Diese Mail kam heute an die Adresse webmaster@genealogy.net Peter Richard Sorge schrieb:
-CLOSURES OF SCHOOLS-
-FORCED RESETTLEMENT-
-DESTRUCTION OF ENVIRONMENT-
CULTURAL GENOCIDE OF SORBS IN GERMANY!
HELP US SAVE OUR NATION!
Horno Alliance
Initiator/Spokesman: Michael Gromm
Dorfstrasse 41 . D-03172 HornoTel: (-49)(0)175-440 9534 . Fax: (-49)(0)180-5052 58 65 14 14
e-mail: Horno-Allianz@web.de
An informal, cross-party alliance of human and minority rights activists, environmentalists, church representatives, youth and student organizations, artists, writers, scientists and politicians, united in support of the people of Horno in their fight against enforced resettlement and the destruction of their ancient Sorb village.
International Appeal for Support
Supported by associations representing the four national minorities in Germany: DOMOWINA - Bund Lausitzer Sorben e.V. (Sorbs), Friesenrat (Friesians), Sydslesvigsk Forening (Danes), Central Council of German Sinti and Roma
The fight to save the Sorb village of HORNO (Sorb: Rogow) in the Lausitz region of eastern Germany, which has been abandoned to private strip-mining interests by the State Government of Brandenburg, has entered its final phase.
Since 1977 - and particularly since the collapse of the GDR in 1990, that promised an end to the wholesale sacrifice of Sorb villages to lignite mining (73 Sorb villages were destroyed between 1945 and 1989) - the people of Horno have fought incessantly (see Background Paper below) against enforced resettlement and the destruction of their thousand-year-old village, which, in 1993, was put under a preservation order by the Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation and Protection of Historic Monuments, because of its historic settlement structure and appearance!
A large number of legal battles have been fought by Horno, both in the Administrative Courts against the strip-mining company LAUBAG and its mining permits, and also at the State Constitutional Court in Potsdam against the incompetent State Government, which, nine years after commencing planning procedures, has still not succeeded in passing a binding lignite plan for the Jänschwalde strip-mine that conforms with the Brandenburg State Constitution. Twice, in 1995 and 1998, the State Constitutional Court upheld claims by Horno and the neighbouring village of Grießen, and declared Government lignite plans to be unconstitutional and therefore null and void. As a result, there is still no legal basis for the enforced resettlement of the Horno people.
The lack of a legal basis for resettlement has not however prevented LAUBAG from continuing both its strip-mining activities and its psychological warfare against the people of Horno. LAUBAG excavators, just 1,500 metres from the village, are now churning away at the Horno Hill, whose fertile earth is transported by conveyor belt some five kilometres in a southerly direction, where it is then tipped into a disused mining site, where the Sorb village of Weißagk once flourished.
LAUBAG sells nearly all its lignite to the electricity utility VEAG, and this power producer is effectively bankrupt, having wasted 16 billion DM since 1990 in the construction and modernization of lignite-burning power plants in eastern Germany, thus only aggravating excess capacities on the electricity market. Now VEAG and LAUBAG are currently being sold for a combined total of only 2.9 billion DM (!) to the Hamburger Elektrizitäts-Werke (HEW), whose controlling shareholder is the Swedish state-owned utility VATTENFALL. For the cost of constructing just a single block at the Boxberg lignite power plant, VATTENFALL is acquiring the whole of VEAG, including "the world's most modern" lignite power plant at Schwarze Pumpe on the Brandenburg/Saxony border, Boxberg, Lippendorf near Leipzig, and the entire East German high-voltage distribution grid, with the mining company LAUBAG thrown in for free.
It is the intention of the Horno Alliance to ensure by concerted pressure of international public opinion, that VATTENFALL be persuaded that the destruction of Horno would be a fundamental violation of the minority rights of the Sorb people, and is therefore not in its best interest; that instead the Jänschwalde strip-mine should bypass Horno. VATTENFALL must also not be permitted to hide behind HEW and the German operating companies. VATTENFALL calls the tune at HEW; it must also bear the responsibility for policies pursued!
The bypassing of Horno is technically feasible, it would have a neutral effect on employment, and - bearing in mind that VATTENFALL is buying LAUBAG/ VEAG through HEW for a song, and that the Horno problem was known to HEW/VATTENFALL before the contracts were formulated - it remains financially justifiable. The LAUBAG argument, that saving Horno would immediately force the Jänschwalde mine to close with the result of huge job losses, is completely unfounded and just another example of the lies and deceit that have characterized the decade-long LAUBAG campaign against Horno.
