GERMANY-IMMIGRATION/GAUCK Refugees are welcomed by vast majority of Germans - president

Record ID: 590884

  • Title: GERMANY-IMMIGRATION/GAUCK Refugees are welcomed by vast majority of Germans - president
  • Date: 25th December 2014
  • Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (DECEMBER 25, 2014) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF BELLEVUE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE
  • Embargoed: 9th January 2015 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA5AHNY3DBXFNMJBN1L15F5IESD
  • Story Text: President Joachim Gauck urged Germans to welcome with open arms the myriad refugees who are arriving in the country to escape wars and violence, and to banish racist fears being whipped up by a growing grass-roots movement of anti-immigrant populists.
    Gauck used his annual Christmas address, delivered on national TV on Thursday (December 25), to praise countless thousands of Germans who sheltered and supported some 200,000 new refugees this year while indirectly attacking a new anti-asylum movement.
    More than 17,000 people took part in Germany's largest anti-immigrant rally to date on Monday (December 22) in the eastern city of Dresden to protest the rise in asylum-seekers and to air their own nebulous fears that Germany is being overrun by Muslims.
    "Taking fears seriously does not mean succumbing to them. If our eyes are wide with fear answers are hard to find. We are more likely to make ourselves look small and disheartened," Gauck said after the grass-roots movement that calls itself PEGIDA -- or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West -- staged its 10th straight weekly rally on Monday.
    Gauck, a former pastor and human rights campaigner in communist East Germany, has held the office with its ceremonial duties and limited executive powers since March 2012. Christmas addresses are rarely political but Gauck, who has no party affiliation, often speaks out more bluntly than predecessors.
    Gauck went out of his way to praise a group in Magdeburg that cares for young orphans stranded in Germany and contrasted that with those at the anti-immigrant rallies.
    "One clear expression of humanity in our society is the great willingness there now to take in refugees," he said.
    "For me the fact that we're responding with empathy to the suffering around us, that the vast majority of us do not share the views of those who want to seal Germany off, is a truly encouraging lesson learned this year," he added.
    The PEGIDA rallies spread quickly across the country in recent weeks and have unsettled the political establishment, which spent decades trying to restore Germany's image as an open, tolerant country after the devastation of the Nazis.
    The number of asylum-seekers in Germany has surged to some 200,000 this year -- double the number in 2013 and four times the 2012 level. Germany has taken in more than any other western country due in part to an influx from war-torn Syria and Iraq.
    "We know that fears will always accompany us, but we also know that putting into practice what we call humanity is indeed the greatest capacity humankind has," Gauck said.
    Germany has among the most liberal asylum rules in the world, partly because asylum granted elsewhere helped many such as former Chancellor Willy Brandt survived the Nazi regime.
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