Fires in Denmark.
My old Danish neighbourhood is being burnt to the ground…sort of.
Those yellow bricks on the right? My old apartment. Foto: Emil Ryge Christoffersen
Foto: Lars Skov
Foto: Susan Thygesen
This has already made international headlines but essentially, what prompted these arsons and other riot acts was the arrest of three men who were suspected to be conspiring to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists responsible for the Mohammed illustrations that got all eyes on Denmark in 2006. The big deal is that these suspects lived minutes from my Danish apartment, in what is officially considered to be the largest ghetto in the country.
When I was still there, It was common to see burnt scooters in pedestrian underpasses, there were fireworks on a nearly nightly basis (great to watch from my bedroom window) and after a local arab man joined the Danish police, others decided to bomb his car.
Now, I heard that after buses were pelted with stones in the area of the city, they are refusing to provide service there.
My European experienced exposed me to a continent that, with the exception of Germany who is very careful about how it openly views immigrants, is new to the idea of immigrant populations and perhaps has some difficulty dealing with the newcomers. We saw it in France in the Parisian suburbs in 2005 and now we’re seeing it for a second time in Denmark.
Europe does a lot of stuff better than North America…bread, chocolate, cars, public transit, cell phones… It needs to start figuring out newcomers though.
Here’s a Danish rap video shot in Copenhagen.
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This looks SO UNREALl! I hope the neighbours are okey! (except for those greedy bike-back-stealers downstairs)…
Comment by maja — March 5, 2008 #