The bypassing of Horno brings with it considerable hardship over a period of several years for the inhabitants. Yet they are willing to bear this hardship in order to save their village.
It is the intention of the Horno Alliance to demonstrate that the cost to VATTENFALL of the wilful and unnecessary destruction of Horno and the enforced resettlement of its people will constitute an incalculable loss of image and goodwill. A recent critical report on VATTENFALL on Swedish television highlighted the company's plans for international expansion. Were the Sorb village of Horno to be destroyed and its people forcibly resettled, these plans would backfire into the face of Sweden's long-standing reputation for environmental protection, social justice and human rights.
The Horno Alliance therefore launches this international appeal to environ-mental organizations, human and minority rights groups, youth organizations, church communities and organizations, artists, writers, journalists, scientists and politicians, as well as bodies representing ethnic minorities (including member organizations of the Federal Union of European Nationalities [FUEV]):
Help save Horno!
What you can do!
Write letters of protest to VATTENFALL, demanding that Horno be saved:
Lars G. Joseffson
Chief Executive Officer
Vattenfall AB
S-162 87 Stockholm
Sweden
Fax: (-46) (0)8-725 0501
Write letters of protest to the Swedish Government:
Prime Minister
Göran Persson
Rosenbad 4
S-103 33 Stockholm
Sweden
Fax: (-46) (0)8-723 1171
demanding that influence be brought to bear on the state-owned VATTENFALL Company to ensure that Horno be spared, and at the same time demanding answers to the following questions:
1. Is the international conduct of a Swedish state-owned company a matter of indifference to the Swedish Government and people?
2. What possible interest can the Swedish people have in the destruction of Sorb villages in Germany for profit?
Kindly send copies of all communications, together with offers of support, by e-mail, post or fax to the Horno Alliance.
You can also support Horno by making a badly-needed financial contribution to the
Horno Fighting Fund
The courageous people of Horno have spent a huge amount of money over the last seven years pursuing major law suits against both the Brandenburg State Government and the LAUBAG mining company. Important cases are still pending before the Administrative Court in Brandenburg, the Brandenburg Constitutional Court and the Federal Constitutional Court, and a large annual legal bill has to be met.
The Brandenburg State Government robbed Horno of its independent municipal status with the "Horno Law", passed in 1997, as a result of which Horno no longer has direct access to public funds.
In order to continue the battle in the German courts, Horno is in urgent need of financial support. The fight to save Horno cannot be allowed to fail because of lack of funds. The Horno Alliance therefore appeals to Horno sympathizers - individuals and organizations - throughout Europe, to make a contribution to the Horno Fighting Fund, in order that the fight to save Horno can be pursued.
A registered association - Pro Horno/Rogow e.V. - has been formed for the purpose of channelling funds and support to the Horno community.
Those individuals and organizations wishing to make a financial contribution towards the fight to save Horno are requested to do so by international bank transfer to:
Volks- and Raiffeisenbank e.G. Forst
Bank code: 180 627 58
Account No.: 11 36 135
"Pro Horno/Rogow e.V."
Or by cheque or international money order to:
Pro Horno/Rogow e.V.
Dorfstrasse 41
D-03172 Horno
All contributions will be gratefully acknowledged and should be marked: "Horno Fighting Fund"
Michael Gromm
Initiator/Spokesman, Horno Alliance
Horno, March 2001
Biographical Note:
The English writer Michael Gromm, born in London in 1943, arrived in Guben on the German/Polish border in September 1992 with the intention of doing research for a family chronicle on the period 1942-92 in the divided city of Guben/Gubin. The day after his arrival, however, he discovered the early medieval Sorb village of Horno, eighteen kilometres to the south of Guben, and the lignite strip-mining industry.
In January 1993 he bought a small piece of land in Horno - a traffic island with three maple trees - in order to effectively support the villagers in their fight against forced resettlement and the destruction of Horno.
He was the founding chairman of the Round-Table Action Committee, "The Future of Guben", co-founder of the Federal Conference of Civic-Action Groups against Lignite Mining, and initiator of the youth action group "Geil auf Horno"['Horny for Horno']. In March 1993 he was made honorary citizen of Horno.
Six months after arriving in Guben, he postponed his project of writing a family chronicle to devote himself entirely to the fight for Horno's integrity. In 1995, it came to his notice that his name was of old Sorb origin. Having come to Guben to write a fictional account, he now discovered unexpected strands of his own biography. He is probably related to the Gromms who lived in Guben, east of the River Neiße, until 1945, when they were expelled from what became the Polish town of Gubin. In the former Sorb village of Niemasch Kleba - in English: 'you've no bread' - (now Chlebowa, Poland), fifteen kilometres north-east of Gubin, he stumbled across the life of another distant relative, Emil Gromm, who, until his disappearance in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, was miller, registrar of births and deaths, and chairman of the village council in Niemasch Kleba. In the old 'Gromm Mill' - that had been! boarded up since the nationalization of private business in Poland in 1950 - he found old documents recording that Gromms had lived in the village as far back as the early 18th Century.
