- guardian.co.uk, Sunday August 6 2000 23.25 BST
When they finished thumping and kicking him, the young thugs set a dog on Rahman and chased him until, covered in blood, he found refuge in a student hostel.
Until last week, stories such as Rahman's merited little more than a few lines in local German newspapers as part of an endless catalogue of right-wing violence in the East. But after four murders in eight weeks and a bomb attack on a Düsseldorf commuter railway station that injured nine immigrants from the former Soviet Union, five of them Jewish, Germany has woken up to the growing menace.
'We can stand by no longer as violent right-wingers hunt foreigners and asylum-seekers in the streets,' Klaus Zwickel, the leader of Germany's biggest union, IG Metall, said last week.
Politicians across the spectrum, from Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Edmund Stoiber, the conservative Prime Minister of Bavaria, have called for tougher action against neo-Nazis and for more civil courage from ordinary citizens.
Business leaders warn that racist violence is damaging the country's chances of attracting foreign investment and deterring the high-skilled workers Germany hopes to attract from abroad with a new, green card visa system.
But as the daily toll of attacks rises and intelligence chiefs warn that right-wingers are turning to terrorism, there is little agreement on what to do about the problem. Bavaria's Interior Minister, Günther Beckstein, who distinguishes between 'welcome' and 'unwelcome' foreigners, has called for a ban on the biggest party of the extreme Right, the Nationaldemokratische Partei (NPD).
A number of senior politicians, including one member of Schröder's Cabinet, agree. But lawyers argue that Germany's constitutional court is unlikely to approve a ban and the NPD's leader, Udo Voigt, said last week that his party was relaxed about the prospect.
'In the thirty-sixth year of the NPD, this is a propagandist, populist demand that has been made by many Interior Ministers before. None has succeeded. Besides, new organisations can be created afterwards,' he said.
Before Voigt took over the party leadership four years ago, the NPD was broke, demoralised and dominated by old men who pined for the days of the Third Reich. A political scientist by training, Voigt shifted the party's emphasis towards social questions, with slogans such as 'Jobs for Germans first!' and attracted young members in the East with concerts, parties and the distribution of neo-Nazi, skinhead music.
The NPD has earned millions of deutschmarks from its music business and, through its youth wing, the Junge Nationaldemokraten (Young National Democrats), has become the party of choice for young right-wingers. 'If there are attacks on foreigners in Germany, that is of course a sorry tale, but it is the responsibility of the established parties who continue to allow uncontrolled flows of foreigners - now with a green card - while they are not in a position to guarantee the right of all Germans to work.
'They have to reckon with the fact that people will develop a will to resist at some stage. But that is a normal, popular reaction. We don't need to orchestrate that,' Voigt said last week.
Banning the NPD is unlikely to stop the violence, not least because violent right-wingers are organised in hundreds of small, independent groups known as Kameradschaften. Often no more than skinhead gangs, the Kameradschaften have only the most informal relationship with organisations such as the NPD, although they come together for the party's bigger political demonstrations.
The skinhead gangs target not only foreigners but any group that does not fit into their nationalistic, conservative world view: gays, the disabled, left-wingers and even young people who listen to the wrong kind of music. Social workers in the eastern Harz mountains have reported a wave of attacks on single mothers who were told they should create a proper German family.
Right-wing internet sites have started publishing the names and addresses of prominent left-wingers and of celebrities they have identified as Jewish; death threats are a daily event for left-wing politicians and Jewish leaders. In many eastern towns, skinheads have created no-go areas for foreigners and left-wingers, known as 'nationally liberated zones', and police warn that they cannot guarantee the safety of anyone who strays into them at night.
'It is easier to attack a socially weaker foreigner than the socially respected Wessi (west German), against whom the real hatred has been directed since unification,' says Dr Hans-Joachim Maaz, a psychotherapist from the eastern city of Halle.
'They strike the African but they really want to hit the west German.'
Easterners are twice as likely to be out of work as their western counterparts and some left-wingers believe right-wing violence is a direct consequence of mass unemployment. But Heinz Fromm, the president of Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the equivalent of MI5, says few violent right-wingers are under-privileged.
'Many are at school, in training or have a professional qualification,' he says. 'Only one-fifth are unemployed. So it is not true that these are mainly people from socially excluded groups.' In fact, extreme right-wing views have become mainstream among young people in many parts of eastern Germany, as a recent survey of 1,600 15-year-olds in the port city of Rostock revealed. Forty per cent agreed with the statement that foreigners were 'totally' or 'mainly' responsible for unemployment and 26 per cent believed Germany needed a strong leader ('Führer') again. The Federation of German Industry called last week for right-wing extremists who have become 'noticeable' to be sacked from their jobs. General manager Ludolf von Wartenburg explained that the business leaders' concerns had less to do with the welfare of minorities than with the effect of such violence on profits.
'If this image becomes fixed throughout the world, I am afraid of dramatic effects on the investment of foreign firms in Germany,' he said. In Eisenhuettenstadt, near the Polish border, the steel manufacturer Eko Stahl, which is the town's biggest employer, has had a zero-tolerance policy towards right-wing extremism for the past two years. Would-be apprentices are questioned during their first interview about their attitude towards foreigners and, before they start their training, they take part in a week-long workshop on tolerance and diversity.
The French-owned company, which took over the former Stalin Steel Works after German unification, organises regular youth exchange schemes in France and Poland in an effort to broaden the horizons of the young easterners. 'The young people can get to know each other and break down prejudices. If you talk to these young people, they sometimes open their eyes,' said personnel manager Andre Koerner.
Despite the attacks on foreigners, there is little political support for right-wing groups, and parties such as the NPD have few public representatives, even at local level. The German far Right has no charismatic leader to compare with Austria's Jorg Haider and most disaffected easterners register their protest against the new order by voting for the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism.
But the public debate over government initiatives to reform Germany's citizenship laws and to allow highly skilled foreign workers to take up jobs in Germany revealed a deep-seated, popular opposition to the idea of a multicultural society - despite the presence of seven million foreigners in the country. The opposition Christian Democrats won an election last year in the southern state of Hesse after a shamelessly xenophobic campaign against allowing foreigners to become German citizens more easily.
One Berlin police officer who is involved in the fight against right-wing extremism warned last week that, unless attitudes changed throughout German society, the threat from the Right could only become greater.
'The fertile ground is there. Unfortunately, many citizens think along the lines that right-wingers give voice to. Schoolchildren must be told clearly what suffering the Nazis brought to the world. Right-wing extremism is not just a problem for the authorities, but for the whole of society,' he said.
• Denis Staunton writes for the 'Irish Times'.
