The Danish government has declared this week’s 28 residential districts in the country to officially ghetto. The neighborhoods appear on the so-called Ghetto list, which the housing Ministry in Copenhagen published for a number of years at the beginning of December. According to the government, the list is used to identify emerging parallel societies and existing by the year 2030 to dissolve.

A corresponding law entered into force at the beginning of this year. Are affected predominantly Muslim, poorer migrants district. Critics of the policy, the stigmatisation of the residential areas and discrimination of the residents.

kita obligation for “Ghetto-kids”

The new housing Minister Kaare Dybvad by the social Democrats, had declared in June first, to the historically loaded term “Ghetto” is not in use. Both in the text of the law as well as on the Website of his Ministry he appears, however, still widely prominent.

The law defines five different criteria. A district is classified officially as a Ghetto, when three of the five criteria apply: for example, more than half of the inhabitants must be immigrants from non-Western countries. It is checked whether the unemployment exceeds 40 percent, whether more than 60 percent of adults have only completed primary school, whether the average income is less than 55 percent of the Region as a whole, or whether the number of the convicted offender exceeds three times the national average.

police officers patrol in Mjolnerparken.

The classification as a Ghetto, has a direct impact on the lives of the residents. One of the most controversial measures to the Integration , under the new law, the kindergarten-duty for the residents. Of their first birthday according to the act, “Ghetto children need to be separated” for at least 25 hours a week from their parents and placed in a daycare center teaching in the Danish language, but also in the “Danish values” and traditions. Families keep their children at home, cut social security benefits. Outside of the ghetto every citizen can decide whether he sends his child before the sixth birthday in Preschool or Kindergarten.

the city, which are five years in a row on the list, are classified as especially persistent Ghettos. For such a district, the law provides for the demolition of the social housing blocks and the relocation of residents, to stop the parallel society. Danish Newspapers report that about 11’000 people to be resettled.

Denmark’s social Democrats had voted in the past year, then still in the Opposition, for the “Ghetto Plan”, then the new law emerged. After the takeover of power by the social Democrats in June, the new housing Minister Dybvad had stated in an Interview that he was in favour of measures of Integration, not wool, but use the term “Ghetto”, as he was historically biased, both by the Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi time as well as in the representation as nests of violence in the American cities of the U.S. television series. Both his Ministry as well as the Danish media speak, however, more of the “ghetto” and “Ghetto list”.

“While we desperately try to climb out, they are digging the hole ever deeper.”Young people in an open letter to housing Minister Dybvad

young people also in this year again to the Ghetto, declared the residential area of Tingbjerg in Copenhagen, requested last week in one of the newspaper Politiken, published an open letter to the Minister, abolish the list, you abstemple as a “second-class citizens”. If cohesion and Integration were the goal, it means the Ghetto-list, do the opposite: “you built a wall between “us” and “you”. It identifies us as a Problem, as living in a “black hole”. But while we desperately try to climb out, they are digging the hole ever deeper.”

It is in the end not a matter of parts of the city such as Tingbjerg of the Ghetto-list to bring down, replied the Minister Dybvad at the weekend by an Interview. It is more a matter of, “to do something for Tingbjerg”.

Created: 03.12.2019, 07:41 PM