He has written two books - in German - on the Horno conflict: The first, "Horno - ein Dorf in der Lausitz - will leben", with photos from Roger Melis, was published by Dietz Verlag Berlin in 1995; the second, a political tale, "Im Schatten der schwarzen Steine", illustrated by Bernd A. Chmura, appeared in 1997 in his own Edition Dreieck Horno. He is currently working on a third book.
At the beginning of 1996 he initiated the "Horno Alliance".
Michael Gromm lives in Horno and Berlin.
Background Paper
The Battle of Horno
The armies of economic miscalculation have convened in Horno. The eastern German power and mining industries, having fought in vain against competitors beyond their borders, are now directing their depleted strength towards purported foes within. Yet a handful of villagers have proven equal to their concerted attacks. Similar battles are mounting throughout Europe. Wherever minorities are the intended victims, let the Sorb village of Horno be a beacon of hope.
The early medieval village of Horno (in the Sorb language: Rogow) has been part of the traditional settlement area of the Sorb people for a thousand years. Their Slavic ancestors settled in Lusatia (German: Lausitz), near the present Polish/Czech border, well before Germanization. Of some 60,000 Sorbs, two-thirds are predominantly Catholic and live in the southerly State of Saxony, and one-third, predominantly Protestant and also known as Wends, living in the State of Brandenburg. The Sorbs have experienced the decimation of their settlement area and the dissipation of their language and culture as a result of the ruthless strip-mining of lignite (brown coal) during the course of the last century.
In the period from 1945-1989, 73 Sorb villages were destroyed and their inhabitants resettled in high-rise tenements along with migrants from all corners of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who had flocked into the Lausitz attracted by work in the lignite mining industry. Through this brutal disruption of traditional rural life and the resulting enforced assimilation, Sorb culture was dealt an almost mortal blow.
In 1989, political metamorphosis in the GDR conveyed the promise that no further Sorb villages would be sacrificed to lignite mining. Apart from energy imports and nuclear reactors from the Soviet Union, the GDR was completely dependent on lignite mining for the generation of electricity and heat. Quite different conditions existed on the West German energy market. The Sorbs, and in particular the people of Horno (who had been informed in 1977 that their village was to be resettled in 1996), renewed their efforts to ensure that no further Sorb villages be destroyed. Their expectations initially appeared to be well founded. The protection of Sorb settlements from further destruction by lignite mining was enshrined in the new Constitution (Article 25) of the State of Brandenburg.
What they could not foresee, however, was that not only lignite mining and electricity-production in the Lausitz would shortly be privatised, but also energy policy itself. The destruction of Horno and the resettlement of its inhabitants were stipulated in the purchase contract from 1994 for the lignite-mining company, Lausitzer Braunkohle AG (LAUBAG). Thereafter, LAUBAG and its new West German shareholders were able to dictate conditions to the State Government, whose Environment Minister would admit to Horno represen-tatives in 1997: "I'm being blackmailed!"
The solution to the problem of the constitutional protection of Sorb settlements from further destruction was characteristic for the morally-bankrupt State Government, whose mendacious dealings with the people of Horno have consistently reflected the vested interests of the mining industry and the mining union. The lie was propagated that the destruction of Horno was necessary in order to save jobs in the mining industry. The truth is, that more than 90% of jobs in Lausitz lignite mining in 1990 have since been lost in a never-ending process of rationalization that has had nothing to do with Horno.
The Brandenburg Government decided that Article 25 of the State Constitution did indeed protect the Sorb settlement area, but not the settlements, that is, the villages, themselves! Horno could therefore be sacrificed, and its inhabitants forcibly relocated within the settlement area, without the State Constitution being contravened! This shameful reinterpretation of the State Constitution clearly revoked the intention of its founding fathers to protect Sorb villages from further destruction by lignite mining; but this was the only argument the Government could possibly put forward when the matter came before the State Constitutional Court, as would inevitably happen. The Government thereafter pursued a steady build-up of political pressure to ensure that the State Constitutional Court judges - all nominated by the political parties and elected by the State Parliament (Landtag) - toed the l! ne.
