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- THE WEEK, Page 14WORLDAn Unfitting End
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- Germany's original Green, Petra Kelly, dies at the hand of her
- lover
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- The deaths were as puzzling as they were a contradiction of
- what Petra Kelly had stood for. Ten years ago she was the
- personification of the German environmental and peace movements.
- One of the founders of the German Green Party, Kelly was a
- member of the West German Bundestag until 1990, when her party
- failed to win enough votes to remain in the parliament. Over the
- years, she had fallen out with many of her fractious party
- colleagues and became a marginal figure. Her compatriots were
- shocked into remembrance of Kelly, however, when she and her
- longtime lover and fellow Green Party founder, Gert Bastian,
- were found dead in their Bonn house. The state of the corpses
- indicated that they had been dead for some weeks and that
- Bastian had either shot Kelly while she slept or with her
- acquiescence, before shooting himself. No note was left.
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- Slight of build, Kelly, 44, had thrown herself with
- passion into campaigns against the stationing of
- intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Germany and for the
- creation of an ecologically sound public policy. The founding
- of the Greens made her perhaps the world's best-known
- environmentalist.
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- Bastian, a former Bundeswehr major general who was 69 when
- he died, had written an open letter in September decrying
- recent xenophobic attacks that had "spread like wildfire over
- the land." But there was no sign that the shootings were meant
- as political protest or, for that matter, anything else.
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