Interpol official warns of dramatic rise in extremist right-wing violence
The secretary general of Interpol, Ju¨rgen Stock, says there has been a dramatic rise in extremist right-wing violence and the use of social media as a “sort of incubator” for far-right ideas. The incidents, he said, should be treated in the same way as Islamist extremism. The Washington Post interviewed Stock after a gunman, who was motivated by extremist right-wing views and conspiracy theories, killed nine people in the German city of Hanau.
In the past months, we’ve seen attacks by individuals who were followers of right-wing ideologies. The most recent attack was in Hanau. Has right-wing extremism increased?
The indication is that things are getting worse, definitely. We will see more of these attacks in the future. It is too early to say [on Hanau], but it seems to be. There clearly seems to be a right-wing xenophobic background to the whole thing. It will be interesting to see whether there was a national or international network involved.
Do you see a trend of globalisation in the case of right-wing extremism? Are people much more connected?
This is a key question. So far, we still have to work on the bigger picture. What we see is that of course in parallel, the number of these kinds of incidents is increasing dramatically. And I think we have some information that just in the last couple of years — primarily in the Western countries, particularly Western
Europe, North America, Oceania — the number of cases attributed to far-right groups has been increasing by 320 per cent. We have seen in some of the cases that of course social media was used as a sort of incubator, as the modus operandi for any ideas.
Do you have any examples?
What happened in Christchurch was used as inspiration by others to streamline other activities. There were more or less loose connections via social media groups, closed user groups, information exchange, and obviously we also see that some of these terrorists are “media sensitive” — releasing messages, videos and manifestos. And here we have to dig a little deeper and establish a better exchange among law enforcement globally about how this radicalisation is taking place, what role does social media play, how is the planning exactly going on.
What about the attack in Hanau? What possible connections to rightwing groups are of interest to you? And where should international cooperation work better?
The person did not have a criminal record. The law enforcement agencies were not aware of him, so the modus operandi, the way they contact each other, the role of weapons, and of course their connections — nationally and internationally. This is something where we have to put in more effort, to intensively share this information on a global scale in order to exactly answer these questions. Understanding what is going on and of course being a little bit ahead so we can kind of predict what is going to happen in the months to come.
There seems to be a strategy for how to deal with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Is it as easy with rightwing extremism?
Of course, we need a collective understanding that this is terrorism. Period. What we know from the other case in Germany where the other obviously right-wing cell was arrested — and obviously had the motivation, according to authorities, to go for a kind of civil war within Germany. So this is terrorism. The successful methodology we have been applying in regard to other terrorist groups including Isis, this global solidarity to tackle this, to enter a new level of sharing information amongst countries which we have never seen before — we have to apply the same methodology to right-wing terrorism, no doubt.