GERMANY:A LEAKED German government report has suggested xenophobia is widespread among the country's youth.
Almost one-third of teenagers interviewed for the study said they agreed "completely" with the view that "Germany has too many foreigners". A further one-third said they "partly" agreed with the statement.
The survey's results were based on interviews with 50,000 secondary schoolgoers aged about 15 in 61 schools. The interviews, conducted with a mix of children of German and non-German background, were conducted by staff of the respected Institute for Criminology Research in Lower Saxony.
Leading anti-racism activists said they were not surprised by the survey results, which they said matched other studies in recent years.
The study said that xenophobia was a Germany-wide problem, but that motives vary between eastern and western regions.
In eastern regions, experts say, decades of dictatorship have brought about a weak democratic cultural tradition and an intolerance towards the tiny foreign population. Most of Germany's 7.3 million foreigners live in the western states. "Here the view still dominates - unlike in Britain or France - that someone cannot be German who doesn't correspond to a stereotypical image," said Anetta Kahane, of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, named after an Angolan beaten to death by skinheads a month after German unification in 1990.
"German immigration policy of the past decades - based on the assumption they would one day go back to where they came from - was programmed to backfire. After all, you can't pursue a policy of playing with prejudices for years and then expect people to suddenly give up racist attitudes."
The survey's authors suggest the need for further interviews to explore the roots of the teenager resentment, while minority groups reacted with alarm to the results. The Co-ordination Council of Muslims in Germany demanded action against "falling inhibitions of violence against 'strangers': the Muslim or the Turk".
The survey contains other startling figures: one in five teenagers expressed anti-Islamic views, while one in 13 German youths admitted committing a misdemeanour or crime with an extreme-right character, such as spraying a swastika on a building or attacking a business owned by non-Germans.