating us,” Mr Mustafa, 49, said. “They were punching and kicking. One friend was badly hurt (and) has since left Peterborough. Some locals here are very angry with us. They are not always friendly.”

Mr Mustafa’s bloody lesson in local community relations was an early indication of rising tensions and simmering racial feuds that climaxed with a series of pitched street battles during the summer.

Rival gangs fought with sticks and knives, windows were smashed and houses and cars set alight before police restored order. On one side were groups of young, male and predominantly Kurdish asylum-seekers. What made the wider world sit up and take notice was that their antagonists were not the stereotypical white yobs of the far-right fringes. They were young Asians.

The city’s May riots were initially dismissed as a localised problem, but Peterborough’s experience of a violent antagonism developing between rival ethnic minority communities is increasingly finding echoes in towns and cities across England.

The new racial tensions pit Pakistani against Kurd, or West Indian against African, while the white majority focuses on the cleaning of its own Augean stable. In Woolwich and Plumstead, southeast London, where young West Indians have been at war with their Somali neighbours, a black youth speaks of the African newcomers as being “a different kind of black, like dirt”, and a West Indian grandmother wishes the Somalis would “go back where they came from”.

In Harringay, North London, a man was killed during a street fight between Turkish and Kurdish groups. In the West Midlands, successful Asian businessmen casually dismiss local blacks as lazy and drug-ridden. And in Peterborough, designated as a cluster area for the dispersal of asylum-seekers, the greatest resentment of the newcomers — who include an estimated 3,000 Kurds — is to be found among the city’s 10,000-strong Kashmiri population.

Across England, ethnic minority communities formed at the tail-end of the British Empire — West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians and Sikhs — seem to have discarded the immigrant solidarity that once united them against white oppression. To some extent, the long-term victims of racism have become the new model racists.

The growth of inter-ethnic hostility has outraged veteran race campaigners, including the broadcaster and writer Darcus Howe. He argues that ethnic minority groups who arrived in Britain in the 1950s have forgotten the persecution that they initially suffered.

“They have become too middle-class,” he says. “Remember that West Indians and Asians were loathed when they first arrived here. How can they then dish out the same treatment to newcomers? There is a collective memory loss in some parts of elderly Asian populations in this country. They forget what it is like to arrive here with nothing. Integration has that effect on some people.”

Peterborough is a curious mix of old and new. An ancient city with a 12th-century cathedral, it was designated a new town in 1968 and saw its population double from 75,000 to 150,000 in 20 years. It has low unemployment and the region’s highest per-capita GDP, but also features pockets of severe deprivation. Drugs are a major problem and violent crime has doubled since 2000.

The first Asians, Kashmiris who came to the city in the 1960s, were hard working and put down roots to form a cohesive and settled community. In recent years they have found themselves living alongside fellow Muslims, asylum-seekers and migrant workers from Iraq and Afghanistan with whom they have little in common.

The new arrivals are viewed with suspicion and blamed for severe overcrowding problems, rising crime rates and the stretching of public services to breaking point. They seek the acceptance that the Kashmiri community earned over decades.

Instead, they feel rejected by the very people they believe should most appreciate their sense of isolation.

Humayun Ansari is the author of The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain 1800, a recently published analysis of Muslim immigration to Britain. He believes that intercommunal ethnic violence is far more widespread in Britain than was thought.

“There is a general trend towards older, more established Asian communities in Britain taking on the fears of the host nation,” he said, suggesting that newly arrived single men were particular targets for demonisation.

“Asian communities pride themselves on extended family traditions. To them, the solitary asylum-seeker or migrant worker, more often than not a young man in his late twenties, provides an example of predatory behaviour.”

The Kashmiri enclave around Gladstone Road, Peterborough, is a street of Victorian semis littered with the detritus of an impoverished underclass. Mohammed Choudhry, 45, director of the Gladstone Community Association, a local support group, delivers a withering denunciation of his Kurdish neighbours. “There are some serious cultural differences,” he says. “The newcomers have a lack of commitment. Asians who arrived here 50 years ago were very hard working. They assimilated into the community and have made some notable achievements.

“The Kurds, for the most part, are single young men. They are aggressive and at times arrogant. They refuse to move from street corners; they are disrespectful to our women. This has led to tensions. The newcomers should be restricted to certain areas.”

The disturbances in May and a further outbreak of hostilities in July, when a hundred youths fought in the streets, were sparked by claims that a group of Iraqis had been harassing local Pakistani women.

The anti-Kurd sentiments of Peterborough’s Pakistani population are partly fuelled by a perception that the newcomers are moving solely into areas of the city that were historically Kashmiri.

Imam Abdul Rashid Nomani, of the Islamic Centre on Gladstone Road, said initially that the summer’s problems had all been resolved and that many Kurds worshipped at his mosque. Later, however, he complained that some houses in “Kashmiri” streets were now being occupied by up to ten Kurds. “They want to be near us so that they can get access to the halal food stores — but that sometimes leads to differences. They hold more liberal values.”

Peterborough’s Kurds have the sympathy of Yassin Ismail, 38, director of the Somali Refugee Action Group in Woolwich, which is home to thousands of Somalis who have fled their homeland since the country’s civil war.

Some have found themselves in open confrontation with members of the established West Indian community who, like the Kashmiris of Peter- borough, have found it tempting to blame all their ills on “parasitic” refugees.

“The Somalis are the newcomers,” Mr Ismail said. “They tend to face persecution and alienation. Even now, there exists a number of stereotypes about us: that we are people without principles and live like warring tribes.”

Many outbreaks of violence are caused by fundamental misunderstandings, he said. “When people from other cultures see a group of Somali men walking down the street, they get scared. They never stop to think: why are the men walking in a big group? It is because they are scared. As a newcomer to this country, doesn’t it make sense that we would find comfort in numbers?”

November 28, 2004 at 12:40 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home