After the latest attack of aggression, De Lijn bus drivers had decided not to protest. There is a suggestion, though, to bring in immigrant volunteers on the most dangerous lines.
Bus driver Hicham El Mzairh suggest that pensioned immigrants would be brought onto public transportation to keep some youth in check. "Many immigrant youth, for example Moroccan youth, don't accept any authority besides their 'own' elders. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam they brought in more than 800 pensioners, and this approach is successful. It's much calmer on public transportation. In Antwerp there are associations such as Samen Op Straat [on the street together], who could perfectly organize that."
According to newspaper De Standaard youth are the first victims of violence by youth gangs on the bus or metro. Public transport employees such as inspectors, drivers and adult passengers are in the second-circle of victims.
The incident in Antwerp where youth from former Yugoslavia attacked a police agent was not a one-time event. The Antwerp youth court has been confronted in recent years more and more with problems of youth from war zones.
Karen Dekoninck, head of the Antwerp youth court, says that in the past four years they've seen a new group of problem youth, particularly youth from former Yugoslavia or Roma youth, who they suspect had been in war zones. Often they have a completely different sense of values than the local youth, although there's no proof that there's a link with the war.
The youth court attributes the increase to the free traffic of people in Europe. Dekoninck says that it's become much easier to move from one country to another and there is less and less supervision.
She doesn't think it's strange that youth from conflict areas get in trouble with the court. The youth and their parents often wait for years for their papers, without means or on welfare. In many of those families going to school is not part of the culture of many of those families, and that will only cause the problem to increase in the coming years.
Sources: HLN 1, 2 (Dutch)
See also: Antwerp: Attack on bus, policeman injured, Let Immigrant Youth Guard the Fair (Allochtonen Weblog Roundup), Germany: Imams on patrol
2 comments:
Unbelievable.
It looks like a parallel government of foreign elders and the legitimate state each looking after different constituencies; that's not a modern nation state but a recipe for a civil war, the very thing that seems to be the life-long experience of the ones causing the problems in the first place.
For the legitimate state to give up its rightful authority to outsiders, regardless of the common decency of having a group of old folks taking care of the kids, is an outrage. They all, the kids, the elders, the state, have to learn, or relearn, that authority is legitimate in some cases regardless of who the face is who represents it, that face being the person uniformed, indistinct from others, a re-presenter of the state and culture.
In short, one needs uniformed, armed police, police being from the polis, the people of the city, or the gendarmes, the armed people. If the state refuses to exercise its authority, preferring instead to give it to "volunteers" from outside groups, then a separate people will not have respect for legitimate authority of the main mass.
It's simple state-craft. It's ordinary. How is it that I understand this and our leaders across the Modern West miss it altogether? How is it that most people get it and that they continue voting for the worst lot of leaders in (for many) living history?
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