Loosening the stake

Once upon a time, when passing a desolate village, the saint meets “the devil.” He asks him, “Which family are you going to break up now?” The devil says, “I am on my way, I have no intention of doing that”, and enters the village. In the village, he sees a calf that cannot reach its mother because its leash is tied to a stake. He carefully loosens the calf’s stake and looks on to see what will happen. The calf pulls out the stake and runs to its mother. The woman milking the cow gets angry and throws a stone at the calf’s head. Seeing the baby cow die, her husband gets angry and throws a stone at the woman’s head. She dies, too. The woman’s relatives come and begin to slaughter the man and the man’s relatives begin to slaughter them. Having seen all this, the saint looks at the devil and says, “You did it again.” The devil answers “What did I do? I just loosened the stake.” He shrugs his shoulders and goes on his way.

Both AKP, aware that it is performing its final act, and those who disguise their racism towards refugees as anti-AKP sentiment, have been busy loosening the stake for a long time. The stake was further loosened in Ankara-Altındağ on August 11 when, as the police of the regime looked on as “spectators”, a pogrom broke out against Syrians.

Battalgazi is a neighbourhood with a population of 50,000 located in the Altındağ district of Ankara, five or six kilometres from the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and a few bus stops from Kızılay, the centre of the city. Here, on August 10, some young refugees playing on sports equipment at the park were picked on by another group of youths for apparently made-up reasons. 18-year-old Emirhan Yalçın allegedly warned the Syrian youngsters, “don’t damage the equipment,” and was then stabbed and seriously wounded. After he was taken to hospital, the incident was used as justification for an attack on refugees, first in the neighbourhood and later by racist social-media accounts.

Huge photographs of Emirhan Yalçın, who was killed by August 10, were on the streets of Altındağ for weeks. (Photo: İrfan Aktan)

The next day, when the news of Yalçın’s death came out, violent groups looted and set ablaze the houses and workplaces of Syrians. The police not only stood by throughout the night but also prompted the attackers to go to certain places, as seen in videos posted on social media.

 One colleague of ours arrived in the neighbourhood just before the attacks started and has asked to remain anonymous because he could not obtain permission from his organization to make a statement. According to his account, “there were about 500 police officers on duty and they were not letting anyone into the neighbourhood, particularly journalists – I was able to get in by hiding in the muhtar’s, the neighbourhood administrator’s car.” In other words, even though everyone, including the police, knew that a mass attack was about to take place on the evening of August 11, the only precaution taken was to prevent journalists from entering the neighbourhood. “While we were talking to locals during the day, young people said ‘We are waiting for people to finish their shift and come back.’ The groups, who were already prepared when they received the news of the death, mobilized around the early evening, chanting Allahu Akbar.”

“They are the excluded people of Syria”

On the night of the attack, many social media users claiming to live in Battalgazi were posting messages that “the attackers came from outside, they do not live in our neighbourhood,” but witnesses say that is not the case. Two weeks after the incident, on August 27, we met Battalgazi’s neighbourhood administrator, or muhtar, Habip Eroğul. His office, where the doors and windows are protected with iron bars, is located right next to the park where Emirhan Yalçın was murdered. He tells us that “all of them were locals of this neighbourhood.” Noting that there are about “seven or eight thousand” Syrians living in this fifty-thousand population neighbourhood, the muhtar says: “The way things are going, Syrians will become the majority. They might even take over the muhtar’s office in the future.”

A driving-school worker who is visiting the office for residence documents, interrupts, pointing to his red eyes: “I have an eye problem but I can’t go to a doctor. Why can’t I go? I don’t have social security. Why don’t I have it? Because if I request social security, my boss would give me the sack and employ a Syrian instead. They are employed illegally, there is no insurance cost, their salaries are less than half of ours.”

The muhtar continues: “We understand that they are the excluded people of Syria. […] Are there decent ones among them? Of course there are. No one would sleep in the homes where some of them stay. Food conditions are poor, too. By necessity, of course. Where would these people go? They cannot go to Ümitköy, Çankaya, İncek. These are rich neighbourhoods. So they came and settled in this poor neighbourhood. Only the state can solve this issue.”

When the driving-school worker asks, “You say the state will solve this, mayor, but how?” he receives the answer, “That is a matter for the state to figure out.” According to the muhtar, some Syrians left the neighbourhood after the August 11 attack. He adds that “this issue will settle down in time, they will get used to us, and we will get used to them.” The driving-school worker, again: “Your talk is fine but if these people are opposed to Assad, they should go and fight and replace the man. If they are not opposed to Assad, then they still should go back and settle in their country. These guys do not come to the mosque; they do not stand behind our imam to pray. How will it work?” The muhtar replies, “This is because of the difference of sects – we are Hanafi, they are probably Shafi’i”. He repeats, “Neither we nor Syrians can solve this issue, this can only be solved by the state.”

We walk towards Gürpınar Mosque, down Muhtar Arif Turan Street – which had been closed by hundreds of police on the night of August 11 and was still under a police blockade even though two weeks had passed. At least two watchmen were on guard in all the neighbourhood parks. When we ask directions to the mosque, one of the watchmen pointed to a group of hundreds of people, saying “follow them, they are all going to Friday prayer.” Using their prayer rugs as protection from the sun, the people walking downhill toward the mosque were silent.

