A giant brawl between German nationals and refugees required roughly 100 police officers to quell the violence.
The city of Bautzen boiled over in violence during an anti-refugee protest on Wednesday night. Approximately 80 Germans and 20 refugees engaged in a melee that injured at least two asylum-seekers. Police were forced to dodge bottles and pieces of wood that refugees threw at them as they attempted to isolate the groups.
“The altercation was started by the asylum-seekers,” local police said in a statement released to the press, Deutche Well reported Thursday.
Bautzen Mayor Alexander Ahrens imposed a curfew on teenage refugees, but said the city would not become “playground for violent right-wing radicals,” the newspaper reported.
German officials estimate that roughly 300,000 refugees from the Middle East and North Africa will reach its borders in 2016. The European nation welcomed 1.1 million refugees in 2015, which resulted in large losses for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), in March’s region elections.
“We are preparing for between 250,000 and 300,000 refugees this year,” said Frank-Jurgen Weise, the head of Germany’s federal office for migrants (BAMF), Agence France-Press reported Aug. 28. “We can ensure optimal services for up to 300,000. Should more people arrive, it would put us under pressure, then we would go into so-called crisis mode.”
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• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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