In Amsterdam, mayor as mediator
By Marlise Simons International Herald Tribune | MAY 30, 2005 http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/29/news/mayor7.php When Job Cohen took office as mayor of Amsterdam in early 2001, he set out to address the urban problems that come with a free-wheeling port city going back eight centuries. But his agenda was abruptly rewritten. The Sept. 11 attacks, although far away in the United States, had strong aftershocks here, exposing long-simmering tensions between conservative Muslim immigrants and the city's liberal traditions. Many Dutch felt they now had a license to complain openly that the newcomers - from Morocco, Turkey, the Middle East - were changing their society for the worse, while the Muslims protested that they were being treated as aliens in their adopted country. Cohen, a calm, somewhat reserved Jewish intellectual, was thrown into the role of mediator. He has since made it his task to keep the peace between the city's Muslims and Christians. Amsterdam, a thriving port of 750,000 people, has always had a cultural and racial mix, but never at today's ratio: Almost half its residents are of non-Western descent, a majority of them Muslims. "Islam is here to stay, in this country, in this city," Cohen said at his official mansion along an elegant 17th-century canal. "We have to deal with Islam as a fact, not whether we like it. So the real question is how to get on with each other." That question has taken on new urgency in Amsterdam since November, when Theo van Gogh, a well-known local filmmaker, was shot and his throat was slit by an Islamic militant. Cohen, 57, takes pride in the fact that in Amsterdam, unlike other cities, no violence or arson occurred in response to the killing, but he concedes that social peace is far from assured. So he moves around, visiting ethnic groups, organizing debates among religious leaders, listening and promoting dialogue. The role appears to suit him. Tall and good-looking, and a man with a reputation for being evenhanded, Cohen has a slightly magisterial aura, even a hint of the absent-minded professor. This is not surprising. Since Dutch mayors are named by the government, Cohen did not campaign for the job, but arrived directly from his last post - as head of the University of Maastricht. Born into a family of historians in the city of Haarlem, he studied law and became a senior civil servant. He and his wife, Lidie, have two grown children. Lidie, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, has been confined to a wheelchair in recent years and Cohen can be seen pushing her along the street or at official receptions. He says this has made him aware of the many practical obstacles handicapped people face. How people move around this picturesque city, with its concentric rings of canals and more than 1,200 bridges, clearly interests him. Amsterdam has more bicycles than residents - an estimated 800,000 - and Cohen continues the course set by his predecessors of making life easier for pedestrians and bicycles by shrinking access for cars. With new parking areas on the edge of town, more people now hop on the trams. "It's been a fight, but we have gained more spaces for benches, for trees and sidewalks cafés, and for children to play," said Miriam Otten, one of Cohen's aides. As part of the anti-car campaign, Cohen has been an advocate for the extension of the underground, an extraordinary puzzle in a city built on layers of spongy peat and clay, where most of the bridges and the historic buildings rest on thousands of wooden piles driven deep into the ground. In a city where a 10-floor building is a high-rise, growth spills over into suburbs and satellite towns and along the old industrial waterfront. Amsterdam has been reclaiming its derelict docklands and warehouses along the IJ, formerly an arm of the sea, now a lake, linked by a canal to the North Sea. "One-fourth of the city surface is water," Cohen said. "It imposes its limitations, but also gives us a lot of options." Among those options is the new housing already built on old landfills in the harbor. Along another abandoned stretch of waterfront, a new concert hall and public library are planned. >From a canal boat, Cohen pointed to new open-air sculptures and a set of hand-cast iron gates, paid for by the city. In Amsterdam, a city devoted to the arts, he said, "it's the rule that in every public housing project, 1 percent of the budget must go to art." In the campaign for the Dutch referendum on the European Constitution, which takes place on Wednesday, Cohen has come out emphatically in favor of the treaty, saying that he sees a stronger Europe and its open trade policies as beneficial for Amsterdam, as well as the rest of the nation. As for city policy, Cohen seemed stung when a reporter asked if he was concerned about the rough sections of the inner city, the realm of open prostitution and soft-drug cafés. "On the contrary," he replied, "since we legalized prostitution and allowed the soft-drug cafés, we have much control. It allows us to have health inspections of the premises, of the people working there." But it is social peace and the need for acceptance and integration of Amsterdam's Muslim immigrants that are among Cohen's greatest concerns. One recent day, he was taking a group of college students to a public housing project in the suburb of Osdorp. Two retired police officers had opened a clubhouse there for immigrant teenagers who had been in trouble with the police. "We're better off listening to these kids than sending them to jail," Cohen said, spending the next hour listening. On another day, he attended an awards dinner of a successful Moroccan group. Before the audience of well-suited businessmen and women in jewels and long Arab-style dresses, the mayor began: "These have not been easy times for you. You may even have wondered: Am I wanted here?" The hall was dead silent, as Cohen continued: "Yes, we all belong here. You are much needed in this society; you are the hope of this country." The mayor's unruffled, low-key style has earned him admirers - and detractors. Geert Mak, a well-known writer, said that after the van Gogh killing, while other politicians panicked and whipped up fear, "Cohen remained a model of calm and civic courage." Others see him as an advocate of the soft pedal, contending that he and his Labor Party's multicultural policies are to blame for the immigrants' lack of integration. Such policies, critics say, have failed to make clear where Dutch society draws the line; making too many concessions, they say, may have encouraged immigrants to live off the state. During one discussion, a political columnist, Theodor Holman, told Cohen across the table, "My mayor is a weakling." In the intense debate over the threat of terrorism, the limits of tolerance, and how to handle gangs of angry immigrant youths, Cohen's aides say he is far from "soft." Under his orders, the police have identified 80 gangs, issuing orders to bar some leaders from troubled neighborhoods and sending several hundred young lawbreakers to reform boot camps. A local mosque known to spread anti-Western ideas has had several visits from Cohen and his aides, including Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born city alderman. "Closing the mosque is pointless when it's likely to be reopened by the courts," he said. Cohen says he is not religious, but holds meetings with religious groups because religion has come to play a greater role in the largely secular Netherlands. Muslim clerics, he argues, are key to helping Muslims integrate into Dutch society, particularly because the most conservative clerics work against this. He also promotes meetings of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders because, he says, "there is a lot of anger against Israel" over its treatment of Palestinians. Asked if this affects his own role, he said: "It's hard to say. Undoubtedly there are people who say, well the mayor is a prejudiced Jew." The mayor and Aboutaleb, a trusted ally, have received death threats and now have bodyguards. (Pinned to the body of the murdered filmmaker, a letter in Arabic called Cohen an enemy because he was a Jew and Aboutaleb a traitor to Islam.) Walking fast along the streets on a recent night, taking large strides and leaving his bodyguard and a reporter scrambling to keep up, Cohen sounded self-effacing. "People think a mayor has a lot of power," he said. "You don't. It's the elected aldermen who have all the power. I'm more the guy who acts as chairman at the meetings." So what, if anything, does make this seemingly imperturbable man angry? It is, he says, the new tough talk used by a number of politicians, talk of "war" on extremism, "war" on terrorism and "clamping down" on immigrants. "I see more polarization," he said. "I don't like it; it's bad for the city, bad for the country. Security comes from a stronger sense of community, from getting closer. I worry about the hardening tone." ------------------------ Yahoo! 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