A German court has said that a military officer indicted on allegations that he plotted to kill prominent politicians and blame the attack on refugees will go on trial in May.

The case of the officer, identified only as 1st Lt Franco A in line with German privacy rules, raised concerns about extremism in the country’s military.

The Frankfurt state court said he will go on trial on May 18.

The 32-year-old suspect, who is currently free pending trial, is accused of planning a serious act of violence among other offences.

Prosecutors allege the suspect, whom they have described as a “right-wing nationalist”, managed to pose as a Syrian asylum seeker and planned to carry out his attack under that identity so that refugees would be blamed.

His alleged targets included then-justice minister Heiko Maas and he had stockpiled four firearms including an assault rifle, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and more than 50 explosive devices, some stolen from military stores, prosecutors said.

The suspect came to the attention of authorities after he was arrested in February 2017 while going to retrieve a pistol he had stashed in a Vienna airport bathroom.

He was freed, but Austrian authorities informed Germany.

When the soldier’s fingerprint matched the one he had given when he registered as a refugee, it triggered the investigation.

Hundreds of migrants from a burned-out tent camp in north-west Bosnia remain packed in buses where they had spent the night after an attempt to relocate them failed.

Bosnian authorities sent buses on Tuesday to transfer the migrants from the much-criticised Lipa camp to an army barracks in central Bosnia.

The mass move was cancelled after local residents organised protests to prevent the relocation.

On Wednesday morning and later in the day, migrants were still inside the buses, local media reported.

The Lipa camp near Bosnia’s border with Croatia was demolished in a fire last week and lacked basic facilities such as running water or heating.

Some 1,000 migrants were stranded there for days during a spate of snowy and windy winter weather that followed the fire.

The situation has prompted EU officials and aid groups to warn of a looming humanitarian disaster and increased pressure on Bosnia to act to move the migrants away from the camp.

The troubled Balkan country, which went through a devastating war in the 1990s, has been struggling with the influx of thousands of people seeking to reach western Europe.

Bickering among Bosnia’s ethnically divided authorities has prevented an organised response to the crisis, leaving some 3,000 migrants sleeping rough or in makeshift tents.

The head mufti of the Islamic Community of Bosnia, Husein Kavazovic, called for better treatment of migrants, describing the situation as “shameful” for both the country and the rest of Europe.

“We do not treat people in need in such a way,” he said in a statement.

Most migrants are staying in the north-west corner of Bosnia, where they hope to cross into European Union member Croatia before moving on towards wealthy EU nations.

To get to Croatia, migrants use mountainous illegal routes and often face pushbacks and alleged violence at the hands of Croatia’s police.

Read more: Croation Jews boycott official Holocaust memorial over rising neo-Nazism

Liberal democracy, the foundational principle of western societies, has been increasingly vulnerable. Globalisation and its fast pace has delivered undeniable benefits but brought with it unattended challenges, namely swiftly growing wealth inequalities and a deepening sense of cultural fragmentation. The atomisation of society has increasingly pushed people to the margins to rediscover a sense of belonging and meaning from a politics they feel no longer answers to them but elitist institutions, both economically and culturally.

The threat to liberal democracy today approaches from primarily two wings.

The first is the populist white nationalist right. A tide of authoritarian politics has swept across Europe and America. The political cultures of each nation-state vary meaning drawing a set of common variables, and thus a solution, is too simplistic. But arguably, a mixture of economic disillusionment in the wake of the financial crash in 2008 and imposition of austerity measures combined with cultural anxiety at fast-paced and large-scale immigration has triggered an opening for authoritarian politics to step forward. In the face of their emergence, social democratic parties have simply not been able to provide coherent answers.

