Hambach Forest: Lies and Nepotism

Most of the information about the currently situation in the Hambacher Forest is in German. I want to make some of the recent events accessible for the international world. To start with I summarized the incidents that astonished me most. Here we go:

Deutsche Bahn Supports Coal Nepotism

The national train company Deutsche Bahn that claims to run entirely on green electricity supports the nepotism network of the coal industry: Last Sunday (September 23rd) the weekly forest walk with Michael Zobel started at 11:30 am, as usual. A local train (S-Bahn) connects Cologne with Buir, the closest stop to Hambacher Forest. It runs only once per hour on Sundays.

While in the past weeks Deutsche Bahn used only short trains (consisting of less wagons than normal S-Bahn) around the time of the forest walk, last week the train arriving at 11:09 was cancelled completely. Deutsche Bahn announced the train driver had reported sick at 7 am in the morning. Yet the electronic schedule system had announced the cancellation as early as 1 am, as screenshots prove. The 7am-post has been deleted from the db_twitter account.

However, people managed to organize car pools and thousands made it to the demonstration despite pouring rain!

Train cancellation
On September 23 the train that would arrive on time for the demonstration was cancelled.
Train cancelled due to sick driver. The original db_presse tweet has been deleted

Mr. Reul, Minister of the Interior of NRW lies continuously

Herbert Reul (CDU), minister of the interior of the state of Northrine-Westphalia (NRW) is in charge of carrying out the political decision to logg Hambach forest in order to help RWE make even more profit. He is personally strongly in favour of the logging. Moreover, he repeatedly states a nasty scene that nobody in the forest witnessed: According to Reul activists accompanied the resuscitation of journalist Steffen Meyn – who had dropped from around 15 meters and shortly thereafter succumbed to his injuries – with chanting of a very derogatory phrase. It would translate into something like: “Fuck it. Logging only takesplace once a year.”  (“Scheiß drauf. Rodung ist nur einmal im Jahr”). It trivialize the young man’s horrible fate and depicts the bystanders as cold-hearded rioters. However, Reul was not in the forest at the time. Journalists, activists and a parliamentary observer who were all eye-witnesses of the terrible scenes did not hear any of these derogatory chants as taz-reporter Annett Selle and others claim. Instead many remember deadly silence, as well as activists screaming “murderer” and activists sinking coming out of their hiding places, sinking onto their knees regardless of the police action that might cause.

Anonymous Hacks Crashed RWE Website

On September 24th the website of the energy company RWE was completely out of service. Here is a screenshot I took on that day. Hackers of the group Anonymous published a video in which an avatar threatened the group would attack the website and corporate servers as long as RWE destroyed the climate:

Unfortunately the RWE website is up and running again by now.

hacker's success: RWE site down
Screenshot: RWE website hacked on September 24th.

Dear English-speaking world. I will report more in the coming days and try to keep you guys up to date.

Sunday Walks in Hambacher Forest

Hacking Live Bullshit Interviews @ Hambi

Occupying Hambacher Forst

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