Racist attackers arsoned workplaces and homes belonging to Syrians and hung Turkish flags on the windows. (Photo: Serkan Alan)

“Racism is the basis of discord”

Battalgazi is a former shantytown, adjacent to the Siteler area, home to hundreds of furniture workshops. Dilapidated gecekondu, shanty houses and hovel housing dating to the 1970s, have not yet been overshadowed by newly-constructed high-rises. The stalls of mostly old hawkers, sheltered in the shadow of unfinished buildings, are not visited by anyone. Syrians have been prohibited from opening their workplaces since August 11. A Syrian in his seventies tells us that he cannot sell anything at the stall he set up to sell his wares in his shop. He opens his hands in a prayer motion and looks up at the scorching sun, sitting on the edge of a briquette in the shade.

At noon, with the temperature at 37 degrees, children chatting with the police tuck their prayer rugs under their arms and run into the mosque amid the voice of the muezzin and the admonishments of adults. While we wait for Friday prayers to end under the suspicious eyes of the police, an old man on his way to the mosque tells us that since August 11, Syrians have been locked in their homes and that they no longer visit the mosque. After the congregation walks away, we chat with the Syrian muezzin who is sipping tea in the shed hut in the mosque courtyard.

Muhammed, who is in his fifties, says that he has been both working as a muezzin and cleaning the mosque for five years. He tells us that things have settled down and these issues will be fixed “if god allows.” How? “Racism and tribalism are the basis of discord and forbidden by our religion. If we keep away from them, we can live together as an ummah” (Muslim community). According to the muezzin, the incidents had calmed down without getting worse because most of the Turks had not become a party to the “discord.” Looking at the tension in the neighbourhood, which has all but been turned into a police station, the muezzin is either too optimistic or is afraid of getting into trouble.

Near the street-facing façade of the mosque, there are two shops, one of which was destroyed during the attacks. The repairman, who is also a refugee, is repairing the shutters of the destroyed shop. Next to this, in a second-hand domestic appliances shop, a Syrian boy says in broken Turkish that their shop was not damaged. The Syrians we approached did not want to talk to us.

We slowly walk past the photographs of Emirhan Yalçın, printed on giant cloth banners hanging from the ropes tied to upper floors of the buildings on both sides of the streets, and enter the park next to the muhtar’s office. Two young people welcome us on the bench where they are sitting. They offer us their half-full 2,5-litre-bottle of warm Coke and hand out cigarettes. Tayfun Y. and İsmail E., in their 20s, are friends both from the neighbourhood and from Kırıkkale University. Tayfun is a graduate of Public Administration, and works in a furniture store in nearby Siteler, where his salary is “almost four thousand lira.” İsmail, on the other hand, is unemployed. He is hoping that Tayfun will marry one of his relative’s daughters and move to Frankfurt and take him too. Tayfun replies, “That didn’t work out, friend. […] Getting married just to leave this country, I don’t know about that… But we want to go, no matter how.” İsmail cuts in: “If I somehow managed to get to Germany, I would accept to be treated by Germans the way we treat the Syrians.”

Four aspects of the night of August 11

The two friends said they had previously hung out at this park with a group of ten or fifteen friends, but that they had now stopped contact with everyone. Tayfun comments, “Because what we actually did that night was to throw stones at our own windows, we broke our own windows. Some people called us racist, others applauded us on social media. But in the end, we were left alone as the locals of the neighbourhood. Alone with our embarrassment, with our anger. Now police are deployed everywhere, but there is a tenser atmosphere than August 11. It is all a matter of a single spark, a single word.” İsmail interrupts: “We did actually throw stones at our own window, in both senses of the word. The district governor’s office replaced the broken windows. How, again with our taxes. Our situation is an example of pure ignorance.”

According to Tayfun, there were four different groups on the street on the evening of August 11: “Radical racists, who are a large presence in our neighbourhood. Those influenced and provoked by them. Looters, who plundered the shops. And those suffering from refugees. In other words, people like us. Our state caused disorder in their country, and they came here and we were left alone with them. Now, Syrians are much more anxious than we are. To be honest, we made an attempt on these people’s lives. Now, our people are organized, they act in unison, but what if the Syrians, too, get organized and act together soon? We cannot tolerate the Syrians, but now I and İsmail cannot tolerate the Turks either anymore. In fact, we have lost patience with everyone. We don’t like people anymore. This is perhaps because of our age, but we have no hope for humanity.”

İsmail says some who took part in the attack had rented their homes to Syrians and moved to the Hüseyingazi and Karapürçek neighbourhoods. He adds that the license plates given to Syrians start with the letter “M”, that everyone knows this, and that countless vehicles were attacked that night. “District markets have not been set up here for two weeks. I wonder if these cops are going to stand over us forever. They are leaving it to time, but this matter will only get worse as time passes. Those who are opposed to Syrians are manipulating us from afar and provoking us. Then they lean back in their seats and watch what happens. They cannot say anything about Tayyip Erdoğan, but they come and create trouble in our neighbourhood.”

Tayfun says “Friend, there are two different worlds in our neighbourhood. The Syrians’ world and our world. We neither make friends nor say hello to each other. But there is another world outside here, too. The world of Çankaya, Ümitköy etc. We cannot even go to Çankaya, let alone another city or country. We are stuck here, and we’ve fallen out with each other. Sometimes my uncle and his family come here from Germany, all of them have Erdoğan’s photo on their phones. And they say to us, ‘Appreciate Turkey, our homeland is so great, etc.’ Of course they do. One thousand euros equals ten thousand lira today. They come for a holiday to the most beautiful places in the country, then they go back. How about staying in Battalgazi for a few days? Then we will see how you delete those photos of Erdoğan.”

