A DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN THE MAKING
During the last 15 years or so,
citizens in Stuttgart have protested against a vast multi-billion dollar
project called “Stuttgart 21” by its proponents, chiefly DEUTSCHE
BAHN [GERMAN RAILWAY, INC.], THE FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENT, THE MAYOR
OF STUTTGART and CERTAIN INVESTORS ACTIVE IN THE PROPERTY SECTOR.
The critics of the Stuttgart 21
project dispute that citizen participation was encouraged and made possible
in a realistic way. This is probably true.
All over the country, citizens discover
that large projects which require that they are heard, are in fact decided
AMONG INTERESTED PARTIES behind closed doors. Then a small announcement
is made in a daily paper, usually among lots of ads and legal announcements,
on a page usually overlooked by most readers. This announcement typically
informs the dear citizens that a public hearing will take place on some
Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday at 10 or 11 a.m. when every normal truck
driver, office worker, sale girl or factory worker is at work. The few
people who come, often elderly people, helplessly face experts and politicians,
and when everyone goes home, the letter of the law has been obeyed. The
public has had its chance to object, to critique, etc.
I have, on the other hand, taken
part in public hearings held in a small town public school where the politicians
and experts were booed and the auditory was roaring with protest. The result?
The protest was ignored. EVERYTHING HAD BEEN DECIDED IN ADVANCE. BUT THE
LOCAL POLITICIANS WERE ANGRY BECAUSE THE ATTEMPT TO WIN THE APPROVAL OF
THE PROJECT HAD FAILED.
As for ANTI-“STUTTGART21”
or “K21” (short for “KEIN 21”, that is to say “no 21”) protests, they have
been going on for a long, long time. They were less noticeable, kind of,
when the project didn’t seem to come of the ground for a couple of years.
Only recently, when things began to get serious, did numerous crowds take
to the street. THESE PEOPLE ARE SAYING ONE THING: WE HAVEN’T BEEN HEARD,
AND WE DON’T WANT THIS PROJECT.
It’s about six weeks ago that Le
Monde, the French daily, published an article entitled “Stuttgart, the
methodical rebel.”*
The article succeeds to give a
portrait of a pharmacist, a woman who has regularly taken part in the demonstrations
that begin each Monday at 6 p.m. and that express a widely-felt protest
against the demolition of the old central tation, a protected historical
monument, and against the devastation of the large park nearby, with its
300 trees (also supposedly “legally protected”) that are to make way for
new office buildings, malls, a prime downtown residential buildings.
The writer of the article mentions
even that this woman who opted to regularly voice her protest in the street
is often accompanying by her old mother, age 84. At least whenever the
time permits, as the old lady does not fail to point out.**
It is a story that succeeds to
bring across a curious fact. The demonstrations in Stuttgart have a very
wide popular base. They are not just an affair of a few ecologists. And
they are certainly not “instigated” by radicals or an affair of “professional
demonstrators” – as conservative politicians tried to insinuate in the
media.
What had been peaceful protests
tolerated by the powers that be suddenly turned into a peaceful protest
dispersed by police wielding batons, using tear gas, pepper spray, and
directing the forceful jet of water of water canons against school kids,
senior citizens and middle-aged ecologists.
That was on Thursday, Sept. 30,
2010. [The weekly DER SPIEGEL
published a number of photos in
the internet, most of them about the attack of the police on school-children
engaging in a tree-protecting sit-in.]
A day later, 65,000 people took
to the street. Even the NEW YORK TIMES could not close its eye to
the fact that “tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Stuttgart
[…] chanting ‘Shame on you,’ one day after the police had used pepper spray,
water cannon and tear gas tp disperse crowds that had gathered to save
[300] centuries-old trees from being cut down…”***
The NY TIMES failed, however, to
report that demonstrators arrived in front of the state parliament on Friday,
October 1, tossing their shoes against its walls very much in the way of
a certain Iraqi journalist, while shouting “Liars, liars!”
