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

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Following this negation of the constitutional protection of Sorb villages, the Government pursued a steady build-up of political pressure to ensure that in the last resort the Constitutional Court judges – all nominated by the political parties and elected by the State Landtag – would toe the line. And so it happened. When the "Horno Law" came before the State Constitutional Court in 1998, in cases filed by the Democratic Socialist Party (PDS), Horno and the DOMOWINA, the barbaric theory – deeply offensive to everyone caring for minority rights, and one that wilfully ignored the effect on Sorb culture and language of seventy-five years destruction of Sorb villages – that the Sorb settlement area could be protected, when at the same time Sorb settlements were destroyed, was confirmed by the highest court in the State of Brandenburg. The majority of the judges (seven of nine) betrayed the Sorb people and left the people of Horno to their fate. One of the minority of two judges, the internationally-renowned jurist Professor Dr. Karl-Heinz Schöneburg, who himself was one of the State Constitution's founding fathers, in delivering his minority verdict to a hushed court, described the majority verdict, in a voice steeped in anger and emotion, as "unconstitutional".
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Grötsch/Grožišco -
The West German mining executives who arrived in the Lausitz in the early 1990s knew nothing of the existence of the Sorb minority, whose traditional homeland had been systematically devastated in the course of the previous forty-five years of strip-mining. Local mining managers, on the other hand, were well aware of the problem. But their only interest was in the continuation of strip mining, at whatever cost, and they saw no need for a change of attitude. And politicians in the newly constituted Brandenburg State Parliament turned a blind eye to the problem, in the hope that it would go away. The outcome was, that while the State Government was pushing through the new Constitution, with its unequivocal protection of Sorb villages, at the same time it was drafting Brown Coal Plans that foresaw the destruction of Horno and other villages! In short, the destruction of Sorb villages continued unabated after Reunification.
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Just what the continuation of strip-mining after Reunification meant for one village community, is amply demonstrated by the fate of the Wend village of Grötsch (Sorb: Grozišco), just a few kilometres to the west of Horno. In 1992 the Jänschwalde strip-mine was operating right in the middle of Grötsch, causing immeasurable hardship to the inhabitants. Not only was a village idyll destroyed, the strip-mine was continued after 1990 as if the village was uninhabited. A rural community of, at that time, 200 people was wilfully and ruthlessly wrecked. The people of Grötsch were not only unceremoneously driven apart into two groups, those who wanted to leave and those who wanted to stay, but the one group was initially left completely alone and unaided with the problem of resettling, while the other group was given no hope of a humane life in Grötsch.
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