İsmail says that Syrians and Turks avoid shopping at each other’s stores in the neighbourhood. İsmail adds, “There were even people who rented their homes to Syrians among those throwing stones, such double-dealing.” He talks about the attitude of police: “Very interesting, the only street closed by police was here, Muhtar Arif Turan Street. The only place where no Syrians live in the neighbourhood!” Tayfun adds: “Even we were surprised, wondering why the police chose only to close this street. There is surely one more thing: the police do not know the Syrians’ homes, but we know. So on the other hand, they did not know what to do.”

“Both an end and a beginning”

A week after the attack, one of the bath attendants we chat with at the historical Şengül Public Bath says, “There is no need to bring in outsiders, the neighbourhood has been like a ticking time-bomb for years anyway. Those who carried out this attack already knew the neighbourhood back to front. That’s why the police could not cope with it”. One of the bath attendants is rubbing down an English customer. Wiping the sweat off his forehead, he begins to talk: “Look, Süleyman Soylu [the Interior Minister] is my client. When he comes here, he has the bath totally closed and stays here for four or five hours. Then he leaves a 600-lira tip. He has not come for a while because of the coronavirus. Soylu has only one problem, the PKK. He does not care about anything else. The man is obsessed with that matter. Think about it, a man who does not stop talking about it, even in the bath! As if the country has no other problem. His only concern is the PKK.”

In fact, what the bath attendant says about Soylu brings to mind another possibility. According to the exiled Kurdish politician Hatip Dicle, who talked to the Yeni Özgür Politika newspaper on August 16, racist anti-refugee attacks are carried out in a planned way according to a certain concept of the state, and the basis of this is actually the “Collapse Plan” introduced in 2014. The Collapse Plan, also known as the “Sri Lanka model,” was a “local and national” version of the horrific attack against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the political and military war initiated after the ending of the solution process was part of this plan.

According to Dicle, the Altındağ attack is both an end and a beginning: “These are all trials, rehearsals. They are firstly started against refugees, then directed against the Kurds. The people who are actually under the threat of pogroms are Kurds. The attacks against refugees are designed as an early rehearsal.”

The attacks on the Kurds in Konya in recent months alone are enough to support Dicle’s assessment. A racist group of 60 people attacked the Dedeoğulları family, living in Konya, on May 12. Seven family members were injured. The majority of the ten arrested attackers were swiftly set free. No precautions were taken despite the family’s pleas, who stated that, “Our lives are in danger.” On July 21, 43 year-old Hâkim Dal, from Diyarbakır and living in Konya, was murdered in a racist attack. Then, on July 30, the Dedeoğulları family was attacked in the courtyard of their house by a racist named Mehmet Altun, who was apparently a skilled gunman. Seven members of the family were murdered. The family’s attorney, Abdurrahman Karabulut, said “The massacre was planned very professionally. The murderer is not alone.”

A group called the “Children of Fire” was indicated as the perpetrator of forest fires that started in late July and burned away forests in Antalya and Muğla. Based on the connection with this group, the fires were associated with the PKK and more generally with the Kurds, although there was no evidence whatsoever. While the fires continued, armed gangs descended onto the streets, forming checkpoints, openly hunting for Kurds, and the government acted as a mere spectator during the whole episode.

A veil of uncertainty, cracks appear

On July 31, the day after the racist attack in Konya, Erdoğan went to Marmaris and drew a veil of uncertainty over the fires: “Like you, we have the question in our minds, of ‘whether the terrorist organization is behind this.’ It is our duty to wrench out the heart of those who have torn out our hearts. If we detect such a link, and we have already found some indications, then we will do what is necessary.”

The government, which failed to cope with the fires, was clearly misdirecting and feeding the racist perception that the Kurds were behind the disaster, but was unable to offer any evidence whatsoever. Perhaps it considered that when the stake was loosened, the rest would simply follow.

The government made no statement during the attack in Altındağ. It did not try to address the uncertainty that deepened anti-refugee sentiment. According to the director of the Association for Migration Research, Didem Danış, this was an extension of the government’s policy of gaining power from uncertainty: “The government uses the power of uncertainty when it comes to refugees. It is said that ‘There is no immigration policy in Turkey’. But, in fact, there is: The immigration policy is governed by uncertainty. Asylum-seekers are not given permanent status, for example. Syrians are given temporary-protection status, trapped into a state of transition, uncertain about when and how it will end, so they are left condemned to the government.”

However, statements from the interior ministry and the Directorate General of Security, which partially lifted the veil of uncertainty, have created the impression that there was no unity within the government. For example, CHP Group Deputy Chairman Engin Özkoç stated on July 29 that he asked the interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, about the reason for the forest fires. Soylu told him there was no evidence of sabotage and that extreme temperatures were the primary cause of the fires. This statement, made two days before Erdoğan’s speech in Marmaris, weakened the stance of the government and its media, which had wanted to create a new anti-Kurdish wave of feeling via these forest fires. It looks like Soylu did this as a precaution against the possibility of being held responsible.

On the other hand, the Directorate General of Security, accountable to Soylu, made a statement on August 12: “After the sad event that took place in our Altındağ district, 76 people were arrested, who were found to be involved in the incidents of prejudice in the locality and who shared untrue posts on social media in order to provoke our citizens and create a certain perception.” It added that 38 of the arrestees had criminal records for offences like looting, wilful injury, robbery, and drug possession and trafficking.

