Mining
Police inform citizens before the evacuation operation in Lützerath
A climate protection activist is carried away by the police in Lützerath. photo
©Oliver Berg/dpa
Only climate activists live in the empty houses of Lützerath. The police are planning a large-scale evacuation operation. Both sides are arming themselves. In Erkelenz, the police informed – an offer to talk.
The Aachen police and the Heinsberg district want to provide information on Tuesday about the planned evacuation of the village of Lützerath and the police operation at the Garzweiler opencast lignite mine in western North Rhine-Westphalia.
The hamlet in the area of the city of Erkelenz, which has now been occupied by climate activists, is to be demolished in order to extract the lignite underneath. The activists want to prevent that. The small town, which borders directly on the big, gray hole, has therefore become somewhat famous.
Call for peaceful protest
The information event is an opportunity to talk to the citizens of the 43,000-inhabitant city of Erkelenz, but also to initiatives and activists operating there. Aachen’s police chief Dirk Weinspach and district administrator Stephan Pusch (CDU) will take part. Both have called for peaceful protests at the mine. The Aachen police are in charge of the evacuation.
According to the police, the evacuation operation could begin on Wednesday at the earliest. Aachen’s chief of police said yesterday that the information event for citizens should be held first.
The police are planning a large-scale operation with support from all over Germany, which could last up to four weeks. The area around the opencast mine is characterized by farmland and fields. For an operation over several weeks with probably more than a thousand officials, infrastructure has to be set up.
Police remove barricades
Meanwhile, in a heated atmosphere, the police began removing barricades on the access road. The evacuation of the village itself will not begin on Tuesday, the police emphasized in loudspeaker announcements on site.
“The police are asking you once again to leave your blockades immediately,” the police announced over loudspeakers. Otherwise the blockades would have to be cleared “by means of coercion”. Several hundred activists had formed human chains in a confusing formation and set up a sit-in blockade, in which some of those involved had dug themselves about half a meter deep into the ground. “It’s about blocking the access to Lützi,” said an activist from the German Press Agency.
Climate activist Luisa Neubauer described the police strategy before the evacuation operation as not particularly peaceful. A peaceful evacuation had been announced by politicians, but what was happening on site was “pretty much the opposite of that,” said Neubauer on Deutschlandfunk. “Several hundreds of people have just come into the village overnight, the emergency services are being mobilized from all over the country and obviously there is no real political plan when more and more police officers are brought in.”
Points for coal mining
For the police, the operation has many unknowns. As in the nearby Hambach Forest, activists have built tree houses and barricaded seven houses. According to the police, a small part of the protest scene is violent. About 300 activists are in Lützerath, another 250 in a neighboring town, the police said yesterday. In the past, there was repeated damage to property at the open-cast mine operated by RWE, which supplies lignite for power generation.
The Greens-led economics ministries in the federal government and North Rhine-Westphalia have agreed with RWE to phase out coal in the Rhineland by 2030. Accordingly, five neighboring villages threatened with demolition are to be preserved. However, Lützerath is to give way in order to mine the coal underneath. According to the energy company, it is needed for the energy supply. Because of the current energy crisis, power generation with lignite has been expanded again.