home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- THE WEEK, Page 16WORLDFires in the Night
-
-
- German right-wingers spearhead scores of attacks against
- foreigners
-
-
- For German right-wing radicals, the incendiary of choice is
- the Molotov cocktail. Instead of hitting their target and burning
- out, however, the ones hurled two weeks ago in Rostock have
- continued to spray sparks across Germany: at week's end, more
- than 150 attacks on asylum-seeking foreigners had been
- registered since the mayhem began. In Ketzin, 10 miles from
- Berlin, 44 Auslander barely escaped with their lives when the
- building they inhabited was razed by torch throwers. Official
- calls for special police powers to confront the skinheads and
- neo-Nazis did not seem to deter anyone. Although there was no
- breakdown in civic order, the attacks reached to the front door
- of the government: right-wingers threw fire bombs at a house of
- asylum seekers a mile from Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Bonn office.
-
- While the shelters burned, however, the politicians
- continued to fiddle. In principle, a move to change Germany's
- liberal asylum laws is closer, since the opposition Social
- Democrats agree that a constitutional amendment is needed. In
- fact, most of Bonn's energy went into fighting over SPD charges
- that the government has deliberately dawdled on processing and
- deporting unworthy asylum seekers to keep the pressure on for
- the legal change.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-