Europe has witnessed a march to the populist right across a range of countries including France and Germany. In Hungary and Italy, right-wing governments who pitched their manifestos on anti-migrant and anti-refugee rhetoric swept into power. Orban has chilling consequences possibly for Muslims and Jews living in Hungary. Italy’s various ministers have made repulsive statements around Roma immigrants. Even in France and Germany, the far-right have weakened the mainstream political settlement. In Britain, UKIP made a brief surge before melting away but not before spearing Britain towards Brexit. In America, Donald Trump ran on a campaign of building a wall to keep out Mexicans, to stop outsourcing jobs to China and ban Muslim migrants. It unfortunately worked.

So why are these politicians, who for all their deference to western political traditions and culture are attacking institutions of liberty be it a free media or judiciary as well as adopting thuggish tactics with protesters, gaining such prominence?

Asserting the primacy of economic grievances would be a mistake. Not all populist voters are unemployed or at the bottom end of the labour market. But a bleak forecast of the future and nostalgic yearning for the past exists even amongst more middle-class families. With growing inequality and dwindling resources, many feel locked out of the best opportunities and see a closed off set of elitist interests dominating them. It would be wrong to say that the financial crash created populism, or even the grounds for it, but it certainly fertilized it with the anger and resentment it needed. Desperate material conditions unanswered by politicians paved way for populists to emerge and demand a return to times when the value of nation-states and all from it was respected.

An example of this is Britain. The closing of industries that provided a sense of security, communal solidarity and identity to many towns created an economic rust and power and wealth relocated almost entirely to London. Communities became bogged down in chronic unemployment and poverty, atomised by the dearth of decent jobs and forced relocation of workers travelling south to find economic prosperity. This was before austerity rolled over the country like a black wave, squeezing public services, cutting welfare at a time when wages weren’t above the poverty line and power lay with employers and landlords. Such a climate made people regard the EU and Westminster as distant elitist institutions that did not represent them. They voted Leave to make their voices finally heard. Why after all would they vote for a continuation of the status quo governed by a party ushering in public spending cuts whilst trimming taxes for the wealthy?

Yet it would be too naïve to assume this alone or even primarily explains the flare in support for populist politics. Globalisation has changed communities at a fast pace, with sense of control now lost and a feeling of cultural fragmentation taking place. It doesn’t help that the sort of communal jobs were closed by Thatcher while communal hotspots like pubs and SureStart have increasingly declined either. A place where people can interact with others and feel like they belong in their local communities has been lost. The commodification of migrant workers rather than viewing them as long-term stakeholders in these communities has also weakened these social bonds. We demonised those uncomfortable by their neighbours not knowing English as racist rather than recognising that sharing a common language is the basis upon which you build social bonds in a community, and not knowing it only otherwise isolates migrants and creates loneliness. People look at their towns and feel like something is missing. These are challenges which have been ignored and need to be addressed. That we have not is partially why the far-right have grown in power and authoritarian parties have taken office.

The other side of it is that we have been inconsistent in our defence of tolerance, freedom, equality and pluralism. Migrants and refugees have been portrayed as burdens and threats rather than important facets of any society, both historically and currently, and both economically and culturally. Racism is normalised in political discourse rather than obliterated entirely. It has had corrosive impact on diverse communities and further fractured relations. The portrayal of Muslims as terrorists and extremists rather than ordinary people who are often at the forefront and the first victims of Islamic extremism must also be challenged. From the rhetoric of politicians to newspapers, discourse around Muslims has normalised a climate where it is increasingly fashionable to abuse a Muslim on the streets. Britain remains considerably better off than its European peers where the rights and protections for minorities remain considerably worse. In challenging the white nationalists, we should not let them dominate the narratives on economy and immigration by allowing immigrants and refugees to be cast as threats to national identity and security. Compassion and empathy is ingrained in us and the British society has evidently shown that years of anti-refugee headlines can be made redundant in one second by the powerful image of a dead refugee child washing up on a Turkish beach. But we must be do better in ensuring it does not reach that stage for the sake of refugees. A compassionate and empathetic politics which listens to voters’ concerns and carries out its humanitarian duties is extremely compatible.

A politics reaffirming the value of citizenship, common good, solidarity and mutual obligation can bind people together in mixed communities and ensure that different identities and cultural expressions need not necessarily result in social tensions.

