[Commpsych] Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage (NYT, October 8, 2007)

[Dawn Darlaston-Jones]

Sorry for cross postings but I thought this was worthy of dissemination

 

 

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Dawn Darlaston-Jones, PhD

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Behavioural Science

College of Arts & Sciences

University of Notre Dame

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From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List
[mailto:COMMUNITYPSYCHUK at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Serdar M.
Degirmencioglu
Sent: 08 October 2007 18:42
To: COMMUNITYPSYCHUK at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Fwd: Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage
(NYT, October 8, 2007)

 

The New York Times, October 8, 2007


Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage 


By ELAINE SCIOLINO
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/elaine_sciolin
o/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

 

SCHWERZENBACH, Switzerland
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sw
itzerland/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , Oct. 4 — The posters taped on the
walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s
national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as
one of them kicks a single black sheep away. 

 

“To Create Security,” the poster reads. 

 

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most
powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the
coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s
Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss
households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge
billboards across the country. 

 

As voters prepare to go to the polls in a general election on Oct. 21, the
poster — and the party’s underlying message — have polarized a country that
prides itself on peaceful consensus in politics, neutrality in foreign
policy and tolerance in human relations. 

 

Suddenly the campaign has turned into a nationwide debate over the place of
immigrants in one of the world’s oldest democracies, and over what it means
to be Swiss.

 

“The poster is disgusting, unacceptable,” Micheline Calmy-Rey, the current
president of Switzerland under a one-year rotation system, said in an
interview. “It stigmatizes others and plays on the fear factor, and in that
sense it’s dangerous. The campaign does not correspond to Switzerland’s
multicultural openness to the world. And I am asking all Swiss who do not
agree with its message to have the courage to speak out.” 

 

Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin, of the Liberal Democratic Party, has
even suggested that the SVP’s worship of Christoph Blocher, the billionaire
who is the party’s driving force and the current justice minister, is
reminiscent of that of Italian fascists for Mussolini. 

 

[On Saturday, a march of several thousand SVP supporters in Bern ended in
clashes between hundreds of rock-throwing counterdemonstrators and riot
police officers, who used tear gas to disperse them. The opponents of the
rally, organized by a new group called the Black Sheep Committee, had tried
to prevent the demonstrators from marching to Parliament.]

 

The message of the party resonates loudly among voters who have seen this
country of 7.5 million become a haven for foreigners, including political
refugees from places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Polls indicate that the
right-wing party is poised to win more seats than any other party in
Parliament in the election, as it did in national elections in 2003, when
its populist language gave it nearly 27 percent of the vote. 

 

“Our political enemies think the poster is racist, but it just gives a
simple message,” Bruno Walliser, a local chimney sweep running for
Parliament on the party ticket, said at the rally, held on a Schwerzenbach
farm outside Zurich. “The black sheep is not any black sheep that doesn’t
fit into the family. It’s the foreign criminal who doesn’t belong here, the
one that doesn’t obey Swiss law. We don’t want him.” 

 

More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP
argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are
foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison
population is non-Swiss. 

 

As part of its platform, the SVP party has begun a campaign seeking the
100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to let judges deport
foreigners after they serve prison sentences for serious crimes. The measure
also calls for the deportation of the entire family if the convicted
criminal is a minor. 

 

Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi
practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals
were held responsible and punished for their crimes. 

 

The party’s political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply
fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has
somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and
threatening the very identity of the country.

 

Unlike the situation in France, where the far-right National Front leader
Jean-Marie Le Pen
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jeanmarie_le_p
en/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  campaigned for president in the spring
alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP has taken a much cruder
us-against-them approach. 

 

In a short three-part campaign film, “Heaven or Hell,” the party’s message
is clear. In the first segment, young men inject heroin, steal handbags from
women, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives and carry off a young
woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland — women in
head scarves; men sitting, not working. 

 

The third segment shows “heavenly” Switzerland: men in suits rushing to
work, logos of Switzerland’s multinational corporations, harvesting on
farms, experiments in laboratories, scenes of lakes, mountains, churches and
goats. “The choice is clear: my home, our security,” the film states.

 

The film was withdrawn from the party’s Web site after the men who acted in
it sued, arguing they were unaware of its purpose. But over beer and
bratwurst at the Schwerzenbach political rally, Mr. Walliser screened it for
the audience, saying, “I’m taking the liberty to show it anyway.” 

 

For Nelly Schneider, a 49-year-old secretary, the party’s approach is “a
little bit crass,” but appealing nevertheless. “These foreigners abuse the
system,” she said after Mr. Walliser’s presentation. “They don’t speak any
German. They go to prostitution and do drugs and drive fancy cars and work
on the black market. They don’t want to work.”

 

As most of the rest of Europe has moved toward unity, Switzerland has
fiercely guarded its independence, staying out of the 27-country European
Union
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/europea
n_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  and maintaining its status as a tax
haven for the wealthy. It has perhaps the longest and most arduous process
to become a citizen in all of Europe: candidates typically must wait 12
years before being considered. 

 

Three years ago the SVP blocked a move to liberalize the citizenship
process, using the image of dark-skinned hands snatching at Swiss passports.
And though the specter of terrorism has not been a driving issue, some
posters in southern Switzerland at the time showed a mock Swiss passport
held by Osama bin Laden
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_lade
n/index.html?inline=nyt-per> . 

 

Foreigners, who make up a quarter of the Swiss work force, complain that it
is harder to get a job or rent an apartment without a Swiss passport and
that they endure everyday harassment that Swiss citizens do not.

 

James Philippe, a 28-year-old Haitian who has lived in Switzerland for 14
years and works for Streetchurch, a Protestant storefront community
organization, and as a hip-hop dance instructor, said he is regularly
stopped by the police and required to show his papers and submit to body
searches. He speaks German, French, Creole and English, but has yet to
receive a Swiss passport. 

 

“The police treat me like I’m somehow not human,” he said at the
Streetchurch headquarters in a working-class neighborhood of Zurich. “Then I
open my mouth and speak good Swiss German, and they’re always shocked. 

 

“We come here. We want to learn. We clean their streets and do all the work
they don’t want to do. If they kick us out, are they going to do all that
work themselves? We need them, but they need us too.” 

 

SVP officials insist that their campaign is not racist, just anticrime.
“Every statistic shows that the participation of foreigners in crime is
quite high,” said Ulrich Schlüer, an SVP Parliament deputy who has also led
an initiative to ban minarets in Switzerland. “We cannot accept this. We are
the only party that addresses this problem.” 

 

But the SVP campaign has begun to have a ripple effect, shaking the image of
Switzerland as a place of prosperity, tranquillity and stability —
particularly for doing business. On Thursday, a coalition of business, union
and church leaders in Basel criticized the SVP for what they called its
extremism, saying, “Those who discriminate against foreigners hurt the
economy and threaten jobs in Switzerland.” 

 

“In the past,” said Daniele Jenni, a lawyer and the founder of the Black
Sheep Committee who is running for Parliament, “people were reluctant to
attack the party out of fear that it might only strengthen it. Now people
are beginning to feel liberated. They no longer automatically accept the
role of the rabbit doing nothing, just waiting for the snake to bite.” 

 

  _____  

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