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Date sent: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 14:29:56 -0800
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: THE ROLE OF GERMANY
The New York Times March 26, 1999
CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: IN GERMANY
By Roger Cohen
Berlin -- For the first time since the end of World War II, German
fighter jets have gone to war, taking part in the attack on
Yugoslavia as part of a NATO force and marking this country's
definitive emancipation from post-war pacifism.
Rudolf Scharping, the German Defense Minister, said four
Tornado jets took off from their Piacenza base in northern Italy late
Wednesday and participated in the NATO mission, before returning
safely. The German Parliament has authorized up to 15 military
aircraft to take part in the air strikes.
Germany reacted calmly, indicating a profound change in its
psyche since the fall of the Berlin wall. Throughout the period of
post-war reconstruction, the saying that "only peace" would go out
from German soil amounted to a kind of mantra. The one time
during the cold war that German troops marched in a foreign land
was in 1968, when East German troops assisted in the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The devastation, physical and moral, caused by Hitler's
Reich and the country's delicate position at the front line of the cold
war contributed to Germany's peace-only outlook. But Europe has
changed and Germany has changed with it.
"The last victim of the fall of the wall is German pacifism,"
Stephan Speicher commented Thursday in the Berliner Zeitung.
Not everyone is ready. There have been dissenting voices
and clear tensions within the governing coalition of Social
Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Gregor Gysi, the leader of the Party of Democratic
Socialism, on Thursday denounced Germany's participation. "After
what has happened this century, Germany above all has no right to
drop bombs on Belgrade." He was referring to Hitler's flattening of
Belgrade, which began on April 6, 1941, after Serbs tore up a pact
with the Nