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Photo: EPA
PEGIDA supporters gather during march
Photo: EPA

Anti-Islam group PEGIDA holds first Austria march

European far-right movement rally attracts hundreds of supporters, counter-demonstrators to streets of Vienna as 1,200 officers deployed to keep two groups apart.

PEGIDA, the anti-Islam movement born in Germany, drew hundreds of supporters and counter-demonstrators to the streets of Vienna when it held its first march in neighboring Austria on Monday.

 

 

With 1,200 police officers deployed in Austria's capital as a precaution, around 250 marchers carrying Austrian flags and chanting "we are the people" faced off against a like number of protesters shouting "down with PEGIDA".

 

Police spokesman Roman Hahslinger told AFP that some 400 PEGIDA supporters showed up but that 5,000 people joined the counter-protest, shouting "Nieder, nieder, nieder mit PEGIDA!" ("Down, down, down with PEGIDA!") and waving rainbow flags.

 

Sympathizers of right-wing populist movement PEGIDA demonstrate in Vienna (Photo: AFP) (Photo: AFP)
Sympathizers of right-wing populist movement PEGIDA demonstrate in Vienna (Photo: AFP)

 

The two groups exchanged verbal insults and chants on a chilly evening in central Vienna but were kept apart by around 1,200 police, and there were no incidents of violence reported.

 

PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) spokesman Georg Immanuel Nagel told AFP that more of the group's supporters had turned up than expected.

 

"There will be further demonstrations," he said.

 

"We need to do something to stop these vermin coming in from abroad," one PEGIDA supporter, an 84-year-old man who declined to give his name, told AFP.

 

"If we don't do something now, in 20 years we will all be wearing the veil," said a woman in her 30s who also preferred to stay anonymous.

 

The rally followed violent demonstrations on Friday by left-wing activists protesting against an annual ball in Vienna that traditionally draws right-wing figures.

 

Counter-demonstrators stand together against PEGIDA supporters (Photo: AFP) (Photo: AFP)
Counter-demonstrators stand together against PEGIDA supporters (Photo: AFP)

 

Religious sensibilities are on the rise in Austria. The government has proposed requiring standardized German-language translations of the Koran and prohibiting foreign funding of Muslim organizations on its soil in a draft law aimed in part at tackling militants.

 

The initiative follows alarm over official estimates that about 170 people from Austria have joined up with Islamist militant forces fighting in the Middle East.

 

The sudden rise of PEGIDA – "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West" – in Germany rattled that country's political establishment by staging rallies that brought up to 25,000 onto the streets of Dresden.

 

But it has fallen into disarray after five of its founding members dropped out to start a rival movement.

 

Georg Immanuel Nagel, a 28-year-old philosophy student from Vienna and spokesman for the Austrian offshoot, told newspaper Die Presse he wanted an end to the "appeasement policy" for the roughly half-million Muslims who live in Austria, a traditionally Roman Catholic nation of 8.5 million.

 

He called for legislation banning "Islamism" so that people promoting Sharia – or Islamic – law could be punished, just as Austria outlaws glorification of Nazism.

 

Nazi Germany in 1938 annexed Austria, whose 200,000-strong Jewish population was wiped out in the Holocaust.

 

Heinz Christian Strache, leader of the far-right opposition Freedom Party that is neck and neck in opinion polls with the centrist coalition parties, has expressed support for PEGIDA, which he has called a "serious civil rights movement".

 

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 02.03.15, 08:17
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