Clashes errupt with migrants in Bautzen

The hill-top town in eastern Saxony, Germany, and administrative centre of the eponymous district, saw scores of migrants fleeing for safety from angry Germans. Police were out in force at the time of the confrontation but only acted when the refugees ran to the city’s Holzmarkt, crowding the square.

Bautzen and the nearby town of Niedergurig are home to no less than four asylum shelters.

With existing shelters filled to capacity, federal, state and local authorities are discarding legal questions to make room for the newcomers. German taxpayers are also being obliged to make colossal economic sacrifices to accommodate the influx of migrants, many of whom have no prospect of ever finding a job.

The town has had a nightly curfew for unaccompanied minors since the violent events of mid-September when inhabitants chased trouble makers breaking the curfew from the streets after the foreigners started hurling insults at Germans in a main square, the Daily Mail reported. The foreigners were escorted back to their hostel and put under police guard.

The previous clashes appeared to be triggered by an incident when a 32-year-old resident was hurt by a bottle being thrown, the BBC said. The young asylum seekers was then slapped with an alcohol ban and a 19:00 curfew.

This time inhabitants chased migrants in their cars and bikes. One of the asylum seekers was hit by a bicycle ridden by one of his pursuers and suffered a small cut. Leftists have fumed at the “right-wingers” and “neo-Nazi’s” chasing the unwanted foreigners back to their lodgings.

As in the previous incident, the confrontation escalated after both groups started exchanging verbal insults, with the foreigners apparently under the impression that they have some kind of immunity when openly taunting the town’s people and ignoring laws.

The incident has highlighted once again the seething resentment that ordinary Germans feel towards chancellor Angela Merkel and the elite for flooding the country with foreigners who are spread out in accommodation centres, often confiscated property turned into housing for the hordes.

In February, a cheering crowd was seen outside a burning asylum-seeker shelter in Bautzen, clapping and shouting: “Good, that’s up in flames.”

That same weekend, a video emerged of inhabitants preventing refugees from getting of the bus to get to another shelter in Clausnitz. Germany recorded more than 1 000 attacks on asylum shelters last year, a five-fold increase from 2014.

Bautzen mayor Alexander Ahrens met members of right-wing groups in October in a bid to try and assuage their desire for law and order.

Earlier, in March, when open-border enthusiast President Joachim Gauck visited Bautzen to remind the inhabitants that the influx of refugees in Germany was an “opportunity”, he was verbally abused. Many other open-border enthusiasts have received the same treatment.

Bautzen is 60km east of Dresden, where the anti-migrant Pegida movement began.

Germany’s federal police force says there have been 700 attacks on asylum accommodation this year, including 57 arson attacks. These arson attacks mainly happen because the of the German government’s forceful and very unpopular policy regarding housing.

Hamburg city officials for example are forcing owners of vacant real estate who have refused to make their property available to the city on a voluntary basis for migrant housing, to sell.

“The proposed confiscation of private land and buildings is a massive attack on the property rights of the citizens of Hamburg. It amounts to an expropriation by the state [and a] “law of intimidation,” said André Trepoll, from the Christian Democratic Union.

“If a property is confiscated… a lawsuit to determine the legality of the confiscation can only be resolved after the fact. But the accommodation would succeed in any event,” Tübingen Mayor Boris Palmer told furious citizens.

Officials in North Rhine-Westphalia seized a private resort in the town of Olpe to provide housing for up to 400 migrants.

German authorities are applying heavy-handed and questionable tactics to house the hundreds of thousands pouring into the country from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and while sustaining the foreigners who arrived in Germany in 2015, the cost to taxpayers is estimated at least at least 11 billion euros a year, with no end in sight.

As The BBC noted, large-scale migration could destabilise German society.

The unpopular chancellor’s conservative coalition has been haemorrhaging voters to the insurgent anti-migrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and next year Merkel’s national government faces an election.