V a t t e n f a l l - Sweden´s other face

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In 1989, political metamorphosis in the GDR conveyed the promise that no further Sorb/Wend villages would be sacrificed to brown-coal mining. Apart from energy imports and nuclear reactors from the Soviet Union, the GDR was completely dependent on brown-coal mining for the generation of electricity and heat. Quite different conditions existed on the West German energy market. The Sorbs/Wends, and in particular the people of Horno (who had been informed in 1977 that their village was to be resettled in 1996), renewed their efforts to ensure that no further villages be destroyed. Their expectati ons initially appeared to be well founded. The then Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, promised at an election rally in 1990 in Cottbus, that the Federal Government would secure the future of the coal-mining industry, but that villages would no longer be sacrificed. And the protection of Sorb/Wend settlements from further destruction by brown-coal mining was enshrined in the new Constitution (Article 25) of the State of Brandenburg.
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What the Sorb population could not foresee, however, was that not only would brown coal mining and electricity generation in the Lausitz be shortly privatised, but also energy policy itself. The destruction of Horno and the resettlement of its inhabitants were laid down in the 1994 purchase contract for the Lausitzer Braunkohle AG (LAUBAG) mining company. Thereafter, LAUBAG and its new West German shareholders were able to dictate conditions to the State Government, whose Environment Minister would admit to Horno representatives in 1997: "I'm being blackmailed!"
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After privatisation, the LAUBAG Company and its new West German owners – including the mining union, the lapdog of the German energy cartel, that developed its own particular version of the principle of "divide and rule" to push through company policy at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs) – were able to dictate Brandenburg energy policy. This mafia-like alliance between politicians, mining/energy industry and mining union functioned perfectly. The mining union regional leader in the Lausitz, Ulrich Freese, was elected to the Brandenburg Landtag in 1994 for the Social Democratics (SPD), whe re he immediately secured the position of parliamentary spokesman on energy matters and saw to it that LAUBAG business strategy was thereafter translated into government policy, thus ensuring that the Lausitz retained a monostructured economy at the expense of any serious effort to provide the region with a viable future after the end of brown-coal mining.
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Within a very short period, the brown-coal lobby, extending across all party-political lines and comprising representatives of the West German cartel and still-powerful remnants of the pre-reunification GDR mining industry elite, had Brandenburg energy policy firmly in its grip. It has perhaps to do with the fact that 50 per cent brown coal comprises water, that political morality in Brandenburg drowned in the black morass of brown coal policy after 1994
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