LUETZERATH, Germany , 11 Jan (AP) \u2014 Police in riot gear on Wednesday moved into a condemned village in western Germany, launching an effort to evict activists holed up at the site in an attempt to prevent its demolition to make way for the expansion of a coal mine.<\/p>\n
Some stones and fireworks were thrown as officers entered the tiny hamlet of Luetzerath, which has become a flashpoint of debate over the country\u2019s climate efforts, on Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
Police announced that the operation had started and that the area would be fenced off. They said that people \u201ccurrently have the possibility to leave the site without further police measures.\u201d They said they had found \u201cfurther stored projectiles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several dozen activists remained camped out in the village, some in tree houses, as police slowly removed further barricades near the entrance in muddy conditions. Some activists read books or played accordion while perched some 10 feet (3 meters) up on tripods.<\/p>\n
Police removed dozens of activists from a roadblock. Some went voluntarily, while others were carried away. At least one screamed in apparent pain as officers used force to remove her.<\/p>\n
Police then started entering several large farm warehouses, one used as a soup kitchen by squatters, and removed the activists holed up inside.<\/p>\n
A few sat or stood on the roofs of Luetzerath\u2019s remaining buildings in the chilly wind.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really afraid today,\u201d Petra Mueller, a 53-year-old local who said she had been at the site for a few days, said from a top-floor window of one of the few houses. But she said she held out hope of preserving what\u2019s left of Luetzerath \u201cuntil nothing is left standing; hope dies last.\u201d<\/p>\n
Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the nearby Garzweiler coal mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. The government and utility company RWE say the coal is needed to ensure Germany\u2019s energy security.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, protesters refused to heed a court ruling effectively banning them from the area. Some dug trenches, built barricades and perched atop giant tripods in an effort to stop heavy machines from reaching the village, before police pushed them back by force.<\/p>\n
RWE wants to extract the coal beneath Luetzerath, which it says is necessary to ensure energy security in Germany. The company reached a deal with the regional government last year that allows the village to be destroyed in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038.<\/p>\n
The environmentalist Green party are part of both the regional and national governments. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, a Green who is Germany\u2019s economy and climate minister, defended that agreement as \u201ca good decision for climate protection\u201d that fulfills many of the environmentalists\u2019 demands and saves five other villages from demolition.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think climate protection and protests need symbols but the empty hamlet of Luetzerath, where no one lives any more, is the wrong symbol from my point of view,\u201d Habeck told reporters in Berlin.<\/p>\n
But climate campaigners say the agreement to expand the massive open-cast mine goes against Germany\u2019s international commitments to reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. They also cite studies suggesting the coal beneath Luetzerath may never be needed.<\/p>\n
Luetzerath \u201cis now the European place of crystallization for the climate movement,\u201d said Lakshmi Thevasagayam, a spokeswoman for the Luetzerath Lives activist group. \u201cWe are standing against RWE making a meter of progress with its diggers, because we know that the coal under Luetzerath isn\u2019t needed for energy security \u2014 it must remain in the ground so that we can achieve climate justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we can do something against the climate catastrophe, but at some point we won\u2019t be able to any more,\u201d Thevasagayam said. She asserted that there had been \u201ca complete escalation\u201d on the part of police.<\/p>\n
The head of the Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft police union\u2019s regional branch, Erich Rettinghaus, said that police were proceeding \u201cvery prudently\u201d and were giving demonstrators every possibility to demonstrate peacefully. But he said that there was concern about trouble because potentially violent demonstrators from across Europe had gathered at the site in recent days.<\/p>\n
RWE said in a statement that a 1.5-kilometer (nearly one-mile) fence will be built around the site as one of the first measures. It appealed to protesters to \u201cend the illegal occupation\u201d of the site that legally belongs to it peacefully.<\/p>\n
Habeck said that there appeared to have been some scuffles \u201cbut no escalation yet,\u201d and appealed to all concerned to \u201cleave it at that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LUETZERATH, Germany , 11 Jan (AP) \u2014 Police in riot gear on Wednesday moved into a condemned village in western Germany, launching an effort to evict activists holed up at the site in an attempt to prevent its demolition to make way for the expansion of a coal mine. Some stones and fireworks were thrown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-208688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}