Ethnic Tensions at a Dangerous Simmer : * Rising antagonism among groups could turn Europe into a tinderbox during the next decade as populations shift.

By ROBERT C. TOTH and STANLEY MEISLER

Sept. 17, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

BIALYSTOK, Poland —

“We are such terrible racists!” fumed the middle-aged librarian. “We cannot say that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist here,” she admitted sadly, “even without Jews.” The populace in this poor, provincial urban pocket of eastern Poland was once 80% Jewish. But now there are fewer than a dozen identifiable Jews within city limits.

Halfway across Europe, racial hate is aimed at Gypsies. “There are some good ones,” a young Spanish lawyer in Madrid said grudgingly. “But speaking frankly, they are all thieves,” she went on. “They have it in their blood.”

In Amiens, an hour north of Paris, four taxi drivers launched a tirade against North Africans. “The Arabs, the Arabs, the Arabs. . . . They cost us plenty, arriving with several wives, several children. . . . They bring crime, they make the system rotten. . . . They want to impose Islam in France.”

Next door in Germany, the target is mainly the Poles and the Turks. And in Bulgaria at the southeastern tip of the Continent, Turks as well as Arabs are disliked. About 10% of Bulgaria’s population is Turkish, but not one Turk is a Bulgarian police officer. “The only change democracy has brought,” a Turkish engineer in Plovdiv said bitterly, “is I don’t get a ticket for speaking Turkish in public anymore.”

Ethnic, religious and racial hatreds are thriving across Europe as the 20th Century draws to an end, according to a Times Mirror poll carried out in 12 countries stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains.

And the potential consequences--for those nations, for their neighbors and for the Continent as a whole are ominous.

Fed by newfound freedom of expression in Eastern Europe, and by record-high immigration into Western Europe, the antagonism among ethnic groups seems to be higher than at any time since World War II, when the barbarism of Nazi Germany silenced all but the irredeemable bigots.

Minority rights, like the concept of “melting-pot” assimilation, are largely unknown and unwanted by the majorities in these nations. This is particularly true in the former Soviet Bloc, where at least two out of five citizens of every country are hostile to the largest minority in that nation.

But the volatility of the ethnic issue does not stop at the former Iron Curtain. Indeed, the Continent could turn into a tinderbox over the next decade as almost continental-size shifts of people occur.

First, within the countries of Western Europe, immigration will rise significantly after national barriers fall with the formal arrival of economic union at the end of 1992. The flow of refugees from the former Soviet Bloc, already 1.5 million in the last two years, is certain to increase with economic and political unrest in those countries, and no diminution of immigration from the south is in sight.

The social fabric in France is already stretched thin over the Arab presence, with four out of 10 Frenchmen expressing hostility to North Africans. In Germany, hostility to Poles is ominous, with skinheads beating up Polish visitors from time to time. And Italy’s expulsion of boatloads of Albanian refugees exposed what could well be a window on tomorrow.

With France leading the way, huge majorities in every West European and in most East European nations told Times Mirror pollsters they want more restrictions on immigration to their homelands.

“The invasion from the south is something unstoppable,” said Jose Antonio Martinez Soler, a leading Spanish journalist. “The Mediterranean will become a kind of Rio Bravo,” added Joaquin Estefania, editor of Spain’s most influential newspaper, El Pais, using the Mexican name for the Rio Grande, the river that separates the United States and Mexico.

Martinez Soler forecasts an American-like integration process, “often bloody, often very hard in terms of compromise and consensus between the different ethnic groups,” but made even more difficult because Europe lacks “a sense of community that would give people hope, a melting pot, a sense that we can live together.

“If many immigrants come, there could be a racist reaction, a Nazi reaction,” he warned. “That could lead to a social explosion.”

The most ethnocentric of Europeans are the Poles, perhaps because they have been overrun repeatedly for half a millennium while retaining a romantic self-image as the protector of Western Christianity. Poles lead all others in their general disdain for other nationalities, the survey found, with almost three out of four saying they “don’t have much in common with other ethnic groups and races.” In no other nation was this even a majority view.

Poles are hostile to virtually all their neighbors. Majorities dislike Ukrainians--who also constitute Poland’s largest minority--as well as Germans; and significant minorities dislike Byelorussians and Lithuanians.

