The last refuge

Indian readers absorb events in central Europe primarily through an Anglo-Saxon prism, since few European mainstream media concerns have websites in English.

We know that in the past year, 1.5 million Syrian refugees arrived in Germany alone. A yet tenuous link between these arrivals, terror attacks such as in Paris in November 2015 and the caches of weapons, suicide vests and other paraphernalia of death found at various European locations, has been established. Subsequently, the fear that the best surveillance at European Union (EU) borders may not have prevented Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorists from infiltrating Europe in the guise of refugees cannot be entirely unfounded.

But there is a far greater social and political crisis brewing on the ground, specifically in Germany, EU’s largest economy. Whether on television debates or opinion columns, the dominant subject in the German-language media is the influx of Syrian refugees. Whomsoever you talk to, German citizens on both sides of the Social Democrat-Conservative political divide are unanimously alarmed by two trends: the rise of extreme right-wing parties and rise in cases of molestation of women, allegedly at the hands of immigrants.

Syrians are not the first foreigners, or even Muslims, to seek shelter in Germany. According to a report by the Federal German office of Criminal Investigation (BKA), there is no co-relation between Germany’s current crime rate and the refugees. And yet, public perception seems at variance.

One telling sign is the dramatic rise of extreme right-wing parties whose rallies are attracting thousands of Germans of all age-groups, like the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA). Founded in 2014, PEGIDA even contested mayoral polls in 2015. Emboldened by a narrow loss, it announced its decision to contest all future polls. The next federal — or general — election is in 2017.

PEGIDA began small but rapidly gained supporters after the Paris terror attacks in 2015. Just five months ago, more than 20,000 people gathered at a PEGIDA rally in Dresden: This despite the fact that some of its goon-supporters have attacked journalists (whom they call “Die Lügenpresse” — “The lying media”) and indulged in other violence over the past few years.

At the rally in Dresden, Akif Pirinçci, an extreme right-wing writer — and, ironically, a Turkish migrant to Germany himself — thundered that Germany was becoming a “Muslim garbage dump”. He also claimed that mainstream politicians would love to throw all PEGIDA supporters into concentration camps, if the latter weren’t “unfortunately out of commission”. He was greeted by uproarious applause. Interestingly, PEGIDA’s manifesto states that the party is not against admitting those fleeing war or “Muslims who have integrated fully into German society”. In January 2016, 14 like-minded pan-European allies of PEGIDA met in the Czech Republic to form a so-called “Fortress Europe” coalition. “The history of Western civilisation will come to an end through Islam conquering Europe,” they declared.

The other group whose fortunes are rising is Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013. It won 4.7 per cent of the votes in the 2013 general elections, narrowly missing entry into the Bundestag, the German Parliament. Since last year, the AfD is represented in five German state assemblies.

German TV channel ZDF interviewed people at an AfD rally late last year. The interviews were not aired but uploaded on YouTube. There are kind-faced, elderly people who tell the interviewer that “Islam is an aggressive religion that simply does not belong in Europe”, while agreeing that refugees fleeing the war in Syria must be allowed to come to Germany as long as they “adapt to our lives and leave their religion at home.”

Xenophobia is unacceptable, but a look at incidents in Germany over the past several months will give a fair idea of what is instigating it.

A total of 738 women reported rape and molestation at an annual New Years’ Eve open-air party in Cologne, one of the most cosmopolitan cities of Germany and home to thousands of foreigners. Most of those arrested up to now are reportedly North African refugees. Last month, three young girls were groped, pinned down and then chased in broad daylight by 30 unidentified men in a shopping mall in Kiel. Two Afghan men were arrested but later released. Just last week young teenage girls were molested at supermarkets in Leipzig. Police say that the “suspects stem from Arabic-speaking circles”. Elsewhere, a Pakistani who was arrested for damaging stationary cars got drunk and attacked a man and his small child at an asylum hostel minutes after his release. A Tunisian pinned down and groped a woman in another shopping mall in Leipzig.

Policemen on patrol are often spat upon by migrants and called “Nazi pigs”. Though an offence in Germany, the policemen can hardly react because their experience teaches them that it is the easiest thing in the world to attract charges of “racism” by doing so.

“Groups of 20-30 young refugees often arm themselves with self-made ‘weapons’ made of furniture or anything handy and assemble expressly to cause trouble,” said Rainer Wendt, chief of the Federal German Police Union, in a television interview. “It’s very well for peaceniks to distribute teddy-bears and chant world peace, but it is my men whose hands are tied even when abused and attacked.”

Liberals often decry these incidents as “small matters” that “could happen anywhere in the world”. But their utopian vision of a pastoral, multi-cultural world fails to offer any solution to victims of such incidents.

“Assimilation” and “adaptation” can’t be dirty words, especially when many migrants carry misogynistic tendencies from their own cultures to Germany, where women enjoy equal rights with men and do not have to adhere to dress codes or public behaviour imposed on them by men.

Before the refugee crisis and given the German penchant for travel, Germany’s was not a society replete with fear for the foreigner. I speak from first-hand experience of my student years in remote towns where hardly anyone knew where India was, but were welcoming and curious.

But those days seem over.

According to a confidential police report leaked to a German daily, a dozen Arab clans rule Berlin’s criminal underworld. They deal in drugs, burgle departmental stores, rob banks and run a “parallel justice system”. If the state tries to intervene, witnesses are bribed or threatened with violence. Things have reached a head with both Germany’s interior minister as well as the EU commissioner pleading with Syrian refugees last week “to please try not to come to Europe”.

But the rich Middle East isn’t taking them in either. So where else can they go

The writer is a former South Asia bureau chief of Der Spiegel and a veteran foreign correspondent