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

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Property owners in Grießen will effectively be dispossessed. They will be severely and intolerably affected by the mine. Use of their houses, for the duration of mining activities in the neighbourhood, will be greatly affected by noise and dust. And so far as adverse effects on the use of property are concerned, it cannot be ignored that for the duration of a generation residential property will lose the necessary social, cultural and economic relationship to the village, because, in terms of these functions, the village itself will be destroyed. The planned measures are equivalent to a "cold dispossession". Not even some form of financial compensation is envisaged for property owners in Grießen. Should they find the circumstances unbearable, should they want to sell out and move, they will not find a buyer for their property. Grießen is under a death threat. As a consequence, its inhabitants will either be driven from their homes without any form of compensation, or they will be plunged into an economic nightmare.
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The threatened fate of the village of Grießen is worst still than that of Grötsch, and that was really bad enough! Nothing has changed over the past decade in the contemptuous dealings of the mining company with those communities that suffer most from mining activities. However, the responsibility both for the present state of affairs and for future developments now lies clearly with the Swedish state-owned Vattenfall concern.
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The Jänschwalde strip-mine is an economic disaster for the Guben region.
Eight other villages, together with the city of Guben, joined Horno in pursuing numerous court cases over the past seven years, in an attempt to provide the region, whose population has declined from 40,000 in 1990 to around 30,000 today, with some hope of economic recovery in the future. The city of Guben, for instance, with a population of 30.000 in 1990, lost 10,000 jobs after German reunification to plant closures in the chemical and textiles industries; and in the meantime some 7,500 mainly young people have left the city in the search for work.
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A survey, prepared for the Guben district authority in late 1993 by the renowned Prognos Institute, reached depressing conclusions. Firstly, only the phased ending of brown coal strip-mining over a maximum period of 15 years would give fresh impetus to the creation of secure, long-term employment opportunities in the region. Secondly, for the development of industrial and business enterprises unequivocal planning security should be achieved through the renunciation of extensions to existing strip-mines. The reason was self-evident: industrialists will not invest in a region doomed to be ravaged by strip-mining.
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The warnings were not heeded. The Brandenburg State Government, just as its GDR predecessors, decided to sacrifice the Guben region to brown coal mining. A Brown Coal Plan for the Jänschwalde mine was drawn up years before a regional plan for South-East Brandenburg was produced. The Government has bemoaned the monostructural dependence of the Lausitz on brown coal, and has proclaimed for the past decade the necessity of structural change. But nothing has changed, and nothing been achieved, apart from depopulation and a massive loss of jobs.
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At the time the Prognos survey was carried out, around 30.000 people were employed by LAUBAG in the Lausitz as a whole. The number is now a little over 5,000 (of whom only 100 or so live in the Guben region), and by the year 2006 it will probably be between 2,200 and 2,400. And when the Jänschwalde mine closes, currently planned for the year 2019, the region will die out.
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