Killing exposes the divisions in united Germany

By IMRE KARACS

SEBNITZ - The lights are on again at the green pharmacy where for days a detachment of police has stood guard, defending an empty building. Detectives from Dresden are searching through book shelves and computer disks. After seven hours they disappear with boxes under their arms.

The evidence they have gathered is unlikely to answer the question half the nation has been asking: "Who killed Joseph?" For the six-year-old boy, whose death has unleashed a wave of hatred towards all things east German, did not perish in his parents' shop. Joseph's limp body was pulled out of the outdoor swimming pool at the edge of Sebnitz on 13 June 1997. Neither his (west) German mother, Renate, nor the Iraqi father, Saad Abdulla, was present.

Yet the local authorities expect to find evidence of foul play in the victim's home. The police are working overtime to discover proof that they and the good burghers of Sebnitz had been falsely accused of covering up a heinous crime.

Sebnitz, a picturesque mountain resort by the Czech border, has been crucified in the past week in the (west) German media, after allegations that three years ago a boy was tortured to death in the swimming pool by neo-Nazi skinheads, and nobody helped him.

Based on the sworn testimonies of 15 witnesses, three people were arrested last week on suspicion of murder.

That event unleashed a chain reaction. Prosecutors in Dresden, the Saxon capital, admitted the original investigation and autopsy had been sloppy. A Lutheran pastor was suspended for suggesting on television Renate Kantelberg-Abdulla should have looked after her son better.

She appeared in a televised debate about racism, telling viewers: "Actually, I'm not proud to be German." Chancellor Gerhard Schröder met her in a show of solidarity. A church in Sebnitz held a special service for Joseph and other victims of racist crimes. The town was organising a torchlight procession to express its disgust with intolerance, indifference and hate.

The demonstration, planned for tomorrow, has been scrapped. The pastor is back with his flock, the suspects have been released and the focus of the investigation switched to the half-timbered pharmacy. The mother is now accused of concocting the story, and of paying witnesses, 13 of them children. All have withdrawn their statements.

"This has been the worst week in the 750-year history of Sebnitz," says Mike Ruckh, the Mayor. The DM50m-a-year ($NZ45m) tourism industry is in ruins, the property market has collapsed, companies in Sebnitz, including the local Bosch plant employing 500 people, are threatened with a nationwide trade boycott. Sebnitz, in seven days, has become almost synonymous with Auschwitz. The town's website has been bombarded with e-mails from the west calling for "concentration camps for Ossis".

Sebnitz suspects a conspiracy. "There is a deep chasm in German society," Mr Ruckh says. "What we are witnessing here, the sentiment between the west and the east, is also a kind of xenophobia." The neo-Nazi presence in his town and the rest of eastern Germany has been vastly exaggerated by biased "Wessi" media and politicians, he adds. The townsfolk agree. Joseph's death was an accident. Murder was invented by his Wessi mother, a Social Democrat councillor. The Christian Democrat mayor and regional government of Saxony will soon prove that.

"There are no Nazis here," says Mrs Köhler, the optician across the road from the pharmacy now surrounded with metal barriers. What about those who marched past her shop last week, threatening to stick a knife into Renate Kantelberg's belly? "No, no, no," she says, still smiling and shaking her head. But they were filmed. The whole of Germany saw them on their television screens. Mrs Köhler draws her breath and, still smiling, clarifies: "That was just four teenagers. But I've never heard of any neo-Nazis marching here."

A group of pupils from the Goethe-Gymnasium, the grammar school attended by Diana, Joseph's sister, think the boy drowned. But they say that Sebnitz, a town where 6.5 per cent voted for the NPD at the last elections, does have a far-right element. "Among stupid people, neo-Nazism is fashionable," says Oliver, a 15-year old.

Oliver and his friends are at the posh end of the town's social scale. Their hair is short but not that short. They say they do not hate foreigners, who make up about 1 per cent of the population of 10,000. "I eat Doner kebabs every day," Oliver boasts.

People are, after all, easily misunderstood in these parts. On this year's anniversary of unification, neo-Nazis staged a riot in the town centre. But those children were from outside Sebnitz, Richard adds.

Those local lads who sport an extremely short hair style gather at the elegant market square. No one, not even coachloads of policemen parked there, pay them any attention, so they are delighted to have the company of the foreign press.

"Foreigners are all rubbish," says Christian, a 19-year old bricklayer. "Except Englishmen." He is a polite young man, in a neat black outfit.

The Abdulla family, he says, "should go back to where they came from. Iraq or the West – I don't care.The majority of Sebnitz," he claims, "hates foreigners. They just don't say it out loud." Whether that is true, and whether it had any bearing on Joseph Abdulla's death, we shall probably never know.

"What Sebnitz has shown," wrote the liberal (west) German Süddeutsche Zeitung, "is that 10 years after unity, Germany remains divided. Each side has its own truth." And never the twain shall meet.