Poles also led Europe in anti-Semitism. Even though fewer than three in 10,000 Polish citizens is Jewish, one in three Poles expressed hostility to Jews. Another 24% say they “don’t know” on this very sensitive issue, suggesting that anti-Jewish sentiment may be considerably higher.

“We have this curious phenomenon called anti-Semitism when there are practically no Jews in Poland,” mused a middle-aged writer. “And all of our minorities make up only 2%, at most 5% of our entire Polish population; but they constitute a moral problem, a litmus test of the moral fitness of the nation.”

“The treatment (of minorities) also has political significance,” he added, “because it affects Poland’s chances to get into Europe” and thus to benefit from a larger economic market with lower tariff and trade barriers.

Polish xenophobia is also expressed in suspicion toward foreign investment--particularly, it appears, German investment. All East European states desperately need and want foreign money, but Poles consider such money the greatest of four foreign threats posed to them--greater than the danger from Soviet refugees, Soviet troops and Soviet economic collapse.

Sometimes this fear of foreign money is more intuitive than rational. A woman pensioner in Krakow, for example, believed that foreigners would annex the Polish land they bought to their home country. “Poland might fall into foreign hands,” she said.

To which a computer specialist exclaimed in exasperation: “Poles are like the dog who can’t eat the bone but won’t let anyone else eat it either. We have nothing here, no technology, no normally functioning economic life. But we fear foreigners.

“What do we fear they’d deprive us of?” he demanded. “Our debts?”

In the wake of the political and economic upheavals of recent years, ethnic tensions have risen markedly in every sector of the former Soviet Bloc, including the Soviet Union. Often they have exploded--at least a dozen border disputes and minor ethnic wars have occurred, not counting such pogrom-like events as the ransacking of a Gypsy community at Mlawa, Poland, in July.

Czechs and Slovaks are more hostile toward each other now than before their “velvet revolution” of 1989 that led to the downfall of Communism, the survey found. “Czechs behave in a very arrogant way at present,” a Slovak biologist in Kosice complained angrily. “They plainly don’t like us very much.”

Strong separatist sentiment in Slovakia raises the prospect that another independent state may yet emerge in the region, much as Slovenia and Croatia are breaking away from Yugoslavia.

The Czechs, impatient with their poorer Slovak cousins, have already said they can go their own way if they chose, but there’s another potential flash point in strong Slovak antipathy for the Hungarian minority among them. In case of trouble, the Hungarian government would be pressed by public opinion to intercede on behalf of its ethnic brethren in neighboring Slovakia.

More significantly, Budapest has already served notice that as far as it is concerned, former Hungarian lands were ceded after World War I to the federated nations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia--not to any partial entity within those nations, such as Slovakia and Serbia, in which those ethnic Hungarian lands now lie. Such lands could be up for grabs if the Czechoslovak or Yugoslav federations fall apart, and violent clashes would in that case seem almost certain.

This problem of state borders not coinciding with ethnic borders is endemic throughout East Europe. Cousins live on both sides of the same frontier, and while this may be the case through most of Europe, the ethnic tribes of Eastern Europe are far from reconciled to remaining divided.

Most Hungarians, Poles and Bulgarians feel that some of their national lands now lie across national frontiers, The Times Mirror survey found. “Many Bulgarians live in neighboring countries,” said a Plovdiv surgeon. Recalling a “Greater Bulgaria” centuries ago, he added, “We say Bulgaria borders on itself.”

Even before the East European revolutions of 1989, with supposedly “fraternal” Communist parties ruling in both capitals, there was a bitter and very public dispute between Budapest and Bucharest over treatment of the huge ethnic Hungarian population living in the Transylvanian region of Romania as the result of post-World War I border changes.

Significant minorities of Czechs covet other lands, such as Silesia, which is part of modern Poland. Poles, for their part, eye Byelorussia and parts of the Ukraine in the Soviet Union and the newly independent Lithuania. Claims and counter-claims seem ready. “If there are any claims made here,” warned a 50-year-old Polish worker, “our claims to Vilnius (in Lithuania) and Lvov (in the Ukraine) would follow.”

Like dominoes, the border disputes continue eastward. Ruthenians in the trans-Carpathian Ukraine want to rejoin Czechoslovakia, to which they were annexed until the end of World War II. The rest of the Ukraine is split along ethnic and religious lines between the west, which was raised on nationalism and Western Christianity, and the east, which is largely Russian and Eastern Orthodox, or atheist.

And although the Soviet Union annexed much territory after World War II, Russians seem to covet more land. One Muscovite spoke enviously of the rich Crimea that was “given to the Ukraine.” Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin has publicly spoken of reserving the right to “readjust” the borders of the Ukraine and Kazakhstan to include the substantial populations of ethnic Russians there. Those republics immediately reacted angrily to the idea. More than 100 ethnic groups are amalgamated but not assimilated in the Soviet Union.

“My mother’s Polish, my father was partly Jewish,” said a woman pensioner in Volgograd, “and I’ve Greeks and Armenians among my forefathers, even Mongolians.”

Religious disputes, which are often associated with ethnic conflicts, have also returned with the new freedoms in East Europe.

In Uzhgorod, capital of trans-Carpathia Ukraine, fists have flown over a cathedral that first belonged to the Greek Catholics (or Uniates) but was taken over by the Greek Orthodox after World War II. Now it is the prize in a tug of war.

“We Greek Catholics have no place to pray,” explained a retired truck driver who, like his friend, a pensioned farmer, has survived several changes of rulers of this region in their lifetimes.

“I was baptized a Greek Catholic but was forced to change my faith for the official state religion at different times,” recalled the farmer. “When Hungarians came, I had to believe in the Hungarian way. Slovaks came, and I prayed in the Slovakian way. Russians came, and I had to be an Orthodox believer. But we cannot really change our religion. I was baptized by a priest.”

In Poland and Slovakia, where about one in three are hostile to Jews, the Times Mirror poll found correlations between those who professed strong religious beliefs and anti-Semitism. Both peoples are predominantly Catholic.

But Lithuania, which is also predominantly Catholic, showed the least correlation between religious profession and anti-Semitism.

Russia and the Ukraine expressed lower levels of anti-Semitism (about one in four were hostile to Jews). However, one of the most disturbing findings was that the young people in those republics are more anti-Semitic than their elders.

In Germany, the reverse was true: Twice as many Germans over 60 were anti-Semitic compared to those under 25 years old. (By way of comparison, about 7% of Americans, or fewer than one in 15, express hostility to Jews.)

While its history makes it the object of special scrutiny on the subject, Germany did not stand out in its attitudes toward ethnic minorities. Western Germans were twice as hostile to Jews as Eastern Germans (25% and 12%, respectively)--which was about the same rate as their hostility toward ethnic Germans from abroad (such as Russia’s Volga Germans), but far below the level of hostility to Poles, Romanians, Turks and Gypsies.

Speaking of ethnic German immigrants, Martin Haushofer, a conservative Bavarian Parliament member, commented: “There is nowhere to put them.” And a newspaper editor, Hans-Hermann Tiedje, explained that most Germans want the money now used to feed immigrants to be used instead to help develop their countries of origin. “If we don’t give them something to eat, they will eat us,” he said.

Hostility to Gypsies showed no correlation with religion or with economic or educational status. It was extremely strong and virulent across the breadth and depth of the Continent, although worse in Eastern Europe.

Gypsies fared best among those polled in Spain, with equal numbers of Spaniards favorable and unfavorable. In Hungary, 5 out of 6 persons were hostile to Gypsies. Anti-Gypsy feeling was strongest in Czechoslovakia where it was about the only thing on which Czechs and Slovaks agreed; 13 out of 14, or 91%, of both peoples, said they disliked Gypsies.

“People automatically consider a Gypsy a criminal,” admitted a Czech institute manager. He said he knew that on weekends, “skinheads” seek out Gypsies, intending to kill them.

“We, the whites, are very angry at Gypsies,” said a Slovak taxi dispatcher. “They are given flats, and I heard that they sold things out of them or had open fires right inside the flats. I won’t give them a job. I hate them.”

Ignorance goes with the prejudice in some cases.

“A Gypsy can’t get heart failure, though he suffers from other diseases,” said a middle-aged Slovak woman. “And for this reason, a Gypsy is never nervous if he’s late for a job. He couldn’t care less--that’s his mentality. It’s true they expect our hate, which increases their aggressiveness.”

MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD

East Europeans often look mostly or very favorably upon their closest neighbors. Bulgarians towards Turks:

Very Favorable: 14%

Mostly favorable: 38%

Mostly unfavorable: 28%

Very unfavorable: 11%

Don’t know: 9%

Czechs toward Hungarians:

Very Favorable: 5%

Mostly favorable: 27%

Mostly unfavorable: 31%

Very unfavorable: 18%