The second threat to liberal democracy is one both leftists and conservatives can agree upon at least as a problem, which is Islamism. The past twenty years has seen western societies repeatedly attacked by Islamist extremists. Politicians and journalists have explored the factors behind extremism but seldom found an argument that makes sense with too much coherence. But, what is unquestionable is that Islamism is causing anxiety within many societies and presents a dangerous threat to basic British values of liberty, tolerance, democracy, human rights and rule of law. A reluctant to criticize a strand of the religion which applies a literalist interpretation of its tenets has allowed the far-right and Islamic extremists to feed off each other. On the left we have regularly made excuses for those radicalized by Islamism and then watched as evidence has repeatedly debunked these claims. Arguments of western imperialism should fall flat given how many young British Muslims were radicalized by both the Syrian conflict but also the appeal of the Caliphate. It would be a fallacy to suggest that religion itself is at fault here or the only reason, but that many young Muslims did not see Britain as their home and community, that they did not feel a sense of attachment but rather exclusion is undoubtedly a factor behind why Islamism is too dangerous to ignore. In the dystopian caliphate, their identity is central to society and their life has purpose and meaning. It is on us to find solutions to stop the few becoming radicalized by Islamist propaganda. This is a battle of integration and values, that requires fighting whether Islamism had a violent edge or not.

By Rabbil Sikdar

Police in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria are investigating two officers suspected of performing the illegal Hitler salute.

The German constitution makes it a crime to exhibit Nazi symbols and the incident is likely to feed into a heated debate about racism and the rise of the far right after a record influx of mainly Muslim migrants three years ago.

Police said in a statement on Saturday the two policemen had shouted anti-immigrant remarks and made the salute in a pub in the city of Rosenheim on Thursday. It based its information on a witness who was in the same beer garden as the two officers.

A third man, described as a security guard in the police statement, had also taken part and made the salute. The policemen have been suspended.

German politicians have been urging action to combat a rise in hostility toward foreigners after skinheads last Sunday clashed with police in an eastern city where a man was fatally stabbed and two migrants were identified as the main suspects.

Skinheads raised their arms in Nazi salutes, chased people who appeared to be outsiders and wrestled with police in Chemnitz after police identified the suspects as a Syrian and an Iraqi.

The leaking of the arrest warrant for one of the two stabbing suspects to the anti-Islam group PEGIDA raised concerns that some justice officials in the state of Saxony, where Chemnitz is located, were sympathetic to the far right.

“We will not allow the extreme right to infiltrate our society,” Justice Minister Katarina Barley told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday, urging authorities in Saxony to investigate far-right groups.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal immigration policy remains deeply divisive in a country that has taken in more than 1.6 million people over the last four years.

The influx contributed to the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which entered parliament for the first time in an election last year with a campaign that proclaimed Islam to be incompatible with the German constitution.

Some 8,000 people took part in a demonstration organised by the AfD and the anti-Islam group PEGIDA in Chemnitz on Saturday. About 3,000 people attended a rival protest by leftist groups.

Police said on Sunday that the demonstrations were largely peaceful.

Leftist groups will hold a concert in the city on Monday to denounce xenophobia and hatred against refugees and foreigners.

Jordan said on Thursday it would lead a campaign to raise funds for the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees, to help it survive after the United States cut its funding.

Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said a meeting next month in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly would mobilise support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to continue core education and health services.

“Any shortage in funding will drive hundreds of thousands towards deprivation and despair,” Safadi, whose country has 2.2 million U.N. registered Palestinian refugees, said in Amman after meeting Pierre Krahenbuhl, the UNRWA head. Jordan will call for an Arab League meeting to lobby for donors to cover the $200 million shortfall needed to shore up UNRWA, Safadi said.

UNRWA has faced a cash crisis since the United States, long its biggest donor, earlier this year slashed funding, saying the agency needed to make unspecified reforms and calling on the Palestinians to renew peace talks with Israel.