On the one side, there was the gendarmerie that had remained a mere spectator while lynch mobs, who saw the Kurds as responsible for the forest fires, performed identity checks, and the police that had turned a blind eye to people attacking Syrians’ homes and workplaces. On the other side, Soylu was saying that there was no evidence of sabotage behind the forest fires, and the Directorate General of Security was making a statement about the arrestees in Altındağ, denying allegations of “Afghan refugees lowering the Turkish flag” on social media. It was clear there was similar discord regarding the Konya massacre.

The fact that, following the first attack on the Dedeoğulları family, the perpetrators were gradually released, and that the attacker’s family was given protection instead of the attacked, shows that the massacre had not only been tolerated but also permitted. The lawyer of the Dedeoğulları family said: “Even though we warned the officials, at every instance they said, ‘these are not racist attacks, whoever says that is carrying out a provocation’. Having said the incident is not related to racism, the governor and the attorney general did not even visit my clients’ relatives until the higher officials came.”

The only common feeling is “abandonment”

It was seen in Altındağ that the government was taking care not to appear to be in a position of protecting the refugees, and not even mentioning them. However, the arrival of millions of refugees escaping the Syrian war that started in 2011 was a part of the ruling AKP’s strategy of undercutting Assad. AKP aggravated the war by supporting jihadist groups in Syria, while it greeted millions escaping to Turkey with an “open-door policy”. The point was not only to increase the number of refugees for political reasons but also to provide cheap labour for capital.

As a matter of fact, referring to the anti-refugee campaigns of the main opposition CHP, AKP Chairperson Advisor Yasin Aktay said, “If the Syrians leave, the economy will collapse.” AKP Vice Chairperson Mehmet Özhaseki emphasized the refugees’ “contribution in the economy” with the following words: “In some cities, the industry is kept alive by the Syrians. If you go to Gaziantep, you will see thousands of people working in the toughest and most difficult jobs. The case is the same in the Kayseri industry. Employers cannot find workers, but these men are willing to work.”

Refugees were useful not only as cheap labour but as an instrument for blackmailing the EU. European leaders, particularly Merkel, were happy to come and visit Erdoğan, while EU institutions did not go beyond expressing their “concern” about serious human-rights violations in Turkey, acting as mere spectators to Turkey’s occupation of Jarablus, Azez, Manbij and Afrin, and financed “efforts” for refugees.

On the other hand, AKP does not share with society certain truths that would invalidate racist grumbling that claims, “Syrians are living off our back” and avoids mentioning that the EU is meeting the costs for refugees. In addition to this, almost no mutual “harmony” programs are developed in the regions where refugees live. For example, our colleague who witnessed the racist attacks in Altındağ said: “Six or seven years have passed, but there is still not the slightest social contact in the neighbourhood. Turks and Syrians do not even sit in the same café. No integration policy has been implemented. No steps have been taken to ensure people have more familiarity and contact with each other. Therefore, each group keeps up its guard against the other. Turks and Syrians in Battalgazi have only one common feeling: abandonment.”

CHP is making some attempts to use this “feeling of abandonment” in its own favour, by loosening the stake. Two weeks before the Altındağ attack, the CHP mayor of Bolu, Tanju Özcan, targeted refugees with these words: “They do not go even if you stop the aid. They do not go even if you say ‘I won’t give you a workplace license.’ We will increase water prices and solid waste fees tenfold for any subscriber of foreign nationality. Turkish citizens and foreign nationals will no longer use water at the same price.”

Very aware of what he is doing, Özcan does not hide his racism: “Some people will talk about human rights, they will call me ‘fascist’. I don’t care.” He was neither referred to a disciplinary committee nor reprimanded by his party. In fact, CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, on a TV show on August 6, commented that Özcan’s practice was “not correct,” but added: “He may have said something like that in the political climate of his region.” Well, what was that “political climate”, and whose work was it?

Syrians were still prohibited from opening their workplaces although two weeks had passed. The neighbourhood remains under police blockade. (Photo: Serkan Alan)

“Excellent observation”

Abraham, a 25-year-old Syrian university student who has been in Turkey for 11 years, sums it up: “If people struggling to earn a living are told that ‘the refugees are the reason for your trouble,’ then we are turned into a hate figure. However, there is no material basis for this rhetoric. Is there any concrete statistical data indicating that we are the reason for the economic crisis in Turkey? As far as I understand, racism, the sense of ‘we are superior to them’ plays a compensatory role for oppressed people. And the politicians are exploiting this.”

A poor internal migrant from Hakkari, who lives in Akdere, close to Altındağ, and collects paper from refuse containers in Ayrancı, says: “The poor cast out the poor. Those racists used to attack us in the past. Then the Syrians came and they set us aside and began to go for them. The smell of hunger emanates from some houses around Akdere. Those people think that when the Syrians leave, they will have kebab to eat day and night. Yet I am Kurdish, you are Turkish, he is Syrian; neither you are hungry because I exist nor am I hungry because you exist. While we are quarrelling with each other, it is the ones at the top who feast on all the kebabs.”

When we tell Tayfun and İsmail about their statements, they say they are an “excellent observation”. İsmail: “Once, people did not like Kurds here. Now the separation between us has ended, our common enemy has become the Syrians. Anytime soon, we will be friends with Syrians and see Afghans as the common enemy. While we fight among ourselves, the ones at the top feast on all the kebabs.” According to Tayfun, there is a greater risk: “We used to talk about this with each other. You drag someone’s kid behind a panzer, and the other kids see this. What will they do? They have no other option left than to become a terrorist. Now we are doing the same thing to Syrians and probably their children will grow up with this grudge and do the same thing tomorrow…”

As we leave, they ask us not to write their surnames. İsmail says, “It seems we will be left with no other choice, we will apply to become police officers. Tayfun thinks we should do our military service and stay in the army as specialist sergeants. So we will either become soldiers or police. They shouldn’t have the chance to use what we have told you against us.”

