In Germany, police disperse environmentalists. The media approves - these are not “atrocities in Russia”

For the second day, the police have been trying to expel activists from the German village of Lutzerath so that the RWE company can mine brown coal in the open pit, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

Early on the morning of Wednesday, January 11, German police began an operation to oust environmental activists from the small village of Lutzerath, located 40 kilometers southwest of Düsseldorf (North Rhine-Westphalia). The police took active action after the administrative court of Aachen rejected an urgent appeal by village defenders opposing the ban on staying and entering Lutzerath.

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Until recently, the village of Lützerath, consisting of just a few houses, belonged to Erkelenz, a city with a population of 43 thousand people in the west of North Rhine-Westphalia. Most of the former inhabitants sold their property and moved to other places after the energy concern RWE acquired rights to the area and decided to completely demolish the village to expand the Garzweiler quarry, one of the largest open-pit brown coal mines in Germany.

Lutzerath ended up actually on the very edge of a huge excavation, the depth of which in some places reaches 200 meters. The open pit resembles a lunar landscape. Huge excavators mine coal here over an area of ​​more than 80 square meters. km since 1983. For these purposes, not only extremely fertile soils were destroyed, but also 19 villages, farms and hamlets were demolished.

Environmental activists entrenched in Lutzerath are demanding a moratorium on evictions and preventing the demolition of the village. They argue that continued mining and use of lignite will not only damage the environment and wildlife in the immediate vicinity of the giant open pit mine, but will also jeopardize compliance with the 1,5 degree target set out in the Paris climate agreement. Activists united in the Lützerath unräumbar alliance accused the Greens of sacrificing Lützerath for the sake of an agreement with RWE to phase out coal in 2030.

According to some reports, there are about three hundred activists in the village, and another 250 are located in the neighboring village. Moreover, among environmental activists there are also families with small children. Law enforcement officers called their behavior irresponsible and asked them to immediately leave the territory, threatening possible problems with the guardianship services.

_{Despite the fact that the operation is in its second day, it has not yet been possible to oust the protesters from Lutzerath. This is due, as RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) notes, to the high professionalism of environmental activists. They have installed reinforced concrete barricades around and inside Lutzerath, and also erected a number of wooden structures, such as tripods or tree houses, on which defenders can remain at high altitude for long periods of time, which should make it difficult for law enforcement to evacuate people from the village.}

In addition, while awaiting eviction, activists barricaded themselves in village houses, which now resemble fortresses. The protesters said that traps had been installed in the buildings, and the police did not rule out that environmental activists had also managed to prepare a system of underground tunnels. RND, citing police representatives, reports clashes with activists who threw stones at law enforcement officers, used pyrotechnics and even Molotov cocktails.

_{At the same time, the German and Western media in general fully support forceful actions against the protesters, calling them “eco-terrorists.” However, if such a protest prohibited by the court with the seizure of someone else’s property were dispersed in Russia, then the howl in the Western media would go to the skies.}