Chanting “Merkel out” and waving placards with slogans like “Rapefugees not welcome,” PEGIDA protesters on Saturday vented their fury against migrants after mass sexual assaults on Dec. 31.
Amid clashes with police, the protesters took aim at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, accusing her of allowing migrants to run amok through her liberal stance toward those fleeing war.
Tensions escalated when followers of the movement — about half of them violence-prone hooligans, according to police — marched and hurled beer bottles and firecrackers at police, shouting: “Where were you on New Year’s Eve?”
Photo: EPA
Riot police beat back the protesters with batons, teargas and water cannons in clashes that left three police and one journalist injured and in which police detained multiple demonstrators.
“Merkel has become a danger to our country. Merkel must go,” one speaker earlier told the 1,700-strong crowd, which loudly echoed the call, expressing their anger at the 1.1 million migrants who entered Germany last year.
“Tolerance is the final virtue of a dying society,” read another banner in the protest, organized by the local chapter of PEGIDA, the self-styled “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident.”
The heated protest was held in the Cologne railway station area that was the scene of the New Year’s Eve assaults, at which witnesses described the perpetrators as people of “North African or Arab” appearance.
Cologne police have come in for broad criticism for failing to stop the violence and being slow to report on it afterward, a scandal that on Friday claimed the scalp of city police chief Wolfgang Albers.
By Saturday, police had received 379 criminal complaints of groping, assaults, thefts and two rapes.
Federal police have said that a majority of suspects identified so far were of foreign origin, inflaming a debate over Germany’s ability to integrate the influx of refugees.
One PEGIDA speaker, a mother of four introduced only as Christiane, told the rally: “These women who fell victim will have to live with it for a long time. I feel like my freedom has been robbed.”
PEGIDA started life over a year ago as a Facebook group, initially drawing just a few hundred protesters in the eastern city of Dresden before gaining strength, peaking with rallies of 25,000 people. Interest subsequently began to wane following comments by founder Lutz Bachmann, and the surfacing of “selfies” in which he sported a Hitler moustache and hairstyle, but PEGIDA has seen a revival with the record influx of migrants.
The PEGIDA protesters on Saturday were greeted by 1,300 demonstrators who staged a counterprotest, chanting “Nazis raus” (Nazis out) as hundreds of the 2,000 deployed police separated the crowds.
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