While “the ones at the top feast on all the kebabs,” the lower class has reached boiling point. There is an increasing possibility that one wing of the government – splitting into more factions as it weakens – might make various moves by turning anti-refugee or anti-Kurdish campaigns into a new “shock doctrine” before the elections. It is not for nothing that mafia boss and whistle-blower Sedat Peker, occasionally used as an irregular warfare figure by the government until recently, has drawn attention to such “provocations”, calling for “moderation” by nationalist groups and warning, “They will want you to pour out into the streets.” The stake is being loosened, and it is clear that there is not only one hand behind it.

On the night of the Altındağ attack, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was warning of “provocation” on Twitter, as if he and his party had not contributed to this climate: “It is clear that what has been carried out via Afghan and Syrian refugees in recent days is a provocation. Raising the Afghan flag, the messages of a so-called journalist provocateur, a Syrian youngster’s calls to ‘unite against CHP,’ attacks and deaths… I can see what these incidents may lead to, I will not allow the Palace government to set the country on fire. We will solve this asylum-seeker problem and of course, we will do it with common sense. We will bid farewell to our guests with our traditional instruments playing to send them on their way.”

It is not hard to predict that Kılıçdaroğlu’s musical farewell will be similar to what happened in Altındağ. Certain nationalist and fascist groups are injecting a new microbe into society by stirring together anti-refugee feelings and xenophobia with the anti-AKP sentiment. In his book Story of a German: Observations in Germany 1914-1933, Sebastian Haffner describes the preparatory phase of the racist climate, the loosening of the stake, and the microbe injected into society as follows:

“Once you become ready to kill people you live alongside – in principle and on a permanent basis and even adopting it as a duty – the changing individual targets will only become an insignificant detail. It is clearly seen from today that replacing ‘Jewish’ with ‘Czech’ or ‘Polish’ or any other figure will not be a problem at all. The issue is the systematic injection of a microbe into German people. This microbe is causing those who fall into its clutches to behave like a wild wolf to the people they live with, or, in other words, the sadistic instincts – that have been put under control or destroyed as a result of thousands of years of civilization process – break their chains, grow and become stronger.”

Until now, AKP has been able to instil this microbe in society by playing its religion and nationalism cards. CHP and the Nation Alliance, on the other hand, are responding to the germ with another, by fuelling the hostility against refugees and tending toward sexist, neo-nationalist, fascist rhetoric with slogans such as, “The border is an honour.” In this way, they are directing the hate and anger against AKP that already exists in society onto refugees. They are stealing people’s anger and destroying the possibility of a democratic Turkey. When terrifying attacks like those in Altındağ occur, they sit back and watch the disaster, saying “I did nothing, I just loosened the stake,” just like AKP has done for so many years.

The First Hotspot

SPIEGEL: Herr Bougie, soon after corona broke out in the Heinsberg district, the whole country knew the story of your brother Bernd. He had attended a traditional Karneval variety show on 15 February 2020 and, unbeknown to him, was carrying the virus. What are the implications for your family?

René Bougie: We were at the centre of a storm. My brother was not seen as a victim, as someone who had caught the coronavirus and was severely ill, but as The One Superspreader. Politicians and the media put together a profile of the perpetrator: a married family man with a pre-existing health condition spreading the virus because of his Karneval party excesses.

SPIEGEL: And that is not true?

René Bougie: No.

Heinsberg District, Germany

Heinsberg district spreads across low-lying farmland, at the very western edge of Germany. Redbrick houses, neat front gardens. Right on the Dutch border lies the village of Gangelt. René Bougie lives in the Birgden part of the municipality, his brother Bernd in nearby Langbroich. Right by the fire station in Quellstraße is the village hall, the venue for the annual comedy extravaganza of the village Karneval association “Langbröker Dicke Flaa.”

Bernd Bougie and his wife Elke were the first cases of Covid 19 that were reported in North-Rhine Westphalia. That was on 25 February 2020, ten days after the Karneval bash, one day after Shrove Monday. One week later 83 cases had been reported in the district, three days after that the number was 199, another five days later 369.

Heinsberg district became Germany’s first Hotspot. In Britain, The Times reported on it as the “German Wuhan;” one Facebook comment called for somebody to nuke Heinsberg with an atomic bomb.

The virus was unstoppable. On 18 March Angela Merkel told the nation on television that it was of existential importance to shut down public activities to “slow the spread of the virus through Germany.” Bavarians First Minister Markus Söder said: ”We must not allow a second Heinsberg to happen.”

Heinsberg will likely remain synonymous with the start of the pandemic in Germany forever. The Haus der Geschichte Museum in Bonn exhibits a blue brewery wreath and green drink tokens that were used at the Karneval meeting.

To find out what happened at the time, SPIEGEL spoke to people present at the Karneval party: virologist Hendrik Streeck, who carried out research on the event, and with doctors, politicians and local businesses.

When trying to deal with the virus and the people it affects, it is helpful to look back.

The Karneval Extravaganza, Gangelt, 2020

The Karneval Extravaganza

On 15 February, the village hall had been decorated with red and white garlands; seven spotlights illuminated the stage. At the front row of tables sat the “Council of Eleven,” the local dignitaries of the comedy association, sporting their ceremonial cocked white fool’s caps. The beer hall tables filling the room could seat some 300 people. A village party where everybody knows each other, with everyone joining in on the exuberant celebration: ideal conditions for the virus. At that time, the invisible danger still seemed far away.

