By IPS Correspondents
BONN, Aug 2 2000 (IPS)

Alarmed at the right-wing extremist violence against foreigners and the homeless, the German government and parliament are considering new ways of tackling a situation which, according to a senior state government leader, brings “shame on all of Germany”.

“This year is shaping up to be deadly,” warned the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a renowned German newspaper, Wednesday, summing up a phenomenon which has taken the general public in the country by surprise.

More than 30 people have been killed by the so-called skinheads in the past 10 years, according to police officials and the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The right-wing extremists are also known as neo-Nazis who have taken to xenophobia as a creed. They are fascinated by the racist views of Adolf Hitler, who brought havoc on Germany and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and committed genocide, among others, against Jews.

The neo-Nazis are said to have been responsible for killing four people this year. In the eastern German town of Dessau, a Mozambican, who had lived in Germany more than a decade, died in June from injuries inflicted by three young right-wing extremists.

Last week in Ahlbeck on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, a homeless man was found dead at the village church, having been beaten and kicked by four right-wing youths.

In two other eastern German towns – Wismar and Greifswald, homeless people have died in recent weeks after similar attacks.

“The series of extremist assaults mark a drastic increase in right-wing violence over past years,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Last year, a Mozambican was beaten to death in Kolbermoor the southern German state of Bavaria. An Algerian bled to death in the town of Guben in eastern German state of Brandenburg, after jumping through the glass of a house door while fleeing from neo-Nazis.

Those were the first right-wing killings the police had recorded since the middle of 1990s. The previous high point of right-wing violence was before, during and after the debate on tightening asylum laws in the early 1990s.

The move was aimed at stopping illegal immigration of foreigners – mainly from the Third World – in a country which already harbours some seven million in a total population of 80 million.

Statistics of the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation show right-wing violence, including killings, bodily harm, arson and bomb attacks, began to increase rapidly for the first time in 1991.

The number of crimes, motivated by left-wing extremism, last year totalled around 3,000 cases, of which more than 700 were classified as violent.

According to official sources, the German Interior Ministry alone spends 189.5 million US dollars a year on programmes aimed at bringing to a halt xenophobic violence – more difficult to achieve than expected.

Analysing the reasons behind racial violence, the speaker of the German federal parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, says society as a whole is responsible for “a flawed development about which everyone complains”.

Paul Spiegel, chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, says schools should be involved more intensively in the fight against neo-Nazi violence.

Nazi is the German abbreviation for national socialism, turned into a genocidal state philosophy and practice under Hitler.

Spiegel would like to see education about national socialism and the teaching of democratic values packaged in a pedagogically more skilful and emotionally more touching way.

Following that line of argument, German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, says a “silent majority” might be abetting the crimes by not speaking against them.

Commenting on the assault Saturday on seven people from the former Soviet republics, Fischer said: “The fact that hatred of foreigners probably lies behind the Duesseldorf attacks should rouse us all.”

A prominent member of the Green Party, Fischer added: “We have reached a point where the majority of the population that has been silent up to now can no longer remain silent.”

Fischer belongs to a generation of political leaders in Germany who triggered student revolts across Europe in the late 1960s – challenging the values cherished valued by their parents.

In the then West Germany, the 1968 student revolt unleashed a hectic debate on the murky Nazi past of some of the politicians, academicians and even judges.

“Now, the aggressively exaggerated swaggering of the skinheads shows up the complexes of a section of eastern German society that has yet to come to terms with itself and its past,” says Stefan Dietrich, an analyst.

“Only when adults recognise their own deformities in these young people (committing acts of violence) will they be able to banish this ghost,” Dietrich adds.

The reference is to the fact that eastern Germany was, for nearly 40 years, ruled by the communist party SED until 10 years ago when two Germanys unified.

The state premier, Manfred Stolpe, who belongs to former East German state GDR and has witnessed right-wing extremist violence in his state, Brandenburg, says he hopes that the ongoing debate over how to combat right-wing extremism was not just a way of filling column inches and air time in the generally quiet summer holiday period.

In a radio interview this week, the social democrat Stolpe said: “I hope that these acts, which bring shame on all of Germany, really will be tackled.” He noted that the phenomenon had been underestimated in the last 10 years.

While the debate continued and government officials from the interior and justice ministries met Tuesday to find ways to combat neo-Nazis, Bavarian interior minister Guenther Beckstein called for the government to crack down.

He said the government should apply to the German Constitutional Court for a ban on the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), which was becoming the political home for all neo-Nazis.

“The NPD is a natural rallying point for disorganised skinheads,” said Beckstein who belong to the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) which has been in opposition at the federal level for the last two years.

The federal interior ministry, headed by social democrat Otto Schilly, had rejected Beckstein’s proposal, arguing this would not have an impact on stopping neo-Nazi violence. In fact, it would drive the NPD underground and make it more dangerous.

This view is, however, not shared by the German Environment Minister, Juergen Trittin, who belongs to the Green Party, the junior partner in the coalition government headed by the Social Democratic Party Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Trittin supported Becktein in his demand for radical steps such as the banning of the right-wing extremists, said to be grouped in the tiny NPD party.

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