In his T-shirt, skinny jeans and sharply styled haircut, Martin Sellner is the European far right's newest poster boy. The group he leads in Austria has attracted huge publicity. However, Sellner's insistence that his movement is non-racist and non-violent doesn't have everyone convinced.
In April 2016, hundreds of people sat inside the University of Vienna's theatre watching The Suppliants, a play performed by asylum-seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And then the stage invasion began.
Members of a far-right group called Generation Identity (GI) rushed in, unfurling a banner calling the audience hypocrites and throwing fake blood over some of them. The performers screamed, fearing they were under attack. There were scuffles as some in the audience began shouting “Nazis raus” or “Nazis out” and tried to eject the protesters.
Ima was one of the performers. She had fled Mosul in Iraq when it was taken over by the so-called Islamic State group. “We came from the land of fear,” she says. And now, in the darkness and confusion, she was scared again.
“We thought they were going to kill us. In my homeland it's just so much killing and dead people so that's what we believed.”
The young man who leads GI in Austria…