The fight to save Horno has never revolved solely around the 300 or so inhabitants of the village, contrary to the claims of the Government, LAUBAG and the mining union ("Horno or 70,000 jobs!"). The village of Horno, atop the Horno Hill (100 metres above the River Neiße), is the gateway to the area around the border-city of Guben, a region rich in lakes and forests that has up to now been spared the ravages of strip-mining. Respecting the integrity of Horno would protect the Guben region from devastation. Such a course would also provide the local population with some hope of economic recovery in the future. The city of Guben, for instance, with some 30.000 inhabitants in 1990, lost 10,000 jobs after German reunification to plant closures in the chemical and textiles industries.
Whereas it had once been official GDR policy to sacrifice the whole region of south-east Brandenburg to strip-mining, the West German energy concerns were given a free hand to carve up the East German lignite mining and electricity-generating industry in line with their own interests. Their main interest, of course, was in getting their hands on the high-voltage distribution grid.
Of the 17 strip-mining sites in operation in 1989 only four - three in Brandenburg and one in Saxony - were mining lignite in the year 2000. In many traditional mining areas, strip mines - and the power stations they supplied - were closed down. In the case of the Greifenhain mine, where villages had already been resettled, 200 million tonnes of lignite might still be mined today. The West German mining executives had early access to the old GDR mining plans, and gave no consideration whatsoever to the possibility of saving the villages still on the devastation agenda. Their attitude was clearly spelled out: If you're against the destruction of villages, then you're against lignite, and if you're against lignite you're for the loss of jobs in the region. However, not jobs but profits were their real motive. Bypassing Horno, for instance, might mean that profits would be cut by 100-300 million DM spread o! ver six years. As a result, no attempt at all was made by either LAUBAG or the Brandenburg State Government to avoid the destruction of centuries-old settlements.
Furthermore, the West German mining executives who arrived in the Lausitz in the early 1990s patently knew nothing of the existence of the Sorb minority, whose traditional homeland had been systematically devastated in the course of the previous forty-five years of strip-mining. Local mining managers, on the other hand, were well aware of the problem (in 1990 the Jänschwalde mine was operating right in the middle of the Sorb village of Grötsch (Sorb: Groico), causing unbearable hardship to the inhabitants), but their only interest was in the continuation of strip mining, at whatever cost. And politicians in the newly-founded Brandenburg Parliament ( Landtag) turned a blind eye to the problem, in the hope of outlasting it. The outcome was, that while the Brandenburg Government was pushing through the new State Constitution with its unequivocal protection of Sorb villages, at the same time it was d! rafting lignite plans that foresaw the destruction of Horno and other villages! With the privatisation of LAUBAG in 1994 it was announced - and is maintained up to the present day - that five of the previous seventeen strip-mines would remain in operation in the long term. But, as with "job security", this too is a falsity.
At a meeting in Potsdam at the end of 1993 between representatives of the State Government and the head of the Federal Government's Treuhandanstalt, respon-sible for the sale of the East German lignite industry, it was agreed that only three lignite mines should have a long-term future. This agreement has never been officially acknowledged, to avoid arousing mining workers. Yet in the LAUBAG purchase contract of 1994, details of which have leaked out over the years, the new owners were given the option of rescinding on two of the five so-called long-term lignite mines. One of the five mines - the Reichwalde mine in the Saxonian part of the Lausitz - no longer produces lignite and has officially been on "hold" since the late 1990s. A second mine - the Cottbus-North mine in Brandenburg - is expected to be closed down once the neighbouring Jänschwalde mine, now threatening Horno,! has proceeded over the Horno Hill in the direction of Guben.
The Jänschwalde mine, that supplies the nearby power station of the same name, burnt 25 million tonnes of lignite in the year 2000 and thus emitted 23 million tonnes of CO2 into the earth's atmosphere! The reality of continuing "disemployment" in lignite mining is amply illustrated at the Jänschwalde mining site, where mining itself is totally mechanized, and no more than a handful of people are directly employed on site at any one time. Approximately 40% of LAUBAG employees work in administration, another 35-40%% in the service area (transport, drainage, maintenance). These LAUBAG employees are being told - not only by their employer, but also by the State and Federal Governments - that now that LAUBAG and VEAG (the power-plant operator) have been acquired by HEW/VATTENFALL, their jobs will be safe. As if HEW/VATTENFALL would not ! ontinue with rationalization! The truth of the matter is that the miners and power-station workers have been consistently deceived by the State Government, their employers and, not least, their own mining union officials. Little more than 3,000 people are currently (2001) employed by LAUBAG in Brandenburg (in the Lausitz as a whole the figure is around 5,000). By 2006 the Brandenburg figure will probably be no more than 1,500.
