Violence on the Streets of Germany

Hosted by Germany’s Angela Merkel the recent G-20 meeting was supposed to present the German Chancellor as the new leader of the Western, if not world alliance. You know, the alliance that has formed to fight the good fight against the climate.

Evidently, the world leaders who mattered were American president Trump, Russian president Putin and Chinese president Xi. Their meetings dominated news coverage. Chancellor Merkel was not present at those important meetings.

Instead, she was trying to explain what went wrong in Hamburg. After all, she had chosen the city to host the meetings. And she is ultimately responsible for controlling the rioting and the looting that was put on by leftist activists, environmentalists and various Muslim groups. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on the breakdown of law and order:

A riot that raged for hours just a mile from the Group of 20 meeting site left German officials struggling to explain Saturday how protests that had long been predicted spiraled out of control.

Only after SWAT teams, riot police and water cannons swept block by block were authorities able to end the overnight riots in the left-leaning Schanzenviertel neighborhood, a 20-minute walk from the venue where leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies continued their two-day meeting Saturday.

Stores were looted, barricades and cars set on fire, and officers attacked with rocks, bottles and slingshots, Hamburg police said. Authorities moved to quell the riots only after they had raged for hours, according to several shopkeepers in one of the hardest-hit streets.

Rioters fully intended to commit violent mayhem:

A police spokesman said intelligence suggesting some of the roughly 1,500 rioters were preparing to pelt authorities from buildings with cobblestones and Molotov cocktails had caused the delay. “We had prepared for the G-20 summit to be attacked, not the people of Hamburg,” Hamburg police spokesman Timo Zill told ZDF public television.

 The Schanzenviertel riot appeared to be the most violent flare-up as tens of thousands of people protested across the city. By Saturday morning, 265 people had been detained and 213 officers injured, according to the police. An unspecified number of protesters were also injured.

The German government failed to control the situation:

But critics claiming the government had miscalculated intensified their attacks Saturday. The conservative opposition leader in the Hamburg legislature, André Trepoll, slammed center-left Mayor Olaf Scholz for going easy on left-wing extremism. The Bild tabloid, Germany’s top-selling paper, said both Mr. Scholz and German Chancellor Angela Merkel —who is up for re-election in September—bore responsibility for the events.

“The feeling of general security, which the state must guarantee, has ceased to exist in Hamburg in the last 48 hours,” Julian Reichelt, a top Bild editor, wrote in Saturday’s edition. “The horrific message of Hamburg is: if the mob wants to rule, it will rule.”

So much for Merkel’s enlightened leadership.

The New York Times also reported  on the situation in the streets of Hamburg. Entitled,  “Everybody Went Totally Mad’: 2nd Night of Violence in Hamburg,” the Times story also laid out the issues clearly:

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces an election in two months, had hoped the demonstrations would show leaders of other G-20 nations where protests are routinely quashed that a thriving democracy can withstand public criticism and dissent.

Instead, Ms. Merkel had to condemn the violence and explain why the streets of Hamburg, a wealthy port city, at times looked like a war zone.

Merkel was trying to show the world what a thriving democracy looks like. No doubt she was also trying to justify her own open-arms policy to refugees. Some believed that Merkel had unleashed a crime wave. She wanted to show that Germans could live in peace and harmony, even with their divisions and their Muslim refugees.

The Times reports the scene:

Hours later, 1,500 black-clad anarchists rampaged through the streets of the city’s Schanzen district, plundering shops and setting fire to cars and trash cans for several hours, the police said. An elite unit of special forces was called in to quell the violence, but only after extensive damage had been done.

The police said on Saturday that they had arrested 43 people in connection with the violence on Friday night. Ninety-six others remained in detention, pending an investigation. The police also said that 213 officers had been injured. Activists reported multiple injuries among the protesters, at least two of whom were hospitalized.

Who organized the protests?

 Jan van Aken, a lawmaker with the Left Party, organized the demonstration with several other groups, including the Hamburg Refugee Council, local environmentalists and the Communist Party.

On the ground the scene was horrific:

Residents of the Schanzen district awoke Saturday to the smell of fire and the sight of shattered storefronts. The police said that about 500 protesters had looted a supermarket and then set it on fire as they retreated.

Videos posted on social media sites showed the smashed glass of a looted electronics store that sold Apple iPhones and other devices. Another showed masked demonstrators in black clothes plundering a grocery store; in yet another, masked protesters could be seen being chased by masked and heavily armed police officers against a backdrop of flames and smoke.

And also:

Vanessa Lamm, a Schanzen resident who observed the protests in the district until about 2 a.m., said the police had waited to act until demonstrators began throwing stones and destroying property.

“Everybody went totally mad after that — the police and the people,” Ms. Lamm said. “When they started to destroy the shops, the police went in along with the special forces, who were stronger.”

By morning, residents were cleaning up trash and assessing the situation. Piles of charred bicycles and a refrigerator lay on the sidewalk. Dozens of shop windows — even those that had been taped with “No G20” and other slogans — had been reduced to shards.

Bloomberg reports on Merkel’s reaction. Instead of standing strong and proud as a world leader, Merkel was reduced to explaining why her government had lost control of the streets of Hamburg:

Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the decision to host the Group of 20 summit in Germany’s second-biggest city, promising government compensation for property damage in the wake of looting and rioting by anti-capitalist activists in Hamburg.

Speaking at the end of the summit on Saturday, Merkel told reporters that, from a pure logistical point of view, the two-day gathering had to be held in a large city, given the sheer number of leaders and guests needing housing. Hamburg was also chosen as a symbol of openness to trade because the city of 1.7 million is Germany’s largest port and richest state per capita.

True enough, Germany has been known as an orderly country for several decades now. But, this was also the country that gave us pogroms, performed by the SA and the SS.

Scenes of chaos, looting and burning cars have played out live on German television since Thursday, shocking many in a country known for its orderliness. Merkel, who is running for re-election in September in part on a theme of public safety, fielded several questions from German media at her closing press conference on the protests and response.

“I condemn in the strongest terms the unchained violence and unrestrained brutality that the police faced repeatedly during the G-20,” Merkel told reporters. “Apparently, there are people who have no interest in the issues and instead go on a rampage of blind destruction in their own neighborhood. Tough police measures are the only response to that.”

A major embarrassment for Chancellor Merkel. As of now, however, no serious political opposition has emerged to challenge her leadership. As for the world stage, she is now an also-ran.