The evacuation in Lützerath continues on Thursday morning: the police forces start with a square, man-high hole that they saw in the wooden gate of a farmstead. “1.5°C means: Lützerath stays!” stands on a yellow banner at the former farm. People are carried out of the building, reports a dpa reporter.
With their occupation, the activists want to prevent the village from being demolished and climate-damaging lignite from being mined 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, reports a spokeswoman for the coal opponents. “Normally they come down in a storm,” she said.
The officials are not faced with an easy task on this day either. Aachen’s chief of police, Dirk, described the clearing of the seven buildings that were still standing as the “actual challenge”. On Wednesday, the police began clearing the activists’ protest camp with thousands of officers. The police spoke out largely satisfied on Twitter on the first day, around 200 activists had already left the site voluntarily and without police action.
Police officers take away a climate activist. The energy company RWE wants to excavate the coal lying under Lützerath – the hamlet is to be demolished for this.
(Photo: Thomas Banneyer/dpa)
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, reports the trade unionist.
Police continue to clear into the night
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”.
The climate activists continued actions on Wednesday evening with which they want to prevent the eviction of the lignite town of Lützerath. A dpa reporter observed that police officers used lifting platforms to lift a good ten activists from a height of around ten meters from the roof of a former agricultural hall. Other forces were in the process of untying an activist tied to a wrecked car. The police cracked down on activists late into the night.
Fridays-for-Future activist Luisa Neubauer called the actions of the emergency services “absolutely incomprehensible” what are you so scared of?” she asked on Twitter. Neubauer, who is a member of the Greens herself, makes no secret of her dissatisfaction with the Greens, whom she accuses of being too close to the energy company RWE.
Habeck defends course
In view of the loud criticism of the Greens, not only from Luisa Neubauer, Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck has now shown himself to be 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.”
RWE wants to excavate the coal lying under Lützerath. For this, the hamlet in the area of the city of Erkelenz is to be demolished. In return, the economics ministries in the federal and state governments of North Rhine-Westphalia, led by the Greens, had agreed with RWE 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.