Planning procedures for lignite strip-mining are carried out on two levels: the mining company submits outline mining plans (Rahmenbetriebspläne) for each mine to the State Mining Office ( Oberbergamt), which has to approve them within the terms of the Federal Mining Act (Bundesberggesetz). Bearing in mind that the Oberbergamt is subordinate to the State Ministry of Economics, it is not surprising that it effectively colludes with the mining company. This circum-stance is regularly reflected in the public statements of its officials.
The second planning level concerns the integration of mining company plans into the State Government's regional planning. The appropriate authority in Brandenburg rests with the Environment Ministry, which oversees the activities of the responsible Lignite Committee (Braunkohlenausschuss ), a regional, indirectly-elected body responsible for drawing up a lignite plan for each mining site.
In 1994, Horno filed its first court suit against LAUBAG's outline mining plan for the Jänschwalde mine, which had been approved in 1993. In a scandalous disregard for the Federal Constitution, which guarantees the right to be heard at court, the Horno suit was ignored - also because of its political implications! - by the Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgericht ) in Cottbus for five years, being finally heard, and dismissed, at the end of 1998.
Horno also filed suit in 1994 with the Brandenburg State Constitutional Court against the lignite plan for the Jänschwalde mine, which had been passed by the State Government in the previous year. In June 1995, the Constitutional Court declared the lignite plan to be unconstitutional and thus null and void, because the plan foresaw the dissolution of the Horno municipality. For such an act to be executed against the express will of the village inhabitants, the State Constitution required a specific law to be passed by the Landtag, that in fact did not exist. This was Horno's first major success in its fight to save the community.
Two years later, in June 1997, the Brandenburg Parliament passed the so-called "Horno Law", which robbed Horno of its municipal status and incorporated it into the neighbouring community of Jänschwalde. Up to this point, the Horno village council had steadfastly refused all demands to discuss resettlement, maintaining that the destruction of Horno was economically unnecessary, environmentally harmful and socially disruptive. This policy had proven most helpful to the Horno cause. But the "Horno Law" now forced Horno to give up its total refusal to talk, simply because the "Horno Law" not only dissolved the municipality, it also laid down a relocation site for "New Horno". The new site was just a few hundred metres from the Jänschwalde power plant, and would have become mandatory were Horno not to choose an alternative site. In a remarkable demonstration of discipline and leadership the Horno representati! es - led by the indefatigable Bernd Siegert, who, with the overwhelming support of the villagers, has spearheaded the campaign to save Horno since 1990 - painstakingly carried out a number of polls of village opinion on the resettle-ment issue. The government poll, laid down in the "Horno Law", was first boycotted; but with a view to keeping the community together, 60 per cent of the Horno people ultimately voted for a site 18 km south, near the town of Forst, as a "backup site", should resettlement prove to be inevitable. A number of people did not want to relocate to Forst under any circumstances and instead chose the nearby town of Peitz for their enforced relocation. The LAUBAG Company, which for years had sought by all manner of means to split the Horno community and destroy the solidarity and resistance of the population, seized upon this opportunity to put pressure on those families not desiring to relocate to Forst, to sell out.
In the meantime, Horno had again filed suit with the State Constitutional Court against the Brandenburg Government's "Horno Law". Furthermore, one of the political parties in the Brandenburg Landtag - the democratic socialists PDS, of whom a majority had rejected the "Horno Law" - also filed suit before the State Constitutional Court, claiming that the new law violated Article 25 of the Brandenburg Constitution ("Rights of the Sorbs"). The central argument on the Government's part was, as already mentioned, that the Brandenburg Constitution protected the Sorb settlement area but not the settlements themselves, and that the "rights of the Sorbs" were not subjective, basic rights but rather objective constitutional aims, such as "the right to work".
Not only did the Constitutional Court have to decide the issue of Article 25; there was a clear constitutional requirement concerning the parliamentary passage of legislation. In short, the Court had to be convinced that during the legislative process all arguments pro and contra the proposed bill had been accounted for and "weighed up" fairly. This constitutional requirement, a central pillar of parliamentary democracy, gave Horno supporters considerable cause for optimism, since the entire legislative process had been little more than a farce. Before the Horno bill had even been brought before parliament, two of the political parties - the governing Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU), who together commanded a large parliamentary majority - had publicly declared that they would vote in favour of the "Horno Law". In effect, the legislative process was a mere formality, numerous hear! ngs conducted just for the record, the result a forgone conclusion. Such a procedure constituted a flagrant violation of the constitution. The Constitutional Court judges could not fail to gather what was going on.
Towards the end of the legislative process, a major scandal erupted involving the SPD parliamentary leadership, which, in open contempt of parliamentary procedures