No one on the international violence A WAVE OF neo-nazi violence rocked Germany last week in the wake of six consecutive nights of fascist rioting in the Baltic coast city of Rostock. Copycat incidents were reported in Berlin, Cottbus, Eberswalde, Goerlitz, Leipzig, Stendal, Schwerin, Neubrandenburg and Eisenhuettenstadt.
Far right gangs have killed seven people so far this year in around 300 acts officially designated as serious violence, as against three fatalities in the whole of 1991.
Troubles flared up after 300 mainly western rightwingers converged on Rostock on Saturday 22. Intelligence sources knew of the plan, yet the authorities failed to take preventative action.
On the Monday night a hostel for asylum-seekers in the suburb of Lichtenhagen was torched down after police gave the green light by withdrawing for an hour, ostensibly to reinforce.
Local residents shouted encouragement from the balconies of their tower block flats, many giving raised arm Hitler salutes. Around 200 Romanian gypsies living in the building were subsequently evacuated.
The disturbances were the worst Since those in Hoyerswerda in September 1991, which saw almost all foreigners driven out of town.
A nationwide anti-fascist mobilisation backed by local trade unions drew an estimated 20,000 to the city on Saturday 29.
Some 3,400 additional police Sieg Heil: Nazi's in the '90s were drafted in to mount a huge security operation, batoncharging anarchist demonstrators at the end of the peaceful march in sharp contrast to their tacit co-operation with the fascists.
Meanwhile, the trial of five east German skinheads accused of murdering a black Angolan outside nightclub in Eberswalde began in Frankfurt an der Oder last week.
A gang of 20 youths went out with a specific intention to 'slam niggers'. The ringleader testified: 'There wasn't one of us who didn't stomp him!
With the right to asylum enshrined in article Germany's constitution, over 500,000 refugees are expected in the country this year, twice the 1991 figure.
There is a growing clamour across the mainstream parties for immigration law to be tightened, fed by members of the governing CDU party frightened of losing electoral support to the far right.
Even Bjorn Engholm, leader of the left-of-centre opposition SPD, backtracked on formal party policy to declare 'immigration must be braked and controlled'.
Most of Germany's quality press has been critical of such responses. In a front page opinion piece, heavyweight weekly Die Welt commented:
'The asylum debate, designed to serve infighting among conservatives, has only damaged them and was useful to the right extremists alone.
The latest cave-in from the SPD - disguised by a thousand windy get-out clauses - seems to be feeble opportunism, and will prove as much an exercise in self-deception as in voterdeception.
Initiative Schwarze Deutsche [Black German Initiative] London spokesperson John Amoateng-Cantara said:
"The most frightening thing about Rostock is not that nazi thugs attacked foreigners - that lappens all the time The problem is that ordinary citizens in the street were applauding their actions. That is something that shocked me, as a German.
'I believe that they just waited for something like this to happen to say, "we've got too many immigrants, we've got to change the asylum law"!
Amoateng-Cantara COltrasted the police response to Nazis with the heavy-handed suppression of. anti-nuclear protesters in the late eighties, adding: 'Don't tell me the police are not able to protect 200 frightened foreigners. These people could easily have been dead by now!
The Anti-Racist Alliance staged a picket outside the German embassy in London on Thursday 27.