22
February 2020
INVESTIGATION
Denmark’s Integration Experiment Reflects European U-turn In the last decade of the 20th century, Western Europe threw open its doors to those fleeing the collapse of Yugoslavia. Today, Denmark says integration has failed and is pursuing a worrying experiment in dismantling immigrant ‘ghettos’. DIMITAR GANEV | BIRN | COPENHAGEN
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vni still remembers the crisp white bed linen the night he arrived in Denmark from his native Kosovo, via a squalid refugee camp in the foothills of northern Macedonia. It was 1999, and Europe had thrown open its doors to Kosovo Albanians fleeing the last act in the disintegration of federal Yugoslavia. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Western Europe in the 1990s as Yugoslavia’s bloody demise triggered the largest displacement of people on the European continent since World War Two. Housed in a former military barracks in the town of Randers, close to the centre and most amenities, Avni, then 10 years old, recalled organised bus trips to the best swimming pools, schooling nearby in English, Danish and his native Albanian, trauma counselling and football in the park with Danish children. Many refugees from the 1992-95 war in former Yugoslav Bosnia had already settled in the neighbourhood, he said. “I remember those white sheets, so clean and nice, coming from a refugee camp with dust and everything,” said Avni, now 30, who spoke on condition his real name not be disclosed. “It was basically a country where you could heal from the war and feel welcome.” Not anymore. In the 20 years since Avni’s stay, this prosperous, socially progressive Nordic country has actively made itself a far less appealing destination for refugees and immigrants, and instituted a package of laws designed to forcibly integrate those who are already settled. By linking benefit payments to kindergarten and school attendance, doubling punishments for certain crimes
committed in heavily immigrant neighbourhoods and selling off or demolishing social housing, Denmark has vowed to break up so-called ‘ghettos’ where residents are accused of shunning Danish language and values while reaping the benefits of the country’s generous welfare state. Though more radical than others, Denmark’s hard line on immigration reflects a shift to the right across the continent. “It has been going on for like 20 years,” said Anders Asbjorn Host of Action Aid Denmark, which aids refugees. “But it was never as bad as it is now.”
Illustration: Joan Wong for Foreign Policy/Photo by Stephane Cardinale/Corbis/getty images
Many collective center residents have given up hope of being re-housed. Photo: Milena Mitrović
‘It was shocking for me’ Avni’s family spent a little over a year in Denmark, turning down the opportunity to stay permanently in favour of returning in mid-2000 to Kosovo, by then a United Nations protectorate setting out on the bumpy road to independence from Serbia. Many from ex-Yugoslavia, however, opted to settle, benefitting from Denmark’s generous social housing system and setting down roots in areas such as Taastrupgaard, a suburb of the capital, Copenhagen. “Back in the nineties, people came from Bosnia as war refugees and they were put directly into neighbourhoods like these. They got a flat and they stayed there,” Claus Bjorton of the KAB Housing Association, which manages some 70,000 social housing apartments in Copenhagen, said of Taastrupgaard. Now, however, Taastrupgaard is one of dozens of neighbourhoods in Denmark declared ‘ghettos’ under new laws to address what authorities say is the failure of efforts to integrate immigrants. Immigrants and their descendants account for around 8.5 per cent of Denmark’s 5.8 million people, a
Claus Bjorton, KAB Housing Association. Photo: Dimitar Ganev
proportion that is forecast to rise further. Hostility towards them has grown particularly since a wave of refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – many of them Syrians fleeing war – began reaching Europe’s shores in 2015. Whereas the likes of Avni were immediately immersed in Danish society, Syrian refugees arriving in Denmark today can expect to be housed in isolated camps, “not in regular societies,” said Bjorton. “After a period of four to five years they get a flat.” Though not familiar with conditions in Denmark today, Avni said his work had taken him to neighbouring Sweden in 2016, where he visited a refugee camp. “It felt very different,” he said. “They were really monitored… They were in the suburbs of the city, kept isolated, but we were not,” he said. “It was shocking for me, 16 years
later, to find out the differences in the way refugees were being treated.” During his stay in Denmark, he said, “you were not told, ‘you are a refugee, you cannot do this…’” ‘Set aside your liberal values’ And while it rolled up the welcome mat for new arrivals, Denmark in 2018 introduced a package of laws that the then government said would tackle the rise of immigrant ‘ghettos’, targeting 28 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves where families would be compelled to integrate with Danish society. Among the new measures is a requirement for all children in such enclaves over one year of age to spend 25 hours per week in kindergarten, where they will be taught Danish language and traditions. Parents who fail to comply risk losing their child support benefit. Another measure gives courts the right to double the punishment for
