Weapons manufacturing for Ukraine: German locality opposes expansion of arms company
The German arms company Diehl BGT Defense GmbH & Ko KG is coveting land to increase its production for the benefit of Ukraine in Troisdorf, in western Germany, not far from Cologne. But the municipality is opposed to it for security reasons, she argues, as well as for its local development.
The mayor of Troisdorf, a town of nearly 80,000 inhabitants, was questioned by the German defense minister, who called on municipalities and regions to work to accelerate the pace of arms manufacturing. ” Pressure (…) is great, because there is, in Europe and Germany, a real bottleneck on ammunition”had launched Minister Boris Pistorius.
A wide spectrum of elected officials ranging from conservative mayor Alexander Bieber (CDU) to the Greens and the far left Die Linke, i.e. two-thirds of the municipal council, refuse to sacrifice such an area in the middle of the city. According to the municipality’s argument, “the production of explosives and combat devices requires enormous “clearance” surfacesthat is to say, protection zones around the factory which cannot be built, for security reasons.
For Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the Bundestag defense committee, the position of the mayor of Troisdorf “is simply irresponsible”. “It’s about Ukraine, but also and above all about the security of Germany”she laments to Agence France-Presse.
The mayor of Troisdorf remains, for the moment, insensitive to national pressure and he is not the only one to resist. This summer, the Rheinmetall group, another flagship of the German arms industry which has delivered numerous equipment to Ukraine, said it was giving up building a gunpowder factory in the Saxony region, in the east of the country. ‘Germany. The project had raised concerns among the local population.