The agency was founded in 1949 after the first Arab-Israel war, in the wake of the exodus of around 700,000 refugees who fled or were driven out of Israel on its founding as a state.

UNRWA now looks after more than 5 million descendants of those original refugees, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“One cannot wish 5.3 million Palestine refugees away. These are people who have rights and for many years now, for decades have faced a plight and injustice that is simply immense,” UNRWA’s Krahenbuhl said at a news conference with Safadi.

“As long as a just a lasting solution has not found of the issue of Israel-Palestine conflict we will continue to implement the mandate that the General Assembly has given us.”

The Palestinians assert the right under international law to return to homes abandoned in Israel or be compensated. Safadi said funding cuts for UNRWA undermine that right.

“The continuation of UNRWA means continued commitment by the international community to working towards a just solution of the refugees that guarantees the right of return and compensation,” Safadi said.

Safadi last week raised the plight of UNRWA with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington where officials say he warned of “dangerous consequences” to regional stability if the financial crisis were not resolved.

More than 100 African migrants managed to force their way into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco on Wednesday when hundreds tried to storm the highly fortified border, a Spanish police spokesman said.

Television images showed some of the migrants with bloodied arms and legs, apparently caused by the razor wire that tops the border fences, cheering as they walked towards a temporary reception centre. Most of them were young men.

“I love Spain!” shouted one. Some were draped in European Union and Spanish flags.

More than 3,800 migrants have crossed the Moroccan border into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla so far this year, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR. The route accounted for 14 percent of the total 27,600 who arrived, mainly by sea, between January and July, a 130 percent increase on the previous year.

Five migrants were injured in the jump, and seven Spanish policemen suffered burns caused by a corrosive substance thrown by the migrants, the spokesman said.

During a recent visit to Spain, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed to increase dialogue with Morocco to handle migrant inflows to Spain, which is now the main destination for people seeking a better life in Europe.

EU leaders have failed to agree a long-term plan on where to house migrants since brokering a convoluted deal in June that appeared designed to appease divergent views rather than provide concrete solutions to the crisis.

Eight days ago, five European Union countries agreed to take in 141 migrants on board the Mediterranean rescue ship Aquarius, a move that ended a four-day standoff in which Spain, Tunisia and Malta refused the ship entry.

The United Nations is awaiting “effective access” to the Myanmar region where 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven out in an army crackdown, months after agreeing with the government to aid the return of refugees, the U.N. country head said on Tuesday.

The organisation’s agencies for development and refugees – UNDP and UNHCR – signed a memorandum of understanding with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in June to allow Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh last year to return home.

But requests for authorisations for staff to visit the conflict area have been beset by delays and authorities have offered access to a limited area, Knut Ostby, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, told Reuters.

Ostby said the United Nations had declined to accept an offer from the government to work in a limited number of villages and would not send in experts until it had negotiated a better deal.

“They’re standing ready to go when we have effective access,” he said.

“We need to have the possibility to do a proper job.”

His comments came despite an announcement from Suu Kyi on Tuesday that her government had “granted access” to the United Nations to work in 23 villages across northern Rakhine State as part of a “pilot assessment programme”.

The United Nations wants to implement “quick impact projects” to benefit the population still there, including cash-for-work schemes and small-scale infrastructure projects.

Ostby said he did not know how the 23 villages, spread out across Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, had been selected.

The United Nations wanted to work in villages next to one another, he said, to avoid the risk of creating “inequality among neighbouring villages”.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay said the United Nations could work within the selected areas first and then expand its operations.

“As far as I understand, UNDP is to implement pilot project within the allowed villages and extend afterwards,” Zaw Htay said. “If UNDP does not think it’s enough, they would have to discuss with the government.”

The United Nations as been mostly barred from northern Rakhine State since August last year, when the government accused U.N. agencies of supplying food to Rohingya militants.

The Rohingya, who regard themselves as native to Rakhine state, are widely considered as interlopers by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and are denied citizenship.

