DUISBURG 2010 LOVEPARADE Here's my EN translation of an article written by…read morehttp://www.qype.com/people/6Kraska6 at http://6kraska6.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/the-party-goes-on/ 'Deathparade', unfortunately. This seems to have been a foul-up on a monumental scale. I don't know how many stars to allocate - maybe 3 for the paramedics? Duisburg, 24. July, 7 pm: Low-flying helicopters whir continuously and are landing every 15 minutes, while the scream of sirens cuts through the air. Blue lights are flashing everywhere, as paramedics, firemen, police and patrol cars run around to the sound of incomprehensible loudspeaker announcements. The riot squad has pulled up in combat gear and the city is effectively cut off from the outside world. The autobahn is closed, no trains are running, the mobile phone network has crashed and the power is out at the WDR broadcasting studios. A&E departments are learning what 'rush hour' really means and chaos and a state of shock rule. In front of the train station, people are trying to push through; some drunk, some doped-up and aggressive. They just don't know where to go. It seems that nineteen people have either been trampled to death in the crowd, or have fallen fatally from a narrow concrete stairway, while there are eighty who are critically-injured and countless people with minor injuries. Incomprehensibly, the techno-party tirelessly continues. The basses thunder on as if the booming racket could drown out the sound of the catastrophe (apparently there is a fear of mass hysteria if the bash were to be stopped). The danger of rioting has yet to be averted. First aid tents fill the closed-off urban motorway stub. Stunned, I follow the disaster live via webcam and video-stream. A catastrophe into which those responsible almost steered people with advance knowledge and with their eyes wide open. A grotesque and virtually incomprehensible combination of inability, bad planning, irresponsibility, and stupidity. For days, I had been reading about it in the papers and asking myself what the Love Parade organisers, the Federal Police, the Deutsche Bahn and the city envisioned as a solution, when an officially-expected (!) 1,500,000 partygoers were to be shepherded through a single (!) entrance into a sealed-off area that was set-up for just 500,000 people. How the hell had they figured that one out? What were their plans for hundreds of thousands of frustrated, overheated, intoxicated, doped-up, exhausted and disillusioned young people arriving at a crowded party area after a long and stressful journey and not being able to figure out how to get in and out and forwards or backwards between the railings and fences? What else can you call it, other than programmed chaos? A catastrophe that they were deliberately prepared to be put up with? Can anyone explain this to me? Perhaps a senseless greed for profit, commercial dementia, craving for assertiveness, general voluntaristic sweet talk up front, collective narrow-mindedness and irresponsible frivolity; by the banal addiction to self-adulation of the so-called 'Event Manager' or the amateurism of incompetent City Fathers? Was it the self-satisfied stubbornness of a completely overtaxed police force? Did they really think that despite the dodgy outlook, it could 'all be alright on the night'? How in all seriousness could anyone have believed that? There were many voices that expressed doubt about the ability of a poor, badly-organised, ill-equipped and logistically-challenged city of half a million like Duisburg to run an event for 1.5 million people, particularly given its experience in hosting such events. They were condemned as being alarmists and killjoys and brought to silence. How dare these critics and sceptics disturb the 'acid trip' of those running the 2010 European Cultural Capital events? A young man who escaped the fatal stampede by a hair's breadth had even urgently warned the police before the disaster, only to be told: Do YOU want to organise this, son? 8.30 pm: The prayer wheels of the media start turning and the semi-official crocodile tears are flowing big time. The words 'tragedy' and 'tragic' again emerge with an almost mechanical regularity. But the word 'tragic' should refer to unavoidable misfortune and the disaster of Duisburg was by no means inevitable. It was, as I said, more than predictable. The crocodile tears will soon have dried again and the parade of floats continues to thump out from its 300,000-watt sound systems. 8.45 pm: Guess what? The question of guilt has already been established and it seems that those responsible bear no responsibility! The freshly-appointed Northrhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Jäger who had hitherto been 'ministering' in Duisburg claims in an interview that the police had done a good job. The official press conference of the City of Duisburg claims that the city, the city authorities and planners bore no fault. Indeed, those who were clearly to blame were the
