German Governor Targets Immigrants
Thursday, January 3, 2008 7:00 PM

BERLIN -- A prominent German state governor said Thursday that immigrants should abide by the country's customs and speak its language.

Roland Koch, the conservative governor of the western state of Hesse, is one of two senior figures in Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union who face elections on Jan. 27. It will be the first major electoral test since 2006 for the CDU and its partner in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats.

Polls have shown the conservative Koch struggling to defend the majority in the state legislature that he won in 2003.

Koch insisted the language of Germany must be German, and said that slaughtering animals in the kitchen, among other immigrant practices, "do not belong to our house rules."

The Social Democrats, who govern with Merkel nationally but oppose her party in many states, have sharply criticized Koch's recent comments.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who is also Merkel's vice chancellor, has urged Koch to focus on "better concrete policies for integration, rather than setting people against each other."

The governor has made youth crime, particularly by immigrants, a major issue following a brutal pre-Christmas attack by a Turkish and a Greek youth in Munich on a German retiree who asked them to put out their cigarettes.

Last week, Koch declared that "we have too many criminal young foreigners" and said that "zero tolerance against violence" must be a key part of integration policy.

In a six-point statement of values written for Thursday's edition of the Bild daily, Koch wrote: "Better three days in prison at the start as a warning shot for a young violent offender than a lifelong criminal career."

He also argued that immigrants should make an effort to become part of German society.

"In residential areas with high proportions of foreigners, there must be clear 'rules of the game,'" Koch wrote. "Our conventions and customs can and should not be thrown overboard."

In an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Steinmeier described Koch's comments on young immigrant criminals _ which followed a proposal last month for a ban on students wearing the all-encompassing burqa in schools _ as "the most brutal possible populism."
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