The clearing of the North Rhine-Westphalian village of Lützerath, which is occupied by climate activists, will continue on Thursday. Police officers are trying to get the demonstrators out of the remaining buildings and tree houses.
With their occupation, the activists want to prevent the village from being demolished and the energy company RWE from continuing to mine climate-damaging lignite on the site. The rainy and stormy weather is becoming increasingly difficult for them. The situation is particularly dangerous for the activists in the tree houses, said a spokeswoman for the coal opponents. “Normally they come down in a storm.”
The police have announced demolition and tree felling work by RWE for this Thursday. The group owns the town. If the police declare an area secured, work will begin, said an RWE spokesman. Two excavators have already started demolishing a former agricultural hall. But it may be a while before all the buildings and tree houses are deserted. Aachen’s chief of police, Dirk Weinspach, described the clearing of the seven buildings that were still standing as the “actual challenge”.
A policeman uses a crowbar to open the window of a wooden hut. On the second day of the eviction, the officers also penetrated the homesteads and tree houses.
(Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa)
While some activists are still holding out in Lützerath, others are demonstrating in the area. However, they will probably not reach the village itself. The village is now completely surrounded by a double fence. RWE wants to mark Lützerath as company premises and prevent unauthorized persons from entering the town.
According to police estimates, around 550 people moved from the Keyenberg district of Erkelenz in the direction of Lützerath, about four kilometers away. A spokesman told SZ that more than 200 people suddenly pushed out of the crowd towards the edge of the opencast mine. The police have circled several dozen demonstrators who were sitting and blocking the way, reports the German Press Agency. Among them were the Fridays for Future activist Luisa Neubauer and the Greenpeace board member Martin Kaiser. “We want to stay here until we are carried away,” announced Neubauer. She carried a sign that read “Climate protection is manual work”.
On Wednesday, the police began clearing the activists’ protest camp with thousands of officers and made a statement largely satisfied on Twitter on the first day: around 200 activists had already left the site voluntarily and without police action.
the The journalists’ union DJU, on the other hand, criticized the police operation: The press was repeatedly prevented from doing its work, wrote the managing director for Brandenburg and Berlin, Joerg Reichel, on Twitter. Reichel, who was there himself yesterday, referred to several eyewitness reports. In some cases, journalists could only have entered the premises with accreditation from the RWE security service. In advance, however, this was described by the police as optional. A photographer was also urged by a police officer to delete pictures of the eviction, reported the trade unionist.
A spokesman for the Aachen police denied the allegations. Rather, the accreditations were an offer to the journalists. They would also give the police a better overview, but were never mandatory. The police are aware of all of Reichel’s allegations, but the eviction yesterday “was a great success in the media,” said the spokesman. He has seldom experienced “that press representatives could move as freely as they did on this mission”.
RWE wants to demolish Lützerath to excavate the coal underneath. In order for the energy company to be allowed to do this, the economics ministries led by the Greens in the federal and state governments of North Rhine-Westphalia had agreed with RWE in return to phase out coal in the west from 2038 to 2030. In addition, five villages in the vicinity of the Garzweiler opencast mine, which are already largely empty, are to be retained.
Habeck defends course
In view of the loud criticism of the Greens, Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck was concerned. “It also touches me or drives me, like everyone in my party,” said Habeck on Wednesday evening in ZDF’s “heute-journal”. “But we still have to explain what is right. And it was right – unfortunately – to ward off the gas shortage, an energy emergency in Germany, also with additional electricity from lignite – and to bring forward the exit from coal.”
Lützerath is not “the continuation of the energy policy of the past: electricity generation from lignite,” stressed Habeck. “It’s not, as is claimed, the eternal continuation, it’s the bottom line.” Unfortunately, the village of Lützerath could no longer be saved – “but it is the end of lignite-fired power generation in NRW”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/.”In this respect – with great respect for the climate movement – in my opinion the Place the wrong symbol.”
With material from the dpa news agency