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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 2KB | 40 lines

                                                                                THE WEEK, Page 18

WORLD

Day of Broken Dreams


Germany's political fringe disrupts a massive plea for tolerance


    Good intentions are sometimes blindsides, but rarely so
spectacularly. Expressing revulsion toward a wave of
antiforeigner violence that has spread across their nation this
year, 300,000 German demonstrators -- nearly four times the
number expected -- converged in Berlin's Lustgarten to rally for
goodwill. But in full view of world media, the demonstration
turned into an ugly spectacle of egg-splatting, paint-bombing
counterprotest -- staged not by the neo-Nazi right, whose
xenophobia prompted the march in the first place, but by some
400 left-wing anarchists. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was forced to
abandon the procession shortly after beginning it. More enduring
was the image of Germany's distinguished President, Richard von
Weizsacker, his coat splotched by eggs, wanly shouting a message
of peace from behind a thicket of police riot shields.

    Purposely held the Sunday before the 54th anniversary of
Kristallnacht, the first major pogrom in Nazi Germany, the
demonstration thus inadvertently showcased the intolerance it
was meant to decry. Kohl dismissed last week's disrupters as
"rabble" and promised not to let Germany's course be influenced
by "terror of the streets," of whatever stripe. But the
subversion sent precisely the message that authorities were
trying to counter: that political extremists are getting out of
control in Europe's largest country.