At 19.11 hrs, the Majorette dance troupe filed in, after which came to the entrance of the official “Prince and Princess” of the silly season. The variety programme included 16 acts, from the Langbröker Rockemariechen to the Zwei Schwaadlappe.

Bernd Bougie was seated at a front table on the left. He had arrived with a group of friends just before 18 hrs to get good seats. Of the ten people seated at his table, at least seven later tested positive for corona, or were found to have antibodies in their blood.

That evening, Bougie felt a slightly irritating cough.

Stephan Ritterbex. Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL

Stephan Ritterbex, 30, had dressed up as a Roman legionary. He remembers that he sat on the right, second row, third table. He used a glass to collect coins from his friends to pay for the round of beer that the waiter had brought. Ritterbex tried to catch some of the roses that someone was throwing from the stage. At one point, he was standing up on the beer house bench, linking arms with others, “schunkling” with the music and singing along. The following day he celebrated “Old Wives Karneval day,” went to the pint-before-noon meeting at his local and lined the road to watch the Karneval procession. On 28 February, he took a bite of a banana and tasted nothing.

Lisa Oliveira. Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL

Towards 21 hrs, his colleague Lisa Oliveira took to the stage with her Pure Poisen dance group, wearing a green wig. The Council of Eleven were clapping along to the rhythm of Sweet Dreams, and the band emphasised the end of the performance with a flourish. Lisa Oliveira, 20, only stayed for two hours, she was not infected.

After the interval came one of the high points. The “Daredevils” had been a fixed element of the annual extravaganza for six years: 13 men in black pants and white shirts, Bernd Bougie amongst them. They danced for nine minutes, in rows, in a line, whirling each other about. Bougie coughed once.

The final act just before midnight brought nearly all the performers back on stage, in a joint chorus. Nine days later Bernd Bougie was admitted to the hospital.

Stephan Pusch. Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL

The Crisis Manager

On Shrove Tuesday, the day following “Rose Monday,” Stephan Pusch was lying on the sofa in his living room. The local CDU council leader had caught a cold. That was when his deputy called and said “We have two corona cases. They are in the hospital, one of them on a ventilator,” Pusch recalls today.

He drove to his office at the council hall and called a meeting of the Crisis Committee. He learned that the patients were Bernd Bougie and his wife, that the couple had been at the Karneval extravaganza, that Bougie had been one of the dancers on stage, and that his wife works at a child daycare centre.

The Crisis Committee decided to close all schools and kindergartens with immediate effect.

Early in the morning on Ash Wednesday, Push recorded a video that he posted on Facebook appealing to the people of Heinsberg to keep their distance, avoid large gatherings and to keep calm.

He then drove to Düsseldorf to meet with North Rhine Westphalian state health minister Karl-Josef Laumann and with staff from the Robert Koch Institute. In the evening, Pusch was contacted by Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn.

That was when he knew that something big was happening, says Pusch.

The Crisis Committee ordered around 1,000 people to go into quarantine. On one of the streets, all residents but two families had to stay inside their houses. Those who were still allowed to move about freely went to place eggs and milk on their neighbours’ doorsteps. There are some inhabitants of Heinsberg who have been in quarantine four times by now.

Pusch set up a citizens’ hotline, open from 8 hrs to 20 hrs. During the first three days, 3,000 citizens called the number. They wanted to know where they could get tested, if they were still allowed to travel. They said that in Aix-la-Chapelle they had received verbal abuse, and as they went shopping across the border in the Netherlands they had their cars vandalised by scratching.

Mail-order companies refused to send goods to the district, into the plague zone. One Heinsberg business that supplies automotive companies throughout Germany saw its orders collapse. To hide their location, the manager tried to set up a subsidiary in Düsseldorf with a separate address and telephone number.

The Crisis Committee met every day in room 335 of the local hospital on the third floor, sitting at tables arranged in a horseshoe formation. At the centre of the room, they placed a map of Germany that showed Heinsberg as the Gallic Village from the Asterix Comics. We will not be defeated, was the message.

A representative of the Thai embassy asked how many of his compatriots had tested positive in Heinsberg. The New York Times and Al Jazeera requested information. Suddenly, the whole world knew about Heinsberg.

Pusch went for transparency, for communication. His Facebook videos he called “Pusch-Notifications”, using the hashtag #hsbestrong. »HS« is the Heinsberg car registration code. To a news report by the WDR public broadcaster that parts of Heinsberg would be closed off as restricted areas Pusch replied: “As long as I have a say in how things are run here, there will be no closing-off of anything.”

The three hospitals in the district were using 4,000 PPE gowns and 8,700 masks per day. Stocks were running low. The German army first refused Pusch’s request for help. After he negotiated with the government of this State, they sent only 900 masks in four weeks.

Someone in the District Council administration had identified a source of supply in Turkey, after which a large order was placed and a down payment was made. A member of staff says the supplier later phoned the hospital and told them that the lorry had been robbed on its route through the Balkans. Masks gone. Money gone.

At home, Pusch had an idea. He wrote a letter to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and received a reply from the ambassador: “The Great Chinese People have heard your cry for help.” China sent 15,000 surgical masks.

Some eleven months later, Stephan Pusch is sitting in his office, the virus still running wild. By late January, the official toll in the district stood at 7,917 corona infections, with 254 people having died of or with the virus. But there is a difference compared to the previous spring: Heinsberg is no longer alone.

Pusch says: “The surrounding region, the state of North Rhine Westphalia, the whole of Germany acted as if the virus was mainly our problem. That always puzzled me.”

