Arturo Sanchez Jimenez
Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, November 11, 2022, p. eleven
Two consecutive mornings, someone set fire to the halls of a building in Cottbus, Germany, where some 320 students live, almost all of them foreigners. It is unknown who is responsible and what is the reason for the attacks, but for CM – a Mexican resident in the building, who prefers that her identity be protected – it may have been a xenophobic attack and she criticizes the lack of action by the police local.
We were very scared. I’m sure if this was full of Germans, the police would be here cordoning off the area, but we’re foreigners and they didn’t.
he says in a telephone interview. Sadly, I’ve gotten used to living
with discrimination, he points out.
CM came to this city three years ago to study for a master’s degree at the Brandenburg University of Technology. She points out that despite the efforts of the educational institution and the government to promote diversity, she has suffered discrimination. People do not accept
the presence of foreigners, immigrants and refugees. One feels it on the street, in how they see you. They have come to shout at me in German and English to go home. Once they didn’t let us sit in the bakery and another time they kicked us out of a bar. One sadly gets used to living with this”, he narrates.
She says that early Tuesday morning, a strong smell of burning prompted her to leave her room. She saw smoke in the stairwell and a number of objects that had been burned. Other students who passed by the place alerted the firemen and the police, who, according to CM, limited themselves to filing a report. The next night, while she was telling her mother about what she had experienced on the phone, again the smell of burning alerted her and she again saw fire and smoke in the lobby of her building, so she left the room. she.
Once outside, she called a colleague who lives in another of the five sections of the building to tell her what was happening. Then, the friend realized that there was also a fire in the lobby of her section. The firefighters and the police came again, who made other reports, but refused to put surveillance on the scene.
The Mexican embassy in Germany has been in contact with CM, he says, but the German authorities have not taken action. The inaction of the police has me very frustrated, whether it’s because of racism or not, but that night the officers were laughing in our faces.
