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Merkel condemns racism as Dresden anti-Islam marches grow

13 December 2014 03:08 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday condemned anti-Muslim demonstrations centered on the eastern city of Dresden, saying there was "no place in Germany" for hatred of Muslims or any other minority, APA reports quoting Reuters.

In a speech at a party congress of her Bavarian allies in Nuremberg, Merkel also denounced an attack on buildings in a nearby town being turned into refuge for asylum-seekers. The structures were set on fire and daubed with swastikas.

"It is unbearable when homes of asylum-seekers are defiled, when people try to make radical slogans," Merkel said, adding that everyone coming to Germany had the right to be treated decently.

Earlier on Friday, Merkel's spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said: "In the name of the government and the chancellor I can say quite clearly that there is no place in Germany for religious hatred, no matter which religion people belong to."

"There is no place for Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or any form of xenophobia or racism," Wirtz said of the growing Monday evening marches in Dresden under the motto PEGIDA, standing for "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West".

Public expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment are largely taboo in mainstream German politics because of the Nazis' mass-murder of Jews and other groups in the Holocaust. Merkel argues that Germany needs immigrants to avoid a demographic crisis.

But local officials say they are struggling to cope with the largest number of asylum-seekers in Europe, with net immigration at its highest levels in two decades.