hermann bredehorst / polaris for time BERLIN Hussein, center, and his two friends work at the Naunyn Ritze youth center, where they help kids learn how to fit in and look for jobs

INTEGRATION     Outside Looking In
	It's not just France. All of Europe is struggling to integrate ethnic minorities into the mainstream
	By JOHANNA MCGEARY

Posted Sunday, November 13, 2005; 9.20GMT
Adnan, Reda and Iachim could be brothers: young, struggling, second-generation Europeans with a grievance. The wiry, kinetic Adnan, 22, owns his own mobile-phone shop, but he's still subjected to regular stop-and-search by the local cops, just like most young men in his neighborhood. When he takes his sharp Mini Cooper for a drive, he says, "The police stop me three times a month, asking, 'Where did you get the money to buy that car?'" Reda, a short, dark-haired 21-year-old, is about to finish vocational school and hopes to find a job in electronics, but says, "When I walk down the street, people say 'blackhead' just because I've got black hair. Whenever a job requires contact with the customer, the management never takes a blackhead." At 26, Iachim is articulate, intelligent and very frustrated. Despite a diploma in retail management, he's prepared to do any kind of work, "even if it's cleaning floors." But for six months, he's been rejected for every job he has applied for. "I never thought it would be this hard," he says, "and it makes me very angry. I feel the system is not giving me a break." Adnan is British, of Pakistani descent; Reda is a German of Palestinian origin; and Iachim is Dutch, with Moroccan parents. Like the angry young men who rampaged through France for over two weeks, they are part of Europe's embittered underclass.

France is not the only country where the ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité have failed whole generations. Nor is it the only nation struggling to come up with the right ways to blend people of different colors, creeds and cultures into once homogenous societies. Integration is still very much a work in progress. With debris from the riots still smoldering, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin acknowledged just that: "France is wounded. It cannot recognize itself in its streets. The effectiveness of our model of integration is in question." Across the rest of the Continent, Europeans are asking whether the pent-up frustration of ethnic minorities might erupt elsewhere. Here's a look at what's working — and what's not.

BRITANNIA'S RULES
Khaddam Hussain arrived in the northern English city of Bradford at the age of 8. His parents, like many Pakistanis in the early 1960s, had come to fill their former colonial rulers' demand for cheap labor. While his father kept his head down working at the woolen mill, Khaddam coped with racism. "I was the only Asian in the whole school," he says. "Day in and day out I got beaten up and some teachers just stood there." Soon, though, there were few white faces left in the Manningham district, where his family lived. Asians moved into the terraced houses and eventually, Pakistani supermarkets banned alcohol. Children learned little English and not much else at ill-funded schools that were almost 95% Asian. As they grew older, young men complained of police insensitivity and borderline brutality. Some, like Khaddam's son Adnan, had enough resourcefulness and family help to start their own businesses, but many can't find a way out of the ghetto.

Continued ...

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