“There is a great silence – and we want to change that,” says Sibel Leyla. She is the mother of the then 14-year-old Can Leyla, who was murdered exactly six years ago along with eight other people by an 18-year-old racist at the Olympia shopping center (OEZ). With a funeral march from Odeonsplatz through the city on Friday afternoon, the families, together with several hundred Munich residents, commemorate the victims. And they make it clear that, from their point of view, the right-wing extremist attack is far from over. “Racism thrives where it is denied,” reads one poster.
For years, the relatives of Armela Segashi, Can Leyla, Dijamant Zabërgja, Guiliano Kollmann, Hüseyin Dayıcık, Roberto Rafael, Sabina S., Selçuk Kılıç and Sevda Dağ have been campaigning for the attack to be recorded in the collective memory as a right-wing act of terrorism and for that Munich faces up to its responsibility. This also includes networking with the bereaved and survivors of other right-wing extremist attacks such as those in Halle and Hanau. The attack on the OEZ is part of a whole series of racist attacks, the perpetrators of which radicalized themselves on the Internet, some even had direct contact, regarded each other as role models to be emulated and shared the same inhuman attitude.
There are events to mark the sixth anniversary of the Munich murders in several German cities – in Regensburg, Weiden, Munster, Offenbach and Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bremen, Jena, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Rostock and Zwickau. For the evening – at the time of the crime – a commemoration event is planned in Munich at the memorial in front of the OEZ, at which, in addition to Mayor Dieter Reiter, only relatives of the victims will have a say.
They combine their grief with concrete demands, also addressed to the city. She finds it unbearable that “burgers and fries are now being served and eaten again” in the McDonald’s on the OEZ where her children were killed. The place must become a memorial. As in Hanau, the graves of the murdered would have to be permanently preserved and cared for, for example as municipal graves of honour. In addition, the relatives are demanding a room in Moosach, a “place of remembrance (…) and solidarity in the fight against right-wing terror and racism”. Right-wing terror is not consistently fought in Germany, says Sibel Leyla on Odeonsplatz. For the first time, she doesn’t feel alone when looking at the crowd. But: “The horror is not over.”