Rotterdam mayor: Muslim migrants must respect EU law

Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Moroccan mayor of Rotterdam, has a simple message for migrants in the wake of the Cologne sex attacks and the Paris murders: respect the law in your host state, or go home.

Speaking to press in the Dutch port city last Friday (8 January), he said: “If you want to pick up a Dutch passport just to travel without a visa then give it up. I’m not giving you a passport. I’m giving you an identity.”

He drew a distinction between personal values, based, for instance, on Islam, his own religion, and between respect for the Dutch codex.

Values are a “complex” issue, he noted.

“If we meet in the street and I refuse to shake your hand, according to my religion, is it because I think you are worth less than me, or is it, in fact, a gesture of respect?” he said.

“To what extent I’m a Muslim in my private space - that’s personal. I’m also a human being and I have right to have my own truth.”

But respect for the law is simple, he added: “People think they might have the truth in the teaching of their religion. But outside, in a public space, in my city, I’m the boss. I represent the law and in this space there’s only one truth and that’s the law."

He said people can’t cherry-pick articles from the Dutch charter - claiming equality on the one hand, while not respecting other people’s rights to free speech.

“The law and the constitution are non-negotiable. You can only change the constitution within the democratic system, and in The Netherlands that’s not easy, the bar has been set rather high,” Aboutaleb noted.

Born in the Rif region of Morocco - an area associated with drug smuggling and radical Islam - in 1961, the 54-year old has the highest personal approval rating of any Dutch politician, prompting talk he might, one day, run for national office.

But Europe’s refugee crisis has polarised Dutch voters, with the anti-immigrant PVV party of Geert Wilders, who leads chants at rallies for “fewer!” Moroccans, coming top in recent polls.

Referring directly to the Cologne New Year’s Eve sex assaults, Aboutaleb criticised the “shouting in the media” prior to hard evidence the attacks were carried out by Muslim migrants.

He also warned against “mixing up” refugees and terrorists in the popular imagination.

But he said that it’s unhealthy for the European debate to skirt around taboos. “What makes a city more resilient, what makes you become stronger, is if you dare to open a debate about really sensitive issues,” he said.

Last year, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, he was even more outspoken.

“If you don’t like it here because humourists you don’t like make a newspaper, may I then say you can bugger off,” he told press.

The mayor jokes that he’s a “mini Ban Ki Moon,” referring to the UN chief, because Rotterdam, a city of some 620,000, contains 174 nationalities, including some 100,000 Moroccan and Turkish Muslims.

Foreign fighters

It’s doing better than Brussels in terms of integration.

Rif-region Moroccans in the EU capital are the principle group among the hundreds of young Belgians who went to join Islamic State, giving parts of Brussels the highest number of “foreign fighters” per capita in the world.

But foreign fighters from Rotterdam can be counted “on the fingers of one hand,” according to Aboutaleb’s office.

The Netherlands is to take in 9,261 people under the EU relocation scheme, with an initial 600 due in Rotterdam as the initiative gets slowly off the ground.

According to the SER, a Dutch consultative body, made up of employers, trade unions, and academics, the situation is far from ideal.

Bart van Riel, an SER economist, told press in The Hague last week that, 10 years after coming to The Netherlands as refugees, the majority of Iraqi and Sudanese immigrants are still on welfare.

He cited language barriers and delays with asylum paperwork as issues, noting “the problem, in the past, wasn’t pressing enough” for Dutch authorities to act.

For Aboutaleb the “basic condition of integration is participation” - in schools and in the workplace.

History and memory

The SER’s studies, as many others around Europe, say migrant workers are good for the Dutch economy. But for the mayor of Rotterdam, history, culture, and morality are the more important part of the story.

He said the people of Rotterdam are welcoming because they remember what happened in World War II and because they live six metres below sea level.

“Poles, Russians, Canadians came to liberate this city. Thousands of Canadians died to liberate this country. This city knows how it is to be at war, to get the support of other people, who don’t have a Dutch identity,” he said.

“People are fleeing because they’re insecure, in the same way that we’ll have to flee if one of the dykes breaks.”

“This city, from its own history, knows its obligations,” Aboutaleb added.

“So how complicated is it to find 600 beds? That’s what we promised and that’s what’s being created.”