100,000 Rally in Bonn Against Rightist Violence

Well over 100,000 people crowded into the city’s main park Saturday to voice solidarity with the country’s foreign population in the latest of a series of mass protests in Germany against right-wing extremist violence.

Rallying under the motto “Now Is the Time,” a handful of international human rights activists joined an array of personalities, primarily from the German political left, to denounce attacks against foreigners and demand that the country’s liberal law on political asylum be left unchanged.

“We need to do everything we can to make Germany a more generous and humane place in the 21st Century,” Beate Klarsfeld, a Paris-based Nazi hunter and human rights activist, told the crowd.

Rock bands and foreign singing groups entertained the demonstrators between speeches, giving the affair a light, relaxed atmosphere.

A large banner held aloft by colorful balloons near the front of the crowd at Bonn University read, “Against Hate, Against Violence.”

The mood in Bonn contrasted sharply with last Sunday’s far larger demonstration in Berlin against right-wing violence, which was disrupted by leftist youths who infiltrated the crowd of 300,000. The youths hurled eggs, fruit and rocks at leading government politicians, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the country’s president, Richard von Weizsaecker.

The peaceful nature of the Bonn protest resulted partly from the absence of leading national politicians.

Indeed, the rally was as much a demonstration against government plans to tighten the country’s liberal asylum law as it was a condemnation of xenophobia.

Kohl wants to tighten Germany’s liberal constitutional provision that grants the right of political asylum to anyone who asks.

Much of the right-wing violence has been directed against asylum seekers, mainly from southeastern Europe and the Third World, who have taken advantage of Germany’s asylum law to seek a better life in one of the world’s richest countries.

With the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the number of asylum seekers entering Germany has rocketed from a few thousand in the early 1980s to 152,000 in 1990 to an expected half a million this year.

Opinion polls indicate that a majority of Germans favor tightening the asylum law, bringing it into line with those of most of the country’s European Community partners.

Members of that left wing and other, more radical leftist groups were present in strength last weekend in Berlin and Saturday in Bonn. They derided Kohl’s policies as pandering to German voters whom his conservative Christian Democrats are afraid of losing to parties of the extreme right.

“We need to change ourselves, not the right of asylum,” read one placard at Saturday’s rally.

Ingrid Koeppe, a member of Parliament from the small, grass-roots New Forum that helped lead East Germany’s 1989 revolution, lumped what she called “lying politicians” together with right-wing extremists and xenophobes as those who endanger German democracy.

“These politicians talk about the inviolability of human dignity but at the same time send refugees back to their countries of origin under difficult and threatening conditions,” she said.

The wave of protests against xenophobia during the past two weeks has also pulled members of the country’s so-called silent majority into the streets, and Saturday was no exception.

Martin Stabbenboch, a 61-year-old engineer, said he traveled from the Ruhr region, 50 miles north of Bonn, to take part in his first political demonstration.

In related developments, Kohl’s interior minister, Rudolf Seiters, called Saturday for a ban on many of the right-wing extremist organizations that are not already forbidden to operate in Germany, while Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger proposed a ban on neo-Nazi symbols. The symbols of Nazism, such as the swastika, are already banned under German law.