Mohamed Rabbae saw the world change right in front of him. In the 1990s he was a widely respected Member of Parliament for GroenLinks, with excellent relations from the VVD to the SP, widely praised for the pioneering role he played as one of the first immigrants from the 1960s to make it far in Dutch politics. . He was regarded as a role model, a very amiable man, averse to polarization, like almost all Dutch politics in those years.
In 2005, three years after Pim Fortuyn’s political revolt, Rabbae was now a former Member of Parliament and he sometimes couldn’t believe his eyes and ears. “The provocations of Hans Janmaat then are child’s play compared to the insults of the rabid right against Muslims now,” he said in a statement. de Volkskrant† And, not without shock: ‘Since September 11, 2001 and the revolution of the underbelly in 2002, the Netherlands has had the largest number of racist and violent incidents against Muslims in the EU.’
Fight against Wilders
Rabbae did not know at the time that Geert Wilders’ PVV would enter the Chamber with nine seats a year later. All the more he would have to deal with Wilders. As chairman of the National Council of Moroccans, he already reported in 2008 against the PVV leader because of his film Fitna. A new declaration followed in 2016, after Wilders’ call for fewer Moroccans. ‘And I call on all migrant organizations and all democrats to do the same en masse.’
It was the introduction to his departure from GroenLinks. Rabbae’s unrelenting public distaste for Wilders and his self-proclaimed ‘fight against fascism’ began to get in the way of then party leader Femke Halsema in 2010. ‘Sometimes the addition of a former GroenLinks MP makes me a bit uncomfortable. Rabbae certainly does not make his statements on our behalf,” she said via Twitter. A few days later, Rabbae canceled his membership. ‘In this way GroenLinks will not be bothered by what I say in the public debate and I will not have to be annoyed by the positions of GroenLinks with which I sometimes disagree.’
On the run
As a result, the party lost a striking member, forever linked to the early days of the party. Rabbae fled as a student from Morocco to the Netherlands in 1966, fearing the repressive regime of King Hassan. He completed his studies in Economics in Amsterdam, worked for a while as a firefighter, in a cannery factory and as a seller of suitcases at V&D, but soon ended up in the administrative environment of the still young Dutch community of former guest workers.
From 1983 to 1994 he was director of the Netherlands Center for Foreigners. There he was scouted by GroenLinks as a political talent. For the first national elections in which the young merger party took part, in 1994, a party leader election was organized. Rabbae became a duo with sitting MP Ina Brouwer. They won the internal election, but not the parliamentary elections afterwards: GroenLinks dropped from six to five seats and did not live up to the high expectations.
Brouwer resigned, Rabbae did not, although according to many he had contributed to the defeat with an interview in NRC Handelsblad in which he showed understanding for people who read the book The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie ‘by democratic means’. That was against the sore leg of some of the progressive supporters. Rabbae ultimately did not get the chairmanship of the faction; that went to Paul Rosenmöller.
Political role model
As an eloquent Member of Parliament, Rabbae managed to win over many within and outside the party in the years that followed. But even more important was the role he played, perhaps not even consciously, as a role model for a whole generation of young people with a migration background and an interest in politics. ‘He had an incredible influence on me at the beginning of my political awareness,’ Tofik Dibi, later a member of the GroenLinks parliament, told the scientific bureau of GroenLinks in 2017. ‘I thought his humor and razor-sharp tongue were a wonderful combination. I made notes in my head as he spoke. I always thought: that’s how I want to be. Committed, but cheerful. Activism, but also having fun.’
Naïma Azough, who also made it to the House of Representatives on behalf of GroenLinks, said about Rabbae: ‘Too many people have forgotten that Mohamed was very critical of the Moroccan king and government, which at the time imprisoned or ‘disappeared’ critics in a terrible way. Mohamed was a political exile, he could not return to his family for a long time. His progressive policy was thus also one of personal sacrifice. (..) I have not always agreed with him in terms of strategic choices – perhaps unjustly – but as they say: when it really comes down to it, I am sure of one thing: you can count on Mohamed Rabbae.’
Rabbae had been ill for some time by then. In 2014, he suffered a brain haemorrhage, which left him severely disabled. He died on Tuesday. Mohamed Rabbae turned 81 years old.
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