Time runs out for victims of Germany's violent far right: The threat to asylum-seekers is refusing to go away, writes Steve Crawshaw in Rostock

THE FLOWERS are still in their little vases on the tables in the informal cafe. But every window is smashed. 'The stones came like hail,' says Brigitte Linkner, who was sitting in the cafe this week when far-right youths launched their attack.

Birgit Kehler, who was sitting with her eight-year-old son, thought the building was about to be set on fire. 'Thank God, we managed to climb out of a window at the back. I thought that we wouldn't be able to escape.'

On this occasion, the target was a women's centre in Rostock and the neighbouring youth centre, whose adherents had clashed before with supporters of the far right. Some 40 were arrested. The event received only a brief mention on the local radio news. In Rostock, it was just another evening.

Attacks like this have become increasingly frequent. Even now, the director of the centre, Marion Richter, says: 'We're afraid it could happen again. People are more frightened than they were.' The attacks by the far right - on foreign asylum-seekers, women and even the disabled - receive little public attention now. The violence has become predictable, especially in the disillusioned east.

In the suburb of Lichtenhagen last August, right-wingers set fire to an apartment block, whose Vietnamese residents were lucky to escape with their lives. Riots and pitched battles continued for days and shocked all of Germany.

The huge candle-lit marches against violence, organised nationwide at the end of last year and the beginning of 1993, were partly prompted by the 'Rostock events'. In Rostock itself, there was a huge turn-out for a demonstration against the violence. But the violence is not dead. The far- right skinheads gather regularly, in a club across the railway tracks from the scene of last summer's riots.

The police deny that the fringe violence is out of control. None the less, there was bitterness at the women's centre that the police knew of this week's attack in advance - and had more than 250 police standing by - but did not bother to inform the potential victims. Last year, the regional police chief was heavily criticised, because of police failure to act decisively against the rioters' violence.

Those committing violence are mostly without jobs and without the prospect of getting one. On the streets, there is little explicit support for the continuing violence. Many are wary of outright condemnation of the potentially lethal violence in Lichtenhagen last year. As one elderly man said: 'You have to understand: these illegal foreigners, the 'asylum-seekers', were all over the place. People said: we have to do something.'

The police, still uncertain of what its own role should be, seems reluctant to clamp down hard. Meanwhile, Klaus Kilimann, mayor of Rostock, argued this week: 'I'm afraid we haven't got much time. We need to be critical of ourselves. One day, we will have to face up to the consequences of what is happening.'