Police officers stand near the demolition edge where the RWE group excavates lignite in Lützerath.Image: dpa / Federico Gambarini
politics
01/10/2023, 19:4201/10/2023, 20:01
Timon Dzienus is angry. The spokesman for the Green Youth has been campaigning for months to ensure that the North Rhine-Westphalian village of Lützerath is not dug up.
The fossil company RWE, on the other hand, had agreed the deal with Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck, among others: Lützerath will be razed to the ground, but coal energy will be phased out as early as 2030.
On Tuesday, the police cleared barricades on the access road to the village of Lützerath, which was occupied by climate activists. The evacuation of the village itself will not begin on Tuesday, the police emphasized in loudspeaker announcements on site. That will be the case on Wednesday at the earliest.
Lützerath is to be dredged so that the lignite underneath can be mined. However, activists have settled in the village, which was abandoned by the original residents.
Timon Dzienus is himself part of the protests in Lützerath.Image: dpa / Kay Nietfeld
Aside from the climate impacts of mining lignite: Dzienus, who is also frequently present at the current protests, is annoyed by the actions of the police and apparently also by the media reports. It’s about riots. About possible police violence. About stones that are said to have been thrown.
According to Dzienus, he was present at the scene that prompted the NRW police to publish a statement stating that there had been violence from among the activists.
In an interview with watson, he said he was concerned about an imminent escalation by the security authorities. “If you see what kind of contingent the police are on site, from how many federal states forces have been sent to Lützerath, it has little to do with de-escalation.”
Dzienus thinks reports on this topic from some media have been taken over by the police without being checked – and that’s the only reason why a big debate has been started.
And the 26-year-old young politician says:
“I was there for one of the scenes that attracted more attention, but ultimately only excerpts could be seen on social networks. The police said afterwards that stones were thrown, I experienced that differently.”
Earth, says Dzienus, was thrown.
In this regard, he recalls that the German Journalists Association had already called on the occasion of protests against the Garzweiler opencast mine to critically question police reports and not to regard the police as impartial observers in clashes with activists.
The NRW Economics Minister Mona Neubaur (Greens) also criticizes Dzienus in this context – and calls on Twitter to stop the violence.
Dzienus isn’t just annoyed by the on-site approach.
“I think that the fact that activists were checked by the police in Hamburg for several hours on Sunday and prevented them from driving to Lützerath was an attempt at intimidation,” he says.
He also describes a general decree by the district of Heinsberg as repressive. This had imposed a residence ban in Lützerath. In the dispute over the legality of this order, the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) dismissed a complaint from climate activists.
Police vehicles are parked at the edge of the Garzweiler II opencast mine on the outskirts of Lützerath. Image: dpa / Henning Kaiser
Dzienus says: “You are no longer allowed to enter this whole area – and that is a huge area. There are reports from journalists who are prevented from doing their work. That is a highly questionable understanding of press freedom that RWE is showing lays.”
Whether earth or stones were thrown – does Dzienus see this action by climate activists as justified?
The 26-year-old says he felt that at that moment the violence was not coming from the demonstrators, but mainly from the police. “And that’s my big concern, also with a view to the next few weeks: that a lot of violence will come from the police.”
Green youth does not want to legitimize violence
The fact that it was said that violence is not a means of political debate irritated the Green Youth spokesman. “I would like to point out one thing: RWE is also taking over the village by force. These are very violent, destructive images that we are seeing – of the excavators and the police. And that worries me.”
The fact that RWE is destroying a place that used to be a home for people with large excavators, “that churches and hundred-year-old farms are being razed to the ground” – he also sees this as a form of violence. “They’re officially legal, but that doesn’t mean that the violence perpetrated against people by fossil fuel corporations is legitimate.”
When asked, he states that he does not want to legitimize any violence on the part of the activists either.
“My aim is to show that what RWE and the state government are doing is also a massive use of force and has a destructive character. To dismiss that as enforcing the law is completely trivializing what is happening right now already happened in Lützerath and will probably happen in the next few days – as we know from other clearances – such as in the Hambach Forest.”
The Hambach Forest was scheduled to be cleared in 2018 to give the energy company RWE the opportunity to mine the lignite underneath. The threatened destruction of the forest met with massive resistance from climate and environmental activists. For weeks, masked people – both police officers and activists – faced each other. Riots and numerous reports of police violence included.
Expectation: Similar conditions as in the Hambach Forest
When the clearance was almost reached, the clearing was temporarily prohibited by court order.
An activist is carried away by police after being arrested from a tree house in the Hambach Forest.PICTURED: REUTERS / WOLFGANG RATTAY
Dzienus expects similar conditions in the coming weeks.
But most of all, he looks to the future with hope. “The activists have a lot of courage and hope. I felt a lot of euphoria and saw how much strength people took with them.”
He sees a hopeful, loud and creative protest in Lützerath in the near future. And: “That the police will try to carry out the evacuation under difficult conditions. That can be very difficult these days and weeks. But I am very sure that the demonstrators and the local activists are showing a lot of perseverance.”
“The decision against Lützerath was ultimately a political one.”
To de-escalate the situation, he suggests canceling the eviction and imposing a moratorium. “In the end, the decision against Lützerath was a political one, and political decisions of such magnitude must be on solid ground.” After all, it is about compliance with the German climate goals, the scientific basis must be “absolutely watertight before irreversible facts of destruction are created”. She is not at the moment.
He means:
“The decision is based on extremely questionable numbers from RWE, which earns billions from this deal. And the group even openly said last year that the dredging of Lützerath had political reasons, because otherwise there would be a motivation for further blockades. Those responsible have to ask here whether such a massive police operation can really be justified on this basis – also in retrospect in a few years when the next severe drought or flood of the century hits Germany.”
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