In reality, Heinsberg served as the dress rehearsal for the rest of Germany.

At the local elections in September, Pusch received nearly 80 per cent of the vote. In October, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his fight against corona.

Pusch says he is still processing what happened. During his summer holiday, he found it difficult to concentrate on a book for even half an hour. In order to dial down, he now regularly spends time in his small workshop doing woodwork.

Christian Hoppe. Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL

The Medics

The pandemonium erupted simultaneously in two places in the Heinsberg region. They are 15 kilometres apart: the surgery of Christian Hoppe, GP in Gangelt, and the Heinsberg district hospital headed by chief consultant Günter Mertens.

At the time, Hoppe received calls from people who said they had been in contact with the Bougies and wanted a corona test. Hoppe took swabs outside in the car park, wearing a mask, goggles, PPE gown. On day one he had 3 positive cases, the next day 11. After 14 days, there were more than 100. Hoppe was so busy that he asked the Telekom phone provider to activate an additional three lines for him.

A second virus began to spread in the Heinsberg region: Fear.

There was not a man nor a woman who had not been celebrating Karneval. And nearly everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been at the Karneval extravaganza. Everyone wanted a test. “We were overwhelmed,” says head consultant Mertens. The hospital management called in two doormen, as a precaution.

GP Hoppe ordered PPE clothing from England; he drove to DIY stores in the Netherlands to replenish supplies. Now, nearly a year later, he is sitting in his surgery talking about the hectic times.

He and his colleagues paid some 4,000 euros for materials including masks, gowns, and disinfectants out of their own pockets.

One of his assistants had tested positive; she had been celebrating Karneval. So the GP had to close his surgery: quarantine. By and by, other GPs in the area had to close due to cases of corona infection.

Over the following weeks, the Crisis Committee decided that doctors and their staff were allowed to work as long as they did not show any symptoms. Hoppe says: “Another two days and the medical care provision would have collapsed.”

One evening at the hospital Günter Mertens was looking at a patient’s x-ray. It showed the lungs of a man in his early sixties. In the image Mertens saw white streaks, the patient’s alveoli were completely obstructed with mucus.

Mertens was confused by the fact that a day earlier, the lungs had looked normal. He knew immediately, he says now, that this was nothing like ordinary pneumonia. “At first we were extremely puzzled by this disease. And to be honest, we are still puzzled.”

The intensive care unit is equipped with eight beds with ventilation. Just a few days after Karneval, every one of them was occupied. Mertens asked hospitals in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Aix-la-Chapelle to take on Covid-19 patients. In some cases, it worked.

The hospital set up its own corona ward with 30 beds. Within a few hours, a carpenter had constructed additional air-locks for the ICUs. He built small antechambers where nurses and doctors could change and disinfect their hands.

By mid-March, Heinsberg hospital had 43 Covid patients.

Christian Hoppe’s greatest worry was that he might carry the virus home with him. At the time his baby was two months old. For seven weeks he did not touch the infant. He had his own bedroom, ate at a separate table, kept a distance from his wife and the older child.

At his surgery, Hoppe now points at a stack of paper some ten centimetres thick. Faxes that he received from the North Rhine registered practitioners’ association, with recommendations on who should be tested and who shouldn’t and how to act.

“Some days the recommendations that arrived in the morning were outdated by the afternoon,” says Hoppe. So he had to call people whom he had told that they did not need a test and make an appointment for them. This went on and on.

Mertens also had difficulties keeping the big picture in sight.

He was reading the publications by the WHO and the Robert Koch Institute. The RKI recommended that hospitals should admit anyone with a suspected corona infection. “I thought: ‘impossible’.”

He studied the publications of the German Society for Intensive Care Medicine. They were dealing with ventilation strategies. He realised that these had been written by people who presumably had never seen a Covid-19 patient.

By the beginning of April, the number of hospital patients was falling again. There were people in Heinsberg who got infected but did not feel anything. There were those with aching bones, stomach upsets, fever, headaches. Others had inflammation of the heart muscle. Some severe cases still suffer from damaged kidneys, destruction of the liver, have a stoma, need a walking aid, have trouble finding words.

Hoppe says that “the people in Heinsberg have learned a lesson that they did not deserve.” They are more restrained and cautious now than people in other places.

Head consultant Mertens says he is proud that they were able to provide a ventilator for each patient who needed it. But one thing still gets to him: “At the beginning I thought, we just have to make it through the first few days, medically. Then the cavalry will arrive, the RKI and the Health Ministry will send their people.” He was hoping for help. “But nobody came, not to this day.”

The Alleged Superspreader

Bernd Bougie, the presumed Patient Zero of the Karneval extravaganza, does not want to talk about last year’s events. He is not ready yet, maybe he will never be. René Bougie has agreed to a conversation, on the condition that the article will not give details of his brother’s health.

Both are estate agents, there is an air filter humming away in the meeting room at their office. René Bougie takes off his glasses and puts them on the table. It is the first time that someone in the family is talking to journalists. He says his brother went home early on the Monday after the Karneval show because he was feeling unwell.

SPIEGEL: Did your brother see a doctor?

Bougie: Of course. During the week following the Karneval show, he had contact with four or five doctors and paramedics. None of them recognized that he had Covid. They said he had pneumonia and should stay in bed. Nobody really had the virus on their radar, not even the doctors.

SPIEGEL: What did you think?

Bougie: I was skiing in Carinthia. On Friday, we talked on the phone. My brother had collapsed and called the emergency doctor. But the doctor left him at home. By Sunday my brother could hardly speak. Then it was decided on Shrove Monday that he should refer himself to the hospital. And that is what he did.