The June deal between the United Nations and the government was not made public, but a draft was seen by Reuters and also leaked online last month.

Refugee leaders and human rights groups said the deal failed to give assurances that returning refugees would be granted citizenship and freedom of movement.

Ostby said the United Nations had advocated for the release of the memorandum of understanding.

“We have proposed to the government that it would be a good idea to make it public,” he said. “Having said that, we recognise that such agreements are not normally publicised in other countries.”

A growing number of migrants are finding jobs in Germany, according to data released on Tuesday that will give heart to supporters of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let in hundreds of thousands of war refugees since 2015.

Figures last week also showed that German companies have managed to attract more apprentices to on-the-job training schemes due to a surge in applications from asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria.

The figures will feed into a running debate in Germany on the impact of Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open German borders to more than a million migrants, many of them refugees from war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Critics including the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have said the new arrivals will be a burden on Germany’s welfare system and economy.

But the head of Germany’s Labour Office, Detlef Scheele, told dpa news agency there was no reason to be overly pessimistic about the country’s ability to cope with the record number of arrivals.

“This is all going pretty well,” he said, adding that the numbers were slightly better than expected. “These are good numbers, also taking into account that the people came here for humanitarian reasons and not for finding a job,” Scheele added.

The number of employed migrants from the eight countries with the biggest numbers of asylum seekers surged by more than 100,000 to 306,574 in May compared with the same month in the previous year, data from the Labour Office showed.

SKILLED LABOUR SHORTAGE

Among those, roughly three out of four had a labour contract in which the company and the employee were paying full contributions to social insurance schemes, the data showed.

There were roughly 500,000 people from the eight main asylum seeker countries who were registered as looking for work in July, the data showed. This includes people who are currently completing an integration and language course.

Among those, nearly 197,000 people were registered as unemployed which is roughly in line with the level seen a year earlier, the data showed.

Shortages of skilled labour and a lack of young people willing to commit to on-the-job training for up to 3 1/2 years have become big concerns for managers in Europe’s largest economy.

Vacancies for training positions have reached their highest level in more than 20 years with more than a third of companies unable to fill all of their training spots.

The number of new arrivals in Germany has fallen sharply this year, partly due to stricter border controls across Europe as well as tighter asylum rules in Germany and other countries.

]]> 7811 https://www.faith-matters.org/sting-blasts-leaders-as-cowards-over-migration-crisis/ Sun, 24 Jun 2018 00:06:16 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=7432

British singer and actor Sting called world leaders “half men and cowards” on Saturday for their inability to solve the refugee crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already played down expectations of a breakthrough at hastily-arranged talks among EU leaders on Sunday on the migration dispute dividing Europe and threatening her own government.

Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said on Saturday he expects a chain reaction across the European Union if Germany closes its borders to refugees.

Migration policies in the U.S. have also been in the spotlight.

“Thank God for Greece because you have shown the way,” said Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, at an Amnesty International event in Athens.

“You have shown how to treat refugees when other people are building walls. When children are being taken from their mothers and put in cages, you are acting with compassion and generosity and commonsense,” he said.

“Because our so-called leaders, a sad parade of half-men, cowards, have not got the solutions … Once again Greece has shown us how to be civilized.”

Nearly a million refugees passed through and got support from Greece in 2015, as the country was dealing with its own major financial crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday abandoned a policy of separating migrant children from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border, after images of youngsters in cages sparked outrage at home and abroad.

Sting told Reuters the family separation policy was “brutal” and “barbaric”.

The former frontman for The Police was in Athens for two concerts as part of world tour.

The first far-right party set to enter Germany’s parliament for more than a half a century says it will press for Chancellor Angela Merkel to be “severely punished” for opening the door to refugees and migrants.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has also called for Germany’s immigration minister to be “disposed of” in Turkey where her parents come from, could become the third largest party with up to 12 percent of the vote on Sept. 24, polls show.

