The new year has arrived and New Year's Eve is over. In the run-up to the New Year, we reported in several articles on the media propaganda campaign and the arming of police forces in the run-up to the turn of the year, in view of the German bourgeoisie's fear of new fights on New Year's Eve. A look at the bourgeois media landscape now gives the impression that it was a fairly quiet New Year's Eve and that the tactic of increasing the police contingents and placing working-class districts under occupation nationwide worked. But this narrative is more likely to cause confusion than to reflect objective reality. It may be that there were fewer attacks and fights with the police overall - we have no figures independent of the police and the bourgeois press - but there were still many targeted attacks on the police this New Year's Eve. This was also the case in North Rhine-Westphalia, despite the mobilization of 6600 police officers by Interior Minister Herbert Reul.
By far the most significant event in NRW took place on New Year's Eve in Hasselstraße in the city of Solingen near Wuppertal.There were real street riots between hooded youths and young adults and the police and fire department that lasted several hours. These combative youths erected several burning barricades and, according to several media and eyewitness reports, defended them by firing alarm guns and throwing stones, pyrotechnics and bottles at the approaching cops and the fire department who were supposed to extinguish the barricades.
It was the youths themselves who started the street riot. The police and fire department were called to Hasselstraße after midnight because of a burning mattress. When the officers arrived, they were immediately pelted with firecrackers and shot at with rockets, and stones and bottles were already flying. When the cops and fire department left after this first attack, several containers were then pushed onto the access roads and set alight. Some of the hedges were set on fire to prevent the approaching cops from entering the estate. According to Westdeutscher Rundfunk, police units tried to storm the barricades several times in vain and arrest the attackers, before they had to repeatedly abandon their attempts to storm the barricades amidst a hail of projectiles and stray bullets. The situation only calmed down more than three hours later when additional police forces from surrounding towns were mobilized at around 3:45 am.
In the working-class districts of Marxloh and Hochheide in Duisburg, there were also small fights between residents of the districts and the police stationed there beforehand. Here too, teenagers and young adults fired rockets and firecrackers at the cops, injuring a police officer in the leg. However, even apart from these two incidents, which received the most media attention, there were plenty of attacks and ambushes on police and firefighters throughout NRW.
Stationed police units in Duisburg. Picture taken from the Rheinische Post.
In Bottrop, cops were pelted with pyrotechnics from a group. During the ensuing chase, even bricks were thrown at the pursuing police cars. All in all, there were so many attacks throughout North Rhine-Westphalia that it would simply not be possible to describe them all adequately here. According to bourgeois media reports, however, there were several targeted attacks on police and fire departments with fireworks and firecrackers in Bonn, Herne, Bergheim, Münster, Bielefeld, Leverkusen, Dülmen, Erkrath, Düsseldorf, Lünen and Essen. In the district of Märkisch, the fire department even had to be called out because unknown persons attacked a local comprehensive school with Molotov cocktails. It is not yet clear whether this was an imitation of similar acts by French students during last year's Nahel M. fights.
In summary, it can be said that, contrary to the widespread narrative in the bourgeois media, New Year's Eve in North Rhine-Westphalia was a night full of struggles by the deepest and broadest masses. Above all, the proletarian youth and young adults. The Ministry of the Interior and Herbert Reul wanted to contain the justified violence of the masses by deploying 6600 police officers and occupying entire districts. They did not succeed. Interior Minister Herbert Reul can really only be "congratulated", he desperately wanted to prevent the attacks on state " emergency forces" and no scenes like last year and instead got hours of barricade fights, shots from alarm guns, Molotov cocktails, attacks with firework rockets, firecrackers thrown, stones and bottles and dozens of ambushes in numerous cities in the federal state. The cherry on the cake of this failure is only the perplexity of the Minister of the Interior in response to this justified rebellion of the masses the next day: "There are still too many people running around who haven't learned how to deal with each other." But the opposite is the case, because it seems that there are more and more people running around in the FRG who are prepared to seriously fight against this system.
Cover Image:https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/solingen/solingen-buerger-entsetzt-von-silvesterkrawallen_aid-104186645
