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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 September 2000 Issue No. 498 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 September 2000 Issue No. 498
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Go back to Sana'a!
By Dominic Coldwell
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder learned two important lessons on his seasonal escapades to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Since a wave of right-wing violence has rolled over his country, Schröder must have been relieved to discover, first, that xenophobia is a universal phenomenon. Complaining about the excessive protection afforded the august German guest, a Spanish security official lamented, "Why doesn't he spend his vacation in Tibet?" And when German holiday-makers criticised the coarse treatment meted out by the Spanish police to those who were hoping to catch a glimpse of their Chancellor frolicking in the pool, Schröder's wife Doris ingeniously explained, "This is a country in which there is active terrorism. This is how they do it here."
Duly impressed, the Chancellor decided to clamp down with similar vigour on home-grown racism after returning from his Mediterranean watering hole. It was certainly high time to act. While left-wing violence has killed 33 people since the sixties, right-wing terrorism has claimed 100 casualties in less than a decade. The first half of this year alone witnessed 5,223 racist attacks- an increase of 10 per cent over the previous year.
Schröder therefore embarked on a hastily planned visit to the economically depressed regions of east Germany where much of the violence has occurred. Last week, he also laid a wreath at the tomb of Alberto Adriano -- a 39-year old Mozambican immigrant beaten to death by three skinheads in the east German town of Dessau last June. Two days earlier, a court sentenced one of Adriano's killers to a life-sentence and decided to lock up his two juvenile accomplices for nine years. Schröder found fitting words of approval, "I think the judgement is an appropriate answer to a disgusting crime. It shows that the state, the police, and the judiciary, independently of each other, set limits that no one should overstep in Germany."
One such limit is a proposal by Bavaria's conservative Interior Minister Günther Beckstein to outlaw the far-right National-Democratic Party (NPD), many of whose 6,000 members have been linked to the resurgence of right-wing terror in recent months. A federal commission is currently investigating the possibility of filing an application for banning the party with Germany's Supreme Federal Constitutional Court (BVG) in October.
Most analysts believe the request would stand a fair chance of succeeding. Beckstein is hopeful that a ban would cripple the NPD much in the same way as last year's decision to outlaw the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) has shown that the PKK "could only extort a third of the contributions it received previously." But unfortunately, things are not so easy. Baden-Württemberg's liberal parliamentary leader Walter Döring has accused Beckstein and his conservative ilk of using the ban out of an opportunistic desire to "cream off voters from the right-wing fringe" without really wanting to combat racism. It is somewhat instructive that only the conservative-led state governments of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Thuringia, and Saxony have voiced clear support for Beckstein's proposal.
However, there could also be judicial pitfalls. Prohibiting a party requires a two-thirds majority of 6 out of 8 members on the BVG. Should two of the court's judges fall ill or retire before the end of deliberations, the absence of a quorum after an expected three years of judicial review would be politically embarrassing. As things stand, the BVG's current President Jutta Limbach is due to retire in March 2002. However, even if the application does succeed, it might be counter-productive. Contrary to the late sixties, when the NPD won several seats in Germany's state assemblies and abstained from the use of violence, the party has now embraced violence and is thoroughly unpopular with the electorate. In the general elections of 1998, it bagged no more than 0.3 per cent of votes.
According to political scientist Eckhart Jesse of the Technical University in Chemnitz, barring an ostracised NPD will lend implicit legitimacy to the Republican Party and the German People's Union (DVU)- with 17,000 members, the country's largest far-right party. "What is legally possible," Jesse believes, "might not be politically sensible... While banning the NPD perhaps would have been necessary, but hardly feasible in the late sixties, it is today certainly conceivable, but not necessary." Unless, of course, a proscription would drive NPD activists into the arms of the Republicans or the DVU and thereby furnish a reason for outlawing these groups too, as some analysts have argued.
Even so, banishing the party would only treat the symptoms rather than the causes of the brown cancer. Recent findings suggest that racism in Germany is too firmly rooted to be extirpated by simply punishing a fringe movement. It is true that on average east Germans are more xenophobic than west Germans. On the one hand, the east German economy is still in the doldrums. While joblessness across the country has declined since last summer, unemployment among East German youth -- the group most prone to right-wing extremism -- has actually climbed from 16.6 per cent in July 1999 to 18.3 per cent in July 2000. Moreover, the absence of any large-scale immigration during fifty years of socialist rule has allowed east Germans to harbour more xenophobic attitudes for want of exposure to other cultures. Incidentally, the states with the highest percentage of immigrants also sport the lowest levels of racist atrocities. In 1998, 10.4 per cent of the population in west Germany and 2.2 per cent of the population in east Germany were foreigners.
On the other hand, the bomb explosion that killed one Russian immigrant and wounded nine others in the west German city of Düsseldorf last July shows that racism is not only of eastern breeding. While 51 per cent of east Germans think too many foreigners live in their country, a staggering 37 per cent of west Germans agree. True, every fourth east German feels exploited by foreigners, but so does every eighth west German. Even more surprisingly, a recent survey by the weekly magazine Der Spiegel revealed that- under certain circumstances- 7 per cent of those who regularly vote for the Social-Democrats could imagine supporting the NPD, DVU, or the Republicans in an upcoming ballot. So could -- even more shockingly -- 16 per cent of Green Party voters and 17 per cent of those who sympathise with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
According to Cristoph Butterwegge, a Cologne-based expert on right-wing movements, "that which was only thought earlier, is openly articulated today. Therein," says Butterwegge, lies "the new quality" of rightist extremism. "Without wanting to downplay or exonerate right-wing terrorist attacks, this change in the mass consciousness is far more dangerous in the long term [than the current wave of violence]."
Nor are Germany's politicians free from any blame. Two weeks ago, Interior Minister Otto Schily still justified his absence -- and that of any other high-ranking government official -- from Adriano's funeral by telling Der Spiegel quite unabashedly, "For me the question is: Once I start [attending memorials for the victims of racist violence], then where is it going to end?" Earlier this year, the Christian-Democratic parliamentary leader in North-Rhine Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, also ran a notorious campaign with the slogan "Kinder statt Inder" ("Children instead of Indians") to protest plans by the federal government for attracting foreign IT specialists rather than training German children to alleviate the country's shortage of computer experts. And last week, the Hessian conservative Clemens Reif shouted down Tarek Al-Wazir, a Green Party politician of Yemeni extraction with the words, "Go back to Sana'a!"
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