TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121492/1214020.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8.9 KB | 184 lines

                                                                                GERMANY, Page 43

Cracking Down on the Right


Bonn has finally chosen to curb neo-Nazi violence. But can the
effort succeed in the face of public apathy -- and sometimes
antipathy -- toward foreigners?

By DANIEL BENJAMIN/BERLIN - With reporting by Lisa Beyer/
Jerusalem and James O. Jackson/Bonn


    Sometimes only death will stir the living. Last week the
continuing horror at three deaths from a fire bombing -- of a
51-year-old grandmother, her niece and her granddaughter -- and
the torrent of denunciations that followed the deaths did just
that, shocking German officialdom into wakefulness.
Demonstrations that began the day after the Nov. 23 attack in
the northern city of Molln persisted through a funeral
gathering in Hamburg that attracted 10,000, and then into last
weekend, when a crowd many times as large gathered in Munich.
Images of marchers carrying banners asking such questions as HOW
MANY CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO FALL TO TERROR SO THAT BONN WILL BE
ALERT? flashed across the nation's television screens. Pointed
criticism poured in from abroad, including condemnations from
the governments of Turkey and Israel. THE SILENCE OF TOO MANY
ACCOMPLICES, headlined Italy's La Stampa.

    Confronted by events and opprobrium, Bonn finally lurched
into action -- prodded as well by the realization that
right-wing violence was spilling beyond the asylum seekers'
hostels, the traditional confines of xenophobic attacks. Not
only were the 14th, 15th and 16th fatalities of this year's
violence Turks -- members of an influential, 1.7 million-strong
community whose labors helped make Germany an economic
powerhouse -- but word came of two more murders, both of
Germans, committed by rightist thugs. In Berlin a leftist was
stabbed; in Wuppertal a man was stomped and burned by
assailants who apparently -- and mistakenly -- thought he was
Jewish. In Bonn, said an official, the feeling set in that "it
was another turn of the spiral, and it showed what would happen
if we didn't say, `Stop now!' "

    That demand came in a blitz of initiatives. Interior
Minister Rudolf Seiters banned the Nationalist Front, a
130-member radical group with no apparent connection to Molln
but a bent for terror, and set his sights on other right-wing
extremists. Police raided 51 houses across the country in one
day, uncovering caches of weapons and propaganda. Chancellor
Helmut Kohl's denunciation of the murders, unlike many of his
earlier comments on violence, bore a note of genuine concern:
"What has appeared here is an act of brutality that for every
humane sensibility is incomprehensible."

    That was only part of it. Eckart Werthebach, head of the
Office for the Protection of the Constitution, announced an
expansion of his agency's surveillance of the far right into "a
department that has never before existed in such a dimension."
Chief federal prosecutor Alexander von Stahl took charge of the
Molln case -- his first involving right-wing terror, despite
some 3,400 acts of violence by radicals in the past two years --
and within days officials rounded up two suspects from a loosely
knit far-right group in the Molln area.

    For many, none of this came soon enough. Turkey complained
that its warnings about threats to its citizens had not been
heeded. In Israel reaction to the neo-Nazi violence was even
stronger. Calls for economic and tourist boycotts were widely
voiced, and a Knesset delegation canceled a trip to Germany in
protest. Said Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: "We turn to
[Germany] with a demand to implement existing laws, pass new
ones and outlaw all those who threaten the right to life of any
human being."

    The reproaches hit their mark. Explaining Bonn's rush of
energy, Bundestag member Friedbert Pfluger of Kohl's Christian
Democrats noted that "people realized what a devastating effect
this was having in other countries. There is a loss of
confidence in us, and loss of political credit, and there is an
economic loss. Industry has complained massively to Bonn about
the economic price we are paying." Industrialists were not
alone in complaining. Declared historian Golo Mann, 83: "If I
were 50, I would arm myself. Trust in the state's protection
clearly no longer suffices."

    Will the crackdown reassure him and others? Even as Bonn
was girding for action, a spate of new attacks swept the
country. Police moved quickly and arrested suspects, many of
whom were then charged with attempted murder. That alone
represents an improvement; until recently many suspects in
violent attacks were charged with nothing more serious than
disturbing the peace. The chairman of the German Union of
Judges, Rainer Voss, admitted last week that the public saw the
judges as "inappropriately lenient" and urged his colleagues
"to confront decisively the enemies of humanity and democracy."
The Molln case may have provided an instance of the kind of
leniency the judges stand accused of. In the week before the
attack, prosecutors tried repeatedly to have Michael Peters, 25,
one of the two suspects in the case, arrested in connection
with several attacks on foreigners. Each time the indictment
was rejected by a judge.

    Though the expansion of surveillance and pressure on police
to act decisively will almost surely help in cracking down on
the right, some of the other measures taken by the authorities
are dubious. The banning of extremist groups will probably mean
little in practical terms. Most of those who commit the crimes
either belong to groups that barely deserve to be called
extremist or are lone operators. Officials admit that a ban also
forces the more organized groups underground, making it tougher
to track them. Nonetheless, political scientist Gerd Mielke
maintains that the ban "is a blow against right-wing extremists
in making their activities illegal. Much more important is its
function as symbolic politics, as drawing a line for the
public." Not enough of that defining, of what is acceptable and
what is not, has been done thus far, he says, adding that the
bans will backfire if nothing is done "to attack the social
circumstances that allow the [violence] to arise."

    That sentiment finds wide agreement among experts on
right-wing extremism, who see a crackdown as only part of the
solution. "Xenophobia in the public is still relatively strong,
and it is being separated [from the criminal acts]. There is
nothing in this [program] to overcome it," says Wilhelm
Heitmayer, a social scientist at the University of Bielefeld. He
argues that the crackdown has the misleading effect of
"reinterpreting" the attacks as being those of a few criminals
on the periphery. Among the statistics experts use to
illustrate the depth of the problem is a poll this month by the
Allensbach Institute showing that sympathy for those attacking
asylum seekers' lodgings has risen sharply, to 16% in western
Germany and 15% in the east. Surveys have also shown a third of
German youth to be openly antiforeign or inclined in that
direction and about a quarter of Germans agreeing with the
right-wing slogan "Foreigners out."

    Given the current political climate, it is difficult to
imagine a far-reaching reshaping of popular attitudes. Although
the cost of supporting the estimated 500,000 asylum seekers who
are expected in Germany this year is less than 5% of what is
being pumped into the rehabilitation of eastern Germany, most
western Germans, polls reveal, consider the asylum seekers to
be the country's biggest problem. Xenophobia has been on the
rise since the mid-'80s, says Eberhard Seidel-Pielen, an expert
on the right-wing scene, and "since the economic problems of
unification have become dominant, foreigners are used even more
as scapegoats." The political crusade to change liberal asylum
laws, he contends, "has fed the latent aggression against
foreigners of millions of citizens."

    Although a constitutional amendment that would restrict the
provision of asylum is imminent, few analysts believe it will
make much difference. Germany is not about to deport hundreds
of thousands of asylum seekers overnight; a continuing influx
of illegal immigrants is considered unavoidable; as Molln
showed, there are other targets as well -- the 6.2 million
foreigners living in Germany.

    Compounding matters are economic troubles that are bound to
heighten resentment and play into extremists' hands. The costs
of reviving eastern Germany -- now running at more than $100
billion a year -- are not diminishing. And as Kohl finally
acknowledged in a recent speech, Germany is entering the
recession that has had much of the West and Japan in its grip.
Most domestic political considerations argue against the Kohl
government's using the opportunity of the police crackdown to
confront German xenophobia. After Molln, though, every humane
consideration demands it.