The o-so objective NEW YORK TIME
also put its lot with the Stuttgart police in its article published on
Saturday, October 2, when admitting that 130 people had been injured by
the police on the preceding Thursday evening. A French source spoke of
about 400 injured; the organizers of the demonstration counted about 370
on site. An emergency hospital had to be set up in the threatened Schloss-Park.
Stuttgart hospitals announced that they had great difficulties handling
all the incoming wounded persons. All of these uninteresting details the
NY TIMES chose to ignore.
The NEW YORK TIMES reported,
however, that “newspapers across the country on Friday [October 1, 2010]
were filled with pictures of German police officers in riot gear and bloodied
and wounded demonstrators, young and old.” And the NEW YORK TIMES did not
fail to point out that the unprovoked attack on peaceful demonstrators
was “a major political embarrassment to Chancellor Angela Merkel” – a fact
still made more unpleasant by the way the chancellor subsequently accused
the demonstrators. (But this unpleasant nuance the TIMES preferred of course
to remain silent about.)
The opposition Green Party which
according to the NEW YORK TIMES was calling for for national protests,
but which is only one force involved in the protests against the
“Stuttgart 21” project, has by now overtaken the Social Democratic
Party in the state of BADEN-WURTTEMBERG (of which Stuttgart is the state
capital).
The GREENS are also about to overtake
the governing Christian Democrats (CDU, for short) at the polls in the
Stuttgart region, and even if they should stop short of that, the Social
Democrats are ready to join them as their junior partner in order to unseat
the presently governing CDU in Stuttgart.
This is perhaps the most decisive
effect of the way in which the classe politique has been treating the population
of this country. More and more people are angry and ask to be heard. They
see campaign promises broken, they feel they are lied to again and again,
they sense that profitable deals are cut and that they as well as nature
are paying the bill. They know that up to now “participation” even when
foreseen by the law is a farce, and they desire a real say in affairs that
directly touch the way they live. This is the basic conflict. The conservative
forces, that is to say, the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and
certain politicians inside the Social Democratic Party want to continue
the old game: We’ll tell them sweet things; they’ll vote for us; THEN WE
DO WHAT WE THINK IS GOOD FOR INDUSTRY, THE BANKS, US – IN SHORT, FOR “THE
COUNTRY”, and if people protest, we’ll call in the cops. Perhaps some GREEN
POLITICIANS, a number of politicians of DIE LINKE and certain SOCIAL DEMOCRATS
have comprehended that this kind of game will face increasing popular resistance,
and this exactly from the better-informed and better-educated among the
working class and the middle class.
Thus, something like a DEMOCRACY
MOVEMENT is in the making, and progressive parties would be blind if they
wouldn’t support this grass roots protests. LET US HOPE THAT THEY WILL
NOT ATTEMPT TO HIJACK IT AND USE IT FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES: it can only
antagonize critical citizens still more than is the case already today.
FOOTNOTES
* Frédéric Frédéric Lemaître, in :
Le MONDE , August 31, 2010 .
** “Comme chaque lundi, Sybille Adler devrait être fidèle
au rendez-vous. A 18 heures, cette pharmacienne sera devant l'aile nord
de la gare de Stuttgart pour protester contre sa démolition. Si
le temps le permet, sa mère l'accompagnera. Malgré ses 84
ans. Ou peut-être à cause d'eux. N'est-elle pas née
au moment même où cette gare aujourd'hui partiellement classée
monument historique voyait le jour ? Cette gare en pierres naturelles,
et surtout le parc qui borde son aile sud, est le joyau de la ville. «
C'est ma patrie », résume une élégante femme
aux cheveux blancs qui avoue « plus de soixante ans », mais
préfère taire son nom : « j'ai été secrétaire
à la mairie, vous comprenez” (Frédéric Lemaître,
ibidem)
*** Michael Slackman, “Crowds Fault Police Action in Stuttgart”,
in : THE NEW YORK TIMES (New York edition), October 2, 2010, p. A6
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