GERMANY:A German town's response to a racist attack follows an all too familiar pattern, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
For Kulvir Singh and seven Indian friends, a day at the annual fair in the eastern German town of Mügeln last weekend turned into a nightmare. After a scuffle, they were beaten and chased by bottle-wielding locals into a pizzeria. As they cowered inside fearful for their lives, a 50-strong mob smashed the windows and tried to get in, chanting: "Germany for the Germans! Foreigners out!"
Exactly 15 years ago pictures flashed around the world of another mob, this time in Rostock, cheering as a home for asylum seekers went up in flames. Following that shameful night, a recurring sequence of events, reactions and promises was established.
This week's events ran to schedule: through a spokesman, German chancellor Angela Merkel called the Mügeln attacks "shameful"; extra money for anti-xenophobic projects was announced; and fresh calls were made to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.
A leader of Germany's Jewish community accused politicians this week of "delivering the same sentiments" after every attack.
"This isn't hysteria; it's the bitter truth," said Stephen Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, to the Tageszeitung newspaper. "Today it's foreigners, tomorrow it'll be homosexuals and lesbians and maybe Jews."
The unspoken truth of last weekend's attacks is that no one knows how to solve this problem.
About 60 cases of serious extreme-right violence are reported each year in Germany, most commonly - but not exclusively - in eastern states. The small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt has the highest number of extreme-right attacks, with more than 32 reported so far this year.
Earlier this month, a man (24) was hit in the face outside a disco by a local neo-Nazi shouting, "Jew! Jew!". In June, a 14-strong theatre troupe on their way home from a performance of The Rocky Horror Show were attacked and beaten by local neo-Nazis; four were hospitalised with rib and jaw injuries.
As in all other cases this year, journalists in Mügeln faced a collective wall of silence from locals. The few people willing to talk gave cliched quotes: "Those people weren't from here"; "It was just a few crazies"; "We don't have a far-right problem here".
"Of course it's hard to admit something like this if the extreme-right leader in the area is the friendly young man in the butcher shop," said Hajo Funke, extreme-right expert at the Free University in Berlin. "But these attacks are regular events, everyday provincial pogroms, if you will."
Kulvir Singh, who has lived in Mügeln for five months, directed his anger over the attack, not at his new neighbours, but at the local police. "They let us sit in the station for eight hours like poor dogs," he said, rubbing his black eye. "No one asked us if we were in pain or if any of us had to go to the hospital." Bureaucracy came first, he said.
Small-town police in previous cases have faced similar criticisms: at best, slow to react to calls for help; at worst, happy to report extreme-right attacks as alcohol-driven youthful indiscretions, which help perpetrators get off with suspended sentences.
In the Mügeln case, extreme-right experts have attacked the local police for failing to classify the incident a racist attack from the beginning. "If the victims are all Indians, and you have calls of 'foreigners out' resounding, we have to assume that we're looking at xenophobic aggression," said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminological researcher.
Germany spends €27 million annually on programmes to tackle extreme-right violence in towns where the authorities usually deny a problem exists.
As is by now usual with these attacks, the mayor of Mügeln and local politicians have said there is no problem with xenophobia in their town.
Their defensiveness when placed in the media spotlight is understandable but, critics say, breeds an institutional apathy or, worse, tolerance for such attacks.
Until that changes, the locals in Mügeln or the next town have official permission to view such attacks as unfortunate, one-off incidents and not another shameful episode in a long-running, xenophobic soap opera.