Racisme

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Black-clad German skinheads from both parts of the newly united country parade through the streets of Dresden to mourn their hero Rainer Sonntag, killed by a gang of pimps in a dispute over turf. Silent onlookers and 1,500 police watch as the 2,000 neo-Nazis raise their arms and shout, "Sieg heil!" and "Foreigners out!"

-- Bands of young Arab men attack the highways of southern France, setting up barricades, occupying tollbooths, fire-bombing buses. They are the sons of Algerians called Harkis, who served the French colonial government during the war in Algeria, and they are demanding jobs and better living conditions.

-- In a sterile, high-rise housing project in southeast London, Rolan Adams, a black teenager, steps out of one of the neighborhood's few youth clubs. A gang of whites jump him and stab him to death. Of the nine whites arrested, five are acquitted, and four still face trial. The Adams family is receiving phone calls from people who say they are glad Rolan is dead.

-- Mulie Jarju, 33, a migrant worker from Gambia, starred last year in a prizewinning film, Letters from Alou, about the plight of Africans employed illegally in Spain under conditions close to those of slave labor. Today Jarju cannot find work in Spain as either actor or laborer and faces deportation.

The collapse of the Soviet empire let the lid blow off Eastern Europe's ugly assortment of old ethnic hostilities. At the same time, for different reasons, countries in Western Europe are becoming increasingly aware of the pressures generated by their own changing racial mix. As their Muslim and African populations have increased, Europeans who for decades delighted in accusing the U.S. of bigotry and violence have discovered they are not nearly as tolerant as they thought they were.

Altogether, 8 million legal and an estimated 2 million illegal immigrants live in the 12 nations of the European Community.* These numbers are about the same as they were 10 years ago, but the proportion of dark-skinned, poor Africans and Arabs in Western Europe is significantly higher now. Even though the overall numbers are not increasing, E.C. governments have decided they have reached the saturation point -- what French President Francois Mitterrand calls "the threshold of tolerance."

Looking toward 1992, when the community's borders will become even more permeable, E.C. countries are working to tighten their immigration rules. The focus on immigration is a reaction to a popular belief, often fueled by incendiary press reports, that migrants from abroad are taking jobs and houses away from needy citizens or living handsomely on welfare payments. There is little or no evidence for such claims, but resentment is building in one country after another.

GERMANY

No sooner had the Berlin Wall fallen than it became obvious that there were other barriers for many former East Germans to overcome. Isolated from the world, trained to distrust everyone unlike themselves, alienated German youths lashed out in a fit of xenophobia. Often their targets were workers imported by the communist regime from other Marxist countries, like Angola and Vietnam, but sometimes they were simply anyone of another race.