That is far less than similar movements in other European countries – in France far-right leader Marine Le Pen won 34 percent of the vote in May and in the Netherlands far-rightist Geert Wilders scored 13 percent in a March election.

But the prospect of a party that the foreign minister has compared with the Nazis entering the heart of German democracy is unnerving the other parties. They all refuse to work with the AfD and no one wants to sit next to them in parliament.

Leading AfD candidate Alexander Gauland denies they are Nazis, saying others only use the term because of the party’s popularity. It has won support with calls for Germany to shut its borders immediately, introduce a minimum quota for deportations and stop refugees bringing their families here.

“We’re gradually becoming foreigners in our own country,” Gauland told an election rally in the Polish border city of Frankfurt an der Oder.

A song with the lyrics “we’ll bring happiness back to your homeland” blared out of a blue campaign bus and the 76-year-old lawyer said Germany belonged to the Germans, Islam had no place here and the migrant influx would make everyone worse off.

Gauland provoked outrage for saying at another event that Germans should no longer be reproached with the Nazi past and they should take pride in what their soldiers achieved during World War One and Two.

The Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, during which time they killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and invaded countries across Europe.

The AfD could end up as the biggest opposition force in the national assembly if there is a re-run of the current coalition of Merkel’s conservatives and Social Democrats (SPD) — one of the most likely scenarios.

That would mean it would chair the powerful budget committee and open the general debate during budget consultations, giving prominence to its alternatives to government policies.

Georg Pazderski, a member of the AfD’s executive board, told Reuters his party would use parliamentary speeches to draw attention to the cost of the migrant crisis, troubles in the euro zone – which the AfD wants Germany to leave – and problems related to the European Union.

“We’ll have a voice when we’re in parliament,” he said. “We won’t be an easy opposition.”

He expects other parties will shun the AfD for a year or two but ultimately work with it, pointing to the regional assembly in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD and Merkel’s Christian Democrats voted to set up a committee to investigate left-wing extremism.

Gauland told Reuters the AfD would call for a committee to investigate the chancellor after entering parliament: “We want Ms Merkel’s policy of bringing 1 million people into this country to be investigated and we want her to be severely punished for that.”

For an interactive graphic on German elections click – http://tmsnrt.rs/2h0NqCT

SUITS, NOT SKINHEADS

MPs have already changed the qualification for the ceremonial post of doyen of parliament to the longest-serving MP rather than the oldest, likely to have been an AfD member.

Sahra Wagenknecht, top candidate of the radical Left party, told Reuters it was important to look at individuals for committees but added: “I won’t elect any AfD member who belongs to Bjoern Hoecke’s wing and who really represents Nazi views into any position of responsibility.”

Hoecke has denied that Adolf Hitler was “absolutely evil”, described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” and demanded a “180 degree turnaround” in the way Germany seeks to atone for Nazi crimes.

The justice minister said some of the AfD’s programme like its demand to ban minarets is unconstitutional.

Alexander Hensel, who studied the AfD’s role in regional parliaments for the Otto Brenner Foundation, said debates in state assemblies had become more polarised since the AfD arrived and some other MPs would not shake hands with the newcomers.

“The AfD’s aggressive right-wing positions have intensified the debates while the tone and way people deal with each other in parliament has become noticeably rougher due to the AfD’s tough rhetoric and targeted provocations,” he said.

Unlike previous right-wing movements in Germany the AfD – founded in 2013 by an anti-euro group of academics – has become socially acceptable so radicalised people from the middle class feel able to vote for it alongside classic radical right-wing voters, said Manfred Guellner, head of Forsa polling institute.

“You don’t vote for skinheads but you can vote for professors in suits,” said Guellner, referring to the likes of Gauland, who tends to wear tweed jackets.

The AfD is unlikely to gain much more support though, said Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, predicting worsening infighting over whether to aim for government or stay in opposition.

“They’ll add to the yelling and screaming in the Bundestag,” he said, but added: “I don’t see them spreading like a cancer through society.”