Subject: Cell Phone Protests in Germany (Hines).
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 145539 -0600
From: Roy Beavers
To: guru
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........From EMF-L........
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Protests in Germany
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 08:54:40 EST
From: Macwti@aol.com
To: guru@emfguru.com
Roy,
Thought your readers might be interested in this.
Virginia Hines
Concord Citizens for Responsible Tower Siting,
Massachusetts Council on Wireless Technology Impacts
EMRNetwork www.EMRNetwork.org
Protesters in Germany Target Mobile Phone Emissions (update2)
11/14/0 8:7 (New York)
(Adds reference to U.K. protests in 14th paragraph.)
Tirschenreuth, Germany, Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- From the
Bavarian hinterland, a citizens' group is sending a warning signal
to Germany's mobile-phone industry.
Members of the Buergerwelle, or citizens' wave, are among
those who believe that the electromagnetic radio frequencies given
off by mobile phones and their transmission towers cause health
problems from insomnia to cancer. And they are making their case
in court.
Last September, Buergerwelle members and other protesters won
a preliminary court judgment requiring Deutsche Telekom AG's T-
Mobil unit to stop transmitting mobile signals from a church tower
in a Frankfurt suburb. The group says it has successfully blocked
the construction of 200 other transmission towers in Germany.
Saving the world from cell phones? Siegfried Zwerenz, the
Buegerwelle's chairman, would like to think so.
``People are no longer prepared to allow themselves to be
destroyed by the base stations,'' says the earnest Bavarian with a
short brown mustache and lank hair.
So far, there is no generally accepted scientific evidence to
support fears that cell phone emissions cause illness in humans.
But the wave of protests threatens to slow construction of some
mobile towers for high-capacity systems in Germany, as well as in
the U.K., Switzerland and Italy, where scattered protests also
have arisen.
Slowing the Rollout
If you are a telecommunications company that has just paid
billions for a license to offer rapid cellular services, ``you
need to roll out this network quickly and sign up customers as
fast as possible in order for it to start paying off,'' says
Conrad Roeber, a consultant with U.K.-based Spectrum Strategy
Consultants. The protests are ``certainly having an effect'',
especially for small operators.
Industry officials don't see the Buergerwelle and its
counterparts elsewhere as a serious threat to the wireless
communications giants. Still, the anti-mobile-phone lobby is
making its mark.
``The Buergerwelle tries to scare people, to make them
uncertain about mobile-phone technology,'' says Fritz Lauer, a
Deutsche Telekom engineer who also acts as the spokesman for the
company's environmental department. ``We take a very critical view
of these tactics so we don't have any direct dealings with them.''
Some cell-phone protesters in Germany are turning to
violence. While Deutsche Telekom denies that its towers have been
hit, Vodafone Group Plc's Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH unit confirms
that a small handful of its 12,000 transmitters have been damaged
by arson, cable-cutting and other means.
Incidents of Violence
Zwerenz insists that the Buergerwelle is keeping its fight
legal.
``I don't know who did those things,'' Zwerenz says. ``We
distance ourselves from any type of violence. At the same time we
can understand those people. What has begun, people destroying
towers by cutting the cables, or burning them, that will
escalate.''
The organization's members believe that ``electrosmog''-- its
term for electro-magnetic radio frequency waves -- causes
sleeplessness, anemia and even cancer. Protesters say some studies
on cells and lab animals show that large doses of mobile emissions
cause genetic changes that could increase susceptibility to some
cancers. The charges are widely disputed by the medical
establishment, which has not been able to replicate those studies.
The Buergerwelle is one of many organizations fighting
mobile-phone emissions in Europe. In the U.K., citizen groups have
launched petition drives and rallied to keep transmission towers
from being built near schools.
The Buergerwelle is one of the largest groups, with 3,000-
plus German members, and sister organizations in Switzerland,
Italy, Luxembourg and Austria. Its annual budget: 25,000 deutsche
marks ($10,800). Deutsche Telekom's net income in 1999: 1.2
billion euros ($1 billion).
Pulling the Plug
The telecommunications companies, such as Deutsche Telekom,
MobilCom AG, Mannesmann and others, won't say what the skirmishes
cost them, but it certainly adds up.
