21 February 2016
Over the course of the past few days, the East German federal state of Saxony was once more the scene of violent anti-immigration protests, described as verging on a pogrom by senior German politicians.
On Thursday evening, a group of one hundred demonstrators attempted to block the arrival a bus bringing refugees from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon to their new shelter in the town of Clausnitz in the Ore Mountains. After a wait of two hours, during which the angry crowd shouted xenophobic slurs at the bus, crying refugees were manhandled out of the bus by police forces, whose conduct has sparked off intense criticism. In chilling video footage, police forces dragged a 14-year old boy out of the bus and into the housing unit. The rough treatment was met with approving jeers from the crowd, erupting in the by now customary chant of “Wir sind das Volk!” (‘We are the people!’). The regional police chief Uwe Reissman defended the use of force against the refugees, asserting that the police were outnumbered and that the refugees had provoked the furious mob. In a further twist of the story, the director of the refugee shelter is held to be a member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the party-political wing of the Pegida movement. Moreover, the director’s brother reportedly organised and led the anti-immigration protests in front of the shelter.
In a second incident on Saturday, a still uninhabited housing unit for asylum seekers was torched in the town of Bautzen about 50 km east of Dresden. Cheering onlookers prevented firefighters from approaching the burning building. Both of these incidents put the East German state of Saxony into the spotlight once more. Saxony has been the site of some of the most high-profile acts anti-immigrant violence in recent years; it is also the home of the Islamophobic Pegida movement. In 2014’s state election, the neo-Nazi NPD and the AfD took a combined 25 per cent of the popular vote.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/sachsen-zweites-clausnitz-video-zeigt-polizeigewalt-gegen-kind-1.2872562 (including a video showing the mistreatment of the 14-year old boy by police forces)
http://www.dw.com/en/senior-german-politicians-condemn-anti-migrant-incidents-in-saxony/a-19064507
Euro-Islam’s recent article on right-wing activism in Saxony and the Ore Mountains: https://www.euro-islam.info/2016/02/21/a-christian-nation-the-importance-of-radical-christianity-for-german-right-wing-movements/
