Germany’s Turks lose their sense of belonging
By Bertrand Benoit

FT
June 25 2005 03:00

It is boiling hot in the Anadolu kebab shop on Wiener Strasse, but the
sweat lining Muzaffer Topal’s brow is not only induced by the grill
glowing behind his back.

“When the going got tough in the cold war, there was never any
question about what side Turkey was on,” he says, wiping his face with
a towel. “Some people seem to have a hard time remembering.”

As Germany prepares for a general election scheduled for September, a
mix of anxiety and resignation is spreading through Berlin’s
120,000-strong Turkish community.

While the campaign has yet to get going in earnest, immigration,
Turkey’s plan to join the European Union and the mass murder of
Armenians by Turks 90 years ago have been high on the political agenda
lately.

Politicians, social workers and analysts say the debates, coming amid
rising doubt about Germany’s ability to integrate its large foreign
population, could push the country’s otherwise placid and apolitical
1.9m Turks towards the edge of the political mainstream.

Chiefly responsible is the opposition Christian Democratic Union,
frontrunner to win the poll. Under Angela Merkel, its leader, it has
made opposition to Turkey’s EU membership a central plank of its
campaign.

In the Kreuzberg borough, which is 30 per cent Turkish, the position
is seen as a betrayal, especially among the few Turks who, like Mr
Topal, are members of the CDU, a party that once embraced Turkey as a
Nato ally. “If Turkey does not belong in Europe,” he says, “what do
you think it means for the Turks who live here? It means they do not
belong here.”

Partly because of its Christian label, the CDU has not traditionally
been a political home for Germany’s 600,000 voters of Turkish origin,
who have historically favoured the Social Democrats.

The CDU toned down the Turkish issue at an election last month in the
state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which boasts some of the largest
Turkish communities in the country. Yet it has no such qualms ahead of
the general election. This week, Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy
parliamentary leader, said immigration should become a focus of the
electoral campaign.

Turkish resentment, meanwhile, is also beginning to turn against the
SPD because of its insistence that Turkey should atone for the 1915
massacres of its Armenian citizens.

“Unemployment is driving the younger ones into the mosques,” says
Johannes Neuwirth, a teacher at Kreuzberg’s Eberhard-Klein high
school, where 80 percent of the 350 pupils are of Turkish origin – the
remaining 20 per cent have Arab backgrounds, mainly
Palestinian. “There is a risk that they will seek political haven in
Turkish nationalism or religious fundamentalism.”

While the foreign pop-ulation, after rising three-fold between 1970
and 1995, has since been falling, politicians have expressed alarm at
the development of “parallel societies” – self-made ghettos
linguistically, economically and culturally insulated from their
German environment.

As one CDU insider confides: “We have made huge mistakes in terms of
integration. We did not put enough pressure on immigrants to speak the
language and abide by the rules, and we failed to open education and
the labour market to them. Now we have a powder keg.”

While economic integration matters, it is not sufficient, says Bülent
Arslan, head of the DTF, a German-Turkish group within the CDU:
“Political participation is hugely important. Right now there are too
many Turks who do not feel attracted to any political party.”

As Mr Topal warns, while Germany has yet to experience any racial
unrest, it is in a fragile state of equilibrium. “We Turks have
adopted western values. But we can do without them if we have to.”