``We don't publicize those figures,'' Lauer said. ``But we do
give out several million marks to support research on the possible
health effects of mobile phones and cover our personnel costs.''
Zwerenz, who works as a natural healer, also focuses on the
effects of cordless telephones in homes, and the electro-magnetic
emissions he believes they give off.
He describes a typical house call.
``Sometimes there will be a cordless phone in the home which
gives off a pulsed high frequency transmission twenty-four hours a
day,'' Zwerenz says. ``This disturbs both children and adults, so
the therapy consists of pulling the plug out of the socket.''
Health Problems
His crusade began in 1997 while he was touring the Bavarian
countryside. He learned, he said, that cows grazing in fields near
the wireless transmission towers had still-birth and abortion
rates 10 to 15 times greater than the average rate. He claims some
children living on these farms even developed cancerous brain
tumors.
The scientific establishment sees the situation differently.
``If people have an unexplained health complaint, and they
live near a base station they tend to blame it for their
problem,'' says Michael Repacholi, who heads the World Health
Organization's International Electro-Magnetic Field Project. ``But
there is no scientific evidence which supports the link'' between
mobile phones and cancer.
For Zwerenz, the connection is clear.
``I said to myself, `Look, I have this knowledge, I may as
well use it to help people,'' he recalled in the sunny timber and
glass studio he started building with the help of his wife and
three children in 1994.
Constructing More Towers
He became chairman of the Buegerwelle, which was founded in
1998, in February of last year. Now, he speaks at least once a
week to citizens' groups about the dangers he perceives in mobile-
phone frequencies. The cause has forced him to neglect his home-
renovation work, and his practice.
Citizen concerns about health effects of mobile towers could
intensify, analysts said, as more towers are constructed to carry
video and voice transmissions on the frequencies currently being
auctioned off across Europe. The auctions have raised more than
100 billion euros for European governments.
Deutsche Telekom, whose court case in the Frankfurt suburb
will be re-heard Dec. 20, plans to operate 25,000 transmission
towers by 2005, and Switzerland will have about 16,000 by the time
its high-capacity video and voice system is complete.
A recent survey by Switzerland's Cash weekly found that 48
percent of respondents didn't want a mobile phone tower near their
homes. (The respondents, two-thirds of whom were mobile phone
owners, had no plans to go give up their cell phones.)
Permission Takes Longer
Italians, 67 percent of whom own a mobile phone, embody the
same internal conflict as the Swiss. They love their mobiles, but
aren't so crazy about the towers. Even before the new round of
towers goes up, protests are growing.
``It is certainly having an effect,'' says Roeber, the U.K.
consultant. ``One of their smaller operators, Blu SpA, is having
enormous difficulty in building up its network, but this doesn't
effect the overall industry, because bigger players already have
their systems in place.''
Giorgio DiStefano, who is responsible for regulatory issues
at Blu, says opposition to the towers means that it now takes six
to nine months to receive permission to set one up, more than
twice the amount of time it took two years ago. Sometimes the
requests are rejected outright.
``As a result, its very hard to deploy a national network,
DiStefano says. ``In Florence, in Bologna, no one has been able to
build anything for the last six months.''
Carlo Fornaro, spokesman for Omnitel Pronto Italia SpA,
Italy's second largest mobile phone service, confirms that it has
become more difficult for mobile phone providers to set up
transmission towers in Bologna and other northern Italian cities.
In one of life's happy coincidences, Zwerenz is unlikely to
have to worry about more base stations in Tirschenreuth, pop.
10,000. Deutsche Telekom says rural areas with less than 25,000
inhabitants won't be covered by the high-capacity mobile-phone
network in the first construction round, which ends in 2005.
--Alfred Kueppers in the Frankfurt newsroom, (49 69) 92041 212 or
akueppers@bloomberg.net, with reporting by Eric Sylvers in
Milan/aes
Story illustration: {DTE GY GP D } to graph Deutsche
Telekom's share-price movement over the past 52 weeks.
To view the Buergerwelle's bi-lingual Web Site, type
www.buergerwelle.com
To view the World Health Organization's International Electro-
Magnetic Field Project, type www.who.int/peh-emf/
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com