Fur Roman die Deutschen Menschen

Germany leads new tide of racism and xenophobia sweeping Europe
By Mohammad A Shaikh in London

Throughout Europe, political parties campaigning on anti-foreigner platforms
are chalking up remarkable gains, with Germany leading the way as poll
figures and recently published figures on racist attacks show. And the main
victims are Muslim residents - many of them born and raised there. In
Germany, an obscure neo-Nazi party has suddenly sprung into prominence after
securing an unprecedented 13 per cent of the votes in the April 26 poll in
the East German State of Saxony-Anholt, where a quarter of the workforce is
unemployed. An openly xenophobic party, founded and run as a private fiefdom
by a Bavarian multi-millionaire businessman, The German People's Union (DVU)
achieved the best electoral result for the extreme Right since 1945.

The result makes the DVU the popular party among electors under 30, forcing
its normally reclusive founder and funder, Gerhard Frey, to boast publicly
that voting for the Right was now part of youth culture, 'just like techno
music and skateboarding.'


The DVU's victory is all the more startling because its campaign was largely
based on hate-mail and posters displayed throughout the state, shrieking:
'Criminal Foreigners Out.' Normal methods of political campaigning were kept
to a minimum - confined mostly to a few public appearances by Frey and a
handful of cronies. Instead, Frey relied on the hate-mail - which targeted
all those aged 18 to 29 and over 60 - and the posters to deliver his dreaded
message to the voters.


The DVU's success has cheered up racist organizations and politicians
throughout Europe. The leader of the French National Front, Jean-Marie Le
Pen, for instance, sent warm congratulations. In fact Frey, who is estimated
to be worth ú170 million, and is ready to spend his wealth to promote his
racist platform throughout the continent, has cordial ties with Le Pen and
other anti-foreigner thugs like Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

But the DVU's electoral breakthrough is not the only manifestation of the
rising tide of xenophobia in Germany. Neo-Nazis, for example, demonstrated
in Leipzig on May Day in large numbers. Thousands of followers of the
National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) gathered to cheer speeches
calling for the deportation of foreigners. When Holger Apfel, head of the
NPD's youth wing, called for deporting foreigners who were supposed to steal
jobs from Germans and sponge off the country's welfare system, he was given
thunderous applause.


Moreover, the number of racist attacks throughout Germany has sky rocketed.
According to figures published in Bonn on May 6, the number of crimes
committed by German Right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis is at the highest
level since 1945.


A total of 11,719 crimes with a Right-wing extremist background were
recorded in 1997, 34 per cent more than in the previous year, with crimes of
violence rising by 27 per cent to 790. The figures, released by Germany's
Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a misnomer considering the
figures and boldness of the racist attackers) exceed the previous record of
10,791, set in 1993.


As one commentator has put it, the figures 'confirm the impression that the
skinheads are becoming bolder in their defiance of the law.' He might have
added that the reluctance of the Law-enforcement authorities to stop them is
a further manifestation of racism, whose principal victims are Muslims. To
quote a recent report in the London-based Right-wing Daily Telegraph, those
skinheads 'show their patriotism by beating up Turks, blacks, punks and
other strangers.'


Interestingly, the response of the mainstream political parties to the rise
of the racists - particularly the DVU's poll success - is to become more
racist themselves, explaining their behaviour in terms of a tactic designed
to cut the anti-foreigners down to size rather than emulate them.

Less than a week after the DVU's electoral victory, the Bavarian authorities
ordered the deportation of a Turkish couple who have lived in Germany for 30
years, because of the criminal record of their son, aged 13. The Turkish
family has not been named but the authorities say that the son is a threat
to public order.


Bavaria's ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) is calling for tougher
campaign on law and order and immigration in an attempt to steal the DVU's
racist supporters. As Siegrried Benker of the Bavarian Green explained in a
recent newspaper interview, the CSU behaviour shows the adverse effect of
the DVU's success on German politics. 'The DVU's election results are
already showing their fatal effect,' she said. 'The CSU is absolutely
determined to make a show as the party of deportation, exclusion and social
polarization.'


In France, Le Pen's National Front says that if it comes to power it will
deport 3 million immigrants, many of them born and raised in France - the
majority being Muslims from North Africa. The Front lost a seat in the city
of Toulon, southern France, but only by 33 votes. The French mainstream
parties are publicly celebrating this as a defeat for racism. In fact, their
very celebration of such a close result on only one seat shows their fear of
the Front's clout rather than its presumed decline.

Elsewhere in Europe anti-foreign parties are making gains. In Flanders, the
Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, the nationalist Vlaam's Blok is receiving
more than 12 per cent of the vote. In Austria, the Freedom Movement has
become a serious rival to the two parties that have dominated the country's
politics for almost 50 years.


But the big prize for Islamophobia must go to the Danish People's Party
(DDP), founded in 1995 but already making waves because of its blatantly
anti-Muslim and racist platform. Its leader and founder, Mrs Pia Kjaesgaard,
denies she is a racist but simply says that they do not want Muslims and
Arabs in a Christian country (For details, see Muslimedia No. 28 - No
Muslims for us please, we are Danes).


But what are Muslim governments doing about this blatant racist and
anti-Muslim phenomenon? It may sound incredible, but they are encouraging it
through their obsession with 'terrorists', whose deportation or extradition
from Europe they routinely seek.

Muslimedia: May 16-31, 1998


--
If you *MUST* practice GREEK on eachother, please be safe and use plent of
GREASE inneet peeps


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