Race hatred ingrained in downtrodden psyche

By CATHERINE FIELD

PARIS - Europe is looking on anxiously as Germany, after Austria, struggles to contain a rising wave of neo-Nazi violence directed against foreigners, asylum-seekers and Jewish sites.

A series of bloody xenophobic attacks has shocked Germany's neighbours into fretting whether the Government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has the power to root out the far right, especially in the breeding ground of former East Germany.

In the past three months, there have been more than 150 recorded acts of racist violence across the country, involving firebombings, beatings or desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, a 50 per cent rise over the same period a year earlier.

In one incident in Halle, two 16-year-olds and a 24-year-old accomplice kicked a Mozambican father of three to death. A bomb attack in Dusseldorf wounded 10 eastern European nationals, seven of them Jews.

The head of the European Union's watchdog, the European Observatory of Racist and Xenophobic Phenomena, says it is alarming to see a resurgence of neo-Nazism in Germany, the ideological source of the Third Reich, and urges Schroeder to act fast to stamp it out.

But those on the frontline caution that theirs is a long-term combat - a war of attrition against hatred.

Jean-Jerome Chico-Kaleu Muyemba, a Zairean, says xenophobia is worsening in the eastern state of Brandenburg, where he has been working for eight years, touring schools to teach children about Africa under a Government programme to promote racial tolerance.

"The most astonishing thing for me is that some teachers now express the same opinions as the pupils: that asylum-seekers contribute nothing, all they do is scrounge money from the welfare state," says Muyemba.

In the five states of the former East Germany which became part of the Federal Republic under reunification in 1990, ignorance and mistrust of foreigners became ingrained by a century of turbulence and totalitarianism: imperial rule, the Weimar Republic, Hitler and Communism.

Unlike West Germany, which imported several million Turkish "guest workers" for its economy, dark skins were a rare sight in the East.

In the realm of the Stasi secret police, spies were everywhere and the pressure to conform enormous.

Anyone who looked a little out of place, wore unusual clothing, spoke with a foreign accent or had one or two enviable consumer gadgets could easily get denounced to the Communist authorities.

Then there is the easterners' lowly status in their own country. Far from being lauded as heroes for overthrowing Communist dictatorship, East Germans are widely derided in the West as dimwits, reactionaries or obese bludgers who spend their days watching satellite TV.

Despite tens of billions of dollars spent on infrastructure and employment incentives, the East remains an economic disaster zone.

Joblessness in the East hovers around 18 per cent, double that of the West, while incomes for those in work are only about two-thirds of Westerners.

Angry and frustrated, many of the young have deserted their homes in search of work in the prosperous West.

Those who remain are bored, sullen and rootless - easy targets for the National Democratic Party (NPD), which with 6000 members is the biggest neo-Nazi group.

Just over a decade ago, many of these were children who wore the red scarf of the Pioneers, the Communists scout movement.

Now they are skinheads, with shaven heads, drainpipe jeans and heavy boots.

They have little ideology other than hatred of "Kanaks" and "Fidjis" - Africans and Asians. They sometimes gather in small demonstrations on occasions linked with the Third Reich, where they are often outnumbered by TV crews. But they inflict bloodshed beyond the view of the cameras, spreading fear and dismay on the way.

Belatedly, Schroeder is touring the East to ram home the message of tolerance. Several million marks, much of it from EU coffers, have been suddenly allocated to fund education programmes in schools, combat violence in railway stations and other crime spots and staff telephone helplines for victims of racism.

Celebrities are lending their name to an anti-fascist campaign. Major companies are declaring they will fire employees convicted of race hatred.

Internet service providers are clamping down on neo-Nazi websites.

The Government, meanwhile, is mulling whether to outlaw the NPD and two other far-right groups, the German People's Union (DVU) and the Republicans.

But to tackle the causes of the far right's popularity in the East will take more than a little preaching and a lightning crackdown, says Anetta Kahane, head of the Berlin Regional Office for Foreigners Issues, Youth Employment and Schooling.

"The problem is a decades-long deficit in democracy and awareness of minorities, foreigners and refugees. There is no fast-track solution for the development of democracy."