Late on Shrove Monday, René Bougie learned that the medics at the hospital had put his brother into an induced coma. He cut his holiday short and returned home to Gangelt.

On the following day at 17 hrs, it was known that Bernd Bougie was corona-positive. The same night René Bougie compiled a document listing the addresses of people his brother had been in close contact with through his work during the 14 days preceding his first symptoms. He found 43 names.

Bougie says the Heinsberg Crisis Committee did not want the list, just the names of colleagues at the office. Bougie says he fails to understand why.

The night before Ash Wednesday, Bernd Bougie was transferred to an isolation ward at Düsseldorf University Hospital and connected to an artificial lung. His wife was transferred with him. She had also tested positive but was not as severely ill as her husband. He needed ventilation for several weeks.

During the night from Ash Wednesday to Thursday, René Bougie wrote an email to council leader Pusch. Earlier, there had been news reporters standing outside his house; a tabloid journalist phoned, pretending to be a client of this company.

René Bougie was angry. In his view, Pusch and the North Rhine Westphalian state health minister Laumann had implied in public that his brother himself was the sole cause of the outbreak. “As if a little bird had dropped the virus on him,” says Bougie. They had given the impression, he says, that after the Karneval show his brother continued to party excessively. “But long before Rose Monday, he was ill in bed at home.”

In his email to Pusch he wrote: “My brother is merely the victim of a virus that is spreading globally.”

It was only then, he says, that Pusch expressed the sympathetic attitude that was warranted.

Bougie is annoyed by the fixation on his brother and his brother’s wife, while at the same time Germany already had 27 confirmed corona cases. People got it into their heads that his brother had a pre-existing health condition even though he had long since completely recovered from it.

The conclusion people wrongly jumped to was that the first person known to be infected must be the source of the spread of the disease.

Bougie sent an email to the German press agency DPA, because “the media pressure” on the family had increased “intolerably.” He clarified that his brother, contrary to reports, did not visit the Tropical Islands Leisure Park. He wrote that his brother had already been to a Karneval event on the day before the extravaganza. Bougie is still surprised that nobody took an interest in that event.

SPIEGEL: How did your brother deal with the allegation that he was the one who spread the virus in Germany?

Bougie: Please respect that I will not reply to that. The answer could reopen emotional wounds.

SPIEGEL: Where could your brother have gotten infected?

Bougie: When I learned later that I have antibodies I thought: maybe it was me, who knows? But I think it is no one’s place to decide who infected whom. Where do you stop looking for the source? At the border?

SPIEGEL: What do you wish politicians would have done?

Bougie: On 28 January, after Bavaria had the first case of corona in Germany, German health minister Spahn said the virus represented little danger. He advised a cautious attitude without being overly concerned. I would have wished that those responsible had stood up later and said: ‘We got it wrong in our assessment of the situation.’

Hendrik Streeck. Marcus Simaitis / DER SPIEGEL

The Study

For virologist Hendrik Streeck the Karneval extravaganza was a treasure trove. It gave him an opportunity to find out more about how the virus spreads. And the key to the treasure chest were the guests. In April, Streeck invited 350 people who attended the event to participate in a study: members of the audience, performers, catering staff. He asked them to inform all the others who were at the event.

Streeck received 411 offers to participate. He had never received such a response, he says. One morning in winter, he is sitting in his office at the Institute of Virology of Bonn University Hospital, looking at an open laptop computer. Streeck’s view is that people’s readiness to help was a reaction of defiance against the hostility they had to bear in Heinsberg.

Over 80 staff collected the data and analysed it. They approached the work like detectives, says Streeck, establishing a profile for each person who attended the event. At a school in Gangelt they took swabs and blood samples and asked questions: Where were you seated? Did you dance on the stage? When did you go to the lavatory? Did you share drinks with anyone? Did you hug anyone? Each guest was assessed using a so-called Proximity Score that showed how close they got to others in the hall.

Streeck wanted to find out if there was a correlation between the position of somebody’s seat and the likelihood of getting infected.

The windows of the village hall had been kept closed due to the noise. The hall had a simple air exchange system: the air was sucked in on the left side of the hall, mixed with fresh air, and blown out again at the right side. A kind of circulating pump.

Streeck opens a file on his laptop with a schematic view of the hall. Each table is colour coded, showing how many of the guests seated there had tested positive or formed antibodies. Seven tables are red or dark red, indicating that more than half of the people got infected.

Those on the stage or at the bar were at high risk. Those seated on the right side of the hall where the air was blown out were more likely to be infected than those on the left where the air intake was. That might be the reason why Stephan Ritterbex fell ill, the Roman legionary. Those who went outside during the interval or left early were less likely to test positive, like the dancer Lisa Oliveira, for example.

198 people who attended the extravaganza were found to have an acute infection or antibodies present, roughly 44 per cent. One of the guests died with or of coronavirus.

At the beginning of the study, Streeck assumed that one single person had spread the virus at the event. Patient Zero. “That theory was incorrect,” he says now. There had been several among the guests who had suffered from loss of sense of smell or taste. On the day after the event, some had been displaying more severe symptoms. Bougie was only one of them.

Streeck says: “The virus had already entered the Heinsberg district before the extravaganza.” He reckons it came via Belgium or the Netherlands.

This year the Karneval extravaganza was cancelled. Who knows if Karneval celebrations will ever be as carefree as they used to be?

They will, says René Bougie. The virus won’t succeed in driving out the Karneval.