Students fear backlash after Paris attacks

Concern is mounting among overseas students at a build-up of blanket hostility towards foreigners following the terrorist attacks in Paris. Politicians fear that far-right movements could cash in on the sentiments developing after the murders.

But overseas students and academics have an important role to play in combating the roots of fanaticism and religiously motivated terrorism, says Kambiz Ghawami, head of the German branch of World University Service, WUS.

The events in Paris have had a profound impact on the mood in Germany. Concern has been voiced by politicians that the attacks could generate hostility towards foreigners in a country that depends heavily on its attractiveness above all to skilled immigrants.

WUS Germany reports that it has already received phone calls from foreign students worried about coming under blanket suspicion of links with Islamic radicals. Ghawami anticipates more problems for students from the Middle East and the Arab nations when seeking accommodation and employment.

“There was a similar situation in 2001 and 2002, after the 9/11 attack,” he says. “Students could be turned down for example in hotels and their restaurants, with employers referring to the students’ presence as possibly causing anxiety among their international clientele.”

The only fatal attack by an Islamic radical so far occurred at Frankfurt Airport in 2011 when two US soldiers were murdered and two seriously injured. A bomb planted at Bonn Central Station in 2012, and attributed to Islamic fanatics, would have caused disaster had the detonating mechanism not failed.

A substantial number of young people from Germany, including German converts, have joined the ranks of the Islamic State movement in Syria and Iraq in recent months. As is the case in other countries with significant Muslim populations, the German authorities are worried these youngsters could commit acts of terrorism on their return.

Neo-Nazis

However, the vast majority of terrorist crimes with a fatal outcome have been committed by Neo-Nazis. Germany’s most serious incident, the Munich Oktoberfest bombing in 1980, killed 14 people, including the bomber himself, a member of the Neo-Nazi Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. A further 211 people were injured.

There was a spate of Neo-Nazi attacks following unification in 1989, the worst being the 1993 fire-bombing of a house with occupants of Turkish origin, killing five people and injuring 15.

In East Germany, student hostels with foreign occupants were frequently targeted by Neo-Nazis, as were individual foreign students.

A nail-bomb attack in Cologne in 2004 left 22 people injured, many of them seriously, after the device went off in a street with residents mainly of Turkish origin. Police inquiries initially focused on the Turkish community in Cologne.

While the phenomenon of Neo-Nazism has been dealt with extensively by academics at several institutions and a considerable level of expertise has been established, action by the state authorities has been flawed by a string of botched investigations and legal complications.

The Neo-Nazi organisation Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, or NSU, formed in the mid-1990s, committed a total of 10 murders, most of the victims being of Turkish origin, as well as a whole series of bank raids and bomb attacks.

Yet it was not until 2011 that the NSU was classified as a terrorist organisation and an NSU video was found by police claiming responsibility for the Cologne bombing.

A new movement

Prompted by an alleged Islamic threat, a new popular movement has emerged that is believed to have close links with established Neo-Nazi groups. PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans against an Islamisation of the Occident, has above all been rallying support in eastern Germany.

Weekly demonstrations in Dresden have attracted up to 25,000 participants, although in other German cities, PEGIDA demonstrators tend to be heavily outnumbered by counter-rallies.

And Charlie Hebdo’s comment on PEGIDA’s attempts to take up its cause speaks for itself: “No, you are not Charlie!”

Offering support

Ghawami believes that the right way to tackle religiously motivated terrorism and fundamentalism is to offer the youth and the democratic forces in the respective countries prospects for democracy and peace.

In this context, he stresses the importance of supporting people from foreign countries to enable them to contribute to the reconstruction, stabilisation and democratisation of their home countries, instead of viewing their presence as a threat.

“If Germany is interested in developing a global peace architecture, it ought to concentrate on investing in grant programmes for expatriates,” Ghawami argues.

Post-war Germany can boast a rich tradition of supporting persecuted students and academics, many of whom were to assume leading posts when their countries returned to democracy. However, Ghawami maintains, things changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s as it became more and more difficult for refugees and expatriates to continue their education in Germany.

“Capacity building in exile” ought to be an element of promoting democracy, and bilateral cooperation funds for development projects that have been suspended could be put to use to support grant programmes for expatriates and open up existing higher education programmes for them.

Michael Gardner Email: michael.gardner@uw-news.com