Opponents of W. German Census Riot in Berlin, Causing Heavy Damage; 100 Hurt

Left-wing activists, enraged at a police raid to confiscate leaflets urging a boycott of the May 25 West German census, waged a seven-hour riot that ended early Saturday with more than 100 injuries, nearly 50 arrests and extensive damage to buildings and vehicles.

A police spokesman said 100 policemen and three firemen were injured, 47 people arrested, four shops plundered and one razed, 12 automobiles damaged, a subway station wrecked, 16 fire department vehicles damaged and one set afire. Construction material and barricades were also set afire.

Medical workers estimated that at least 42 protesters were hurt.

Witnesses said about 400 police used tear gas and night sticks against about 300 people who stoned police through the night from behind barricades in the Kreuzberg district.

Police said the disorder erupted at a block party organized by leftist political groups at about 9 p.m. Friday and lasted until 4 a.m. Saturday in the working-class district that has attracted thousands of West German draft resisters, dropouts, squatters and members of the counterculture, all living alongside foreign workers.

Demonstrators rampaged through the Kreuzberg subway station and “made firewood of it,” wrecking signal equipment so that traffic had to be diverted to buses, the police spokesman said. He said it was not known when the station can be used again.

About noon Friday, police raided a four-story building used as a headquarters by various left-wing groups and the Census Boycott Information Office.

Leaflets Confiscated

Officers confiscated thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott of the census on the grounds information provided could be used by the state for repressive measures.

News of the raid was broadcast on the radio and police said the riot began hours later at a nearby block party organized by the Alternative List--the West Berlin branch of the Greens party--and the West Berlin branch of the East German Communist party.

Last week a similar raid was carried out in Bonn on the headquarters of the Greens, a small ecological, anti-nuclear political party that advocates withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Greens, who contend that “only sheep are counted,” oppose the census.

The census was originally scheduled for 1983 but was challenged and postponed when the Constitutional Court ordered changes to protect secrecy of the data.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl denounced the boycott as an attack on the democratic system. He said the government needs the census for planning purposes.

Irmgard Adam-Schwaetzer, a member of Parliament of the liberal Free Democratic Party, Kohl’s coalition partner, said many of the Greens “want another republic.”

Meanwhile, in Mutlangen, police arrested 44 demonstrators who blocked access to a Pershing 2 missile depot at the U.S. Army’s 56th Field Artillery Brigade.

Those arrested were about half the number of mostly elderly demonstrators who responded to the anti-nuclear movement’s call for a “Mothers’ Day and old people’s blockade” for nuclear disarmament, a police spokesman said.

Mutlangen has been the scene of repeated protests since late 1982 when the United States began stationing Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany.