Cologne was not a good place to be on New Year’s Eve. In and around the main train station, groups of young men ran amok in a frenzy of violence, theft and sexual assault. Up to 100 women were molested, groped, and, in some cases, raped.
The Cologne chief of police, who has since been sacked, said that those responsible were “young men, 18 to 35 years old, originating from North Africa and the Arab world”. He also said it was a “completely new dimension of crime”.
Sadly, it wasn’t all that new to me. It reminded me of Mumbai and the millennium celebrations of December 31, 1999. That evening I decided to see in the new year at the Gateway of India, in the company of a group of (mostly European) friends. As expected, the place was crowded; in particular, there were hundreds of young men milling around.
Around midnight, things suddenly got ugly as groups of men took to attacking every woman they could lay their hands on, quite literally. I have a vivid memory of a Sikh giant fighting to pull his screaming wife away from a bunch of young men who were assaulting her.
At one point we had to form a kind of cordon around the four of five women in our group, just to prevent them from being raped right there on the street. It was awful, and very terrifying indeed. We somehow made our way to the club at the Taj hotel, where we spent the rest of a sobering night. It was the only safe place we could find in a city centre that had gone sex-crazed.
Now ‘Eve teasing’ (a dreadfully-inaccurate euphemism for sexual harassment, usually groping) is not uncommon in Mumbai, especially when foreign women are involved. This, however, was different. The scale and extent of the harassment were jaw-dropping.
As I write, the news is that Cologne was only the worst hit of the lot. Wholesale sexual molestation was experienced in Hamburg, too, and similar happenings in Helsinki led the chief of police in that city to describe things as a “completely new phenomenon”.
A different dimension, and a new phenomenon, on at least two counts. First, it was more than just the sum of the individual parts. This was not a case of more molesters and rapists than usual out on the streets. Rather, what seems to have happened is that numbers of fairly average young men suddenly took to sexually assaulting women. I can believe it, because I saw it happen in Mumbai.
It is no coincidence that the guilty parties tend to come from certain backgrounds
Second, the mass assaults took place in some of the most crowded urban centres. Brushing and frottage aside, outright sexual molestation usually happens in private places, or at least when other people are not looking. Definitely rape is not generally considered a real risk in a crowded city square. And yet on New Year’s Eve, the sense of safety in numbers collapsed dramatically.
As expected, the resonances have been damning. In Germany, the New Year’s Eve incidents connect to two political faultlines. The first cuts through the recent influx of asylum seekers and Angela Merkel’s controversial policy to accommodate them in large numbers.
The second and more far-reaching one questions the feasibility of multiculturalism as a State-sponsored process. For more than a decade now, and by no means exclusively in Germany, multiculturalism has suffered from what some have called a crisis of perception. Even the staunchest of liberals no longer see it as an unproblematic model of coexistence. In many cases the word was quietly dropped, even as the policies that sustained it remained largely intact.
Cologne feeds directly into these currents. For the hardened opponents, and I don’t mean just the far-right fascists, it’s a case of ‘we told you so’. For the liberals, there are pangs of self-doubt. It doesn’t help that the news took several days to make it to the press, or that the mayor of Cologne advised women to “stick together in groups” and stay “at arm’s length from men”. More broadly, the names of Enoch Powell and Pim Fortuyn come back to haunt us.
Incidents like these are uncomfortable to discuss and write about. That’s because they appear to lead us into the dark alley of racism and xenophobia. The other day I got an e-mail from a friend who told me she had been accosted several times by Arab men in Sliema, and that she no longer felt safe to be out alone. She also told me she had no wish to be misunderstood, and asked me not to quote her.
The association that dare not speak its name brings together identity and, in this case, attitudes towards women. Put bluntly and generally, it is no coincidence that the guilty parties tend to come from certain backgrounds – North African and the Arab world if the chief of police of Cologne is right, South Asian if my experience in Mumbai is worth anything.
It’s an equation we would be foolish to brush aside or bury under a heap of political correctness and a mawkish embrace of diversity. That would be a disservice, indeed an insult, to the identities and cultures in question, and especially to the millions of women who form part of them.
Take Eve teasing. Certainly it is an endemic phenomenon of South Asian societies. That does not mean, however, that it is an uncontested one. Hardly a day passes without a rally against it in some or other Indian city.
The point is that even as Eve teasing is a characteristic of South Asian culture, hundreds of millions of South Asians think of it as completely unacceptable.
Our worst enemy in these situations is a glib model of culture that sees groups (North African, Arab, South Asian, and so on) as monolithic and robs them of political agency. It’s the same model we apply when we describe particular cultures as ‘hospitable’, ‘generous’ or ‘spiritual’. The aesthetics of these benign adjectives makes it easier for us to lapse into their more sinister cousins when things turn sour.
The Cologne police have come under fire for their lethargic reaction on the night. It may be that the reason for their reluctance was a facile multiculturalism. Different cultures or no different cultures, the police should have responded swiftly and heavily, because that’s what those very cultures expected of them.
mafalzon@hotmail.com