BONN, Germany -- The people who live in the trim row houses with
well-tended gardens that line the streets of this spa town along the
Rhine like to boast of their city's tolerance, which dates to its time
as the capital of West Germany and home to dozens of foreign embassies.
"We used to be a city of diplomats," said Christa Menden, who owns a flower shop.
But
since 1999, when the central government moved to Berlin, the capital of
the reunited Germany, the diplomats have gone. Now there is a growing
population of Muslim immigrant families, many of whom have moved into
the neighborhood of Bad Godesberg, filling many of the houses left empty
by the shift in capitals.
Today Bonn, once tranquil, is a
volatile cocktail of social tensions between its Muslim newcomers, who
include some German converts as well as immigrants from Arab-speaking
countries, with some hard-core elements, and a far-right nationalist
group that is mounting a growing campaign against them.
Last
month, about 200 Muslims, many from other cities, gathered to defend the
honor of the Prophet Muhammad after the far-right Pro-NRW party (for
North Rhine-Westphalia) threatened to display caricatures of the Prophet
during an anti-Muslim rally in front of the King Fahd Academy, an
Islamic school built in 1995 by Saudi Arabia's government.
After
the authorities tried unsuccessfully to win a court injunction
preventing the display, they parked police vans to block the view of the
offending cartoons. But after one of the 30 or so rightists climbed on
the shoulders of another to flash the cartoon at the Muslims, who had
just finished praying, a shower of rocks and shards from smashed flower
pots flew at the police in response.
"They just exploded," said
Robin Fassbender, a prosecutor in Bonn, who has begun an investigation
that could yield attempted murder charges against a 25-year-old Muslim
protester who sneaked through the police barrier and stabbed three
officers, wounding two seriously.
By the time the rioting stopped on May 6, the police said, they had rounded up 109 Muslim protesters.
"They
viewed the police as an organ of the state that wanted to insult
Muslims by failing to prevent the caricatures from being shown," Mr.
Fassbender said. "That is a different dimension of violence than these
officers are used to. They are trained to regularly take stones and
broken bottles, but not to be specifically attacked like this."
Days
earlier the same far-right group held a similar protest in another
city, Solingen, where the cartoons of Muhammad were also paraded. The
police there detained 32 Muslim protesters after they clashed with
officers, throwing stones and charging the barriers separating them from
the far-right demonstrators.
The violence, which was preceded by
a nationwide campaign by Salafists to hand out Korans in cities, has
refocused the authorities' attention on what they call a threat from the
conservative Salafist movement.
German's interior minister,
Hans-Peter Friedrich, has vowed to take stronger action against the
Salafists. While they account for a tiny fraction of the estimated 4.3
million Muslims living in Germany, he noted, nearly all Islamic
extremists known to German security officials, including several
charismatic preachers, have links to the movement. They have proved
adept at using social media and Internet forums to attract young
followers in Bonn and surrounding areas.
The King Fahd Academy,
where the clashes with the police took place, stands incongruously in
Bad Godesberg, its gold-topped minaret rising against the deep green
bluffs of the Drachenfels crag, where legend has it that Siegfried slew
the dragon.
The school was intended to offer a traditional Arabic
curriculum to children of diplomats stationed in Bonn. The city
authorities tried to close the school in 2003 after it emerged that it
taught an extreme form of Islam that encouraged a violent rejection of
the Western humanistic values enshrined in the German Constitution.
A
compromise was reached, and the school has become a magnet for Muslim
families. Several hundred move to Bonn each year, and Muslims now make
up about 10 percent of the city's population. Many are wealthy Arabs
attracted to Bonn's outstanding medical facilities.
The Bonn
police spokesman, Harry Kolbe, said, however, that the influx had also
brought young Muslims with no jobs or diplomas, who clashed with their
wealthier peers.
Ms. Menden, whose flower shop sits on a corner
opposite the King Fahd Academy, said she was traumatized by watching
what had begun as a peaceful protest deteriorate into a street riot
beneath her window. At first, Ms. Menden said, young men, many with long
beards and traditional Arabic clothing, greeted her politely. She was
impressed by how they had laid out their rugs in the center of the
street and bent in unison to pray.
But at some point, she said,
she noticed that several young men were stuffing their pockets with the
small slate chips that lined the garden along her exterior wall. "I went
over to fuss at them, and one turned and threw the stones back in my
face," she said. Her husband pulled her inside to safety.
She
said it still upset her to know that the stones from her garden were
thrown at the police by the very people who moments earlier had greeted
her politely. "I do not feel hate, I do not feel fear," Ms. Menden said.
"I feel disappointment."
Other residents blame the city's own
education system for the troubles. Classes are taught in Arabic at
several elementary schools, part of an effort at integration begun in
2003, when several hundred students had to leave the King Fahd Academy.
"Years
of work on integration were unraveled in that demonstration," said
Annette Schwolen-Flümann, district mayor of Bad Godesberg.
Less
than an hour after the disturbance, residents swept away the dirt and
debris from the overturned flowerpots. Many were Muslims who had sought
to keep the peace that Saturday afternoon and were themselves struggling
to come to terms with the events.
A Muslim woman who gave her
name only as Ms. Elbay because, she said, she did not feel comfortable
being identified in media outlets, said she has lived behind the parking
lot where the rightist group held its demonstration for the past 11
years without any trouble.
"It is difficult for us as Muslims,"
Ms. Elbay said. "Our image is always being destroyed. We do our best to
try to live a normal life; we send our children to integrated play
groups, we have German friends, and then these people come and destroy
it," she said, referring to the Muslim demonstrators who had turned
violent.
Ms. Menden insisted that now she struggled to fight back anger whenever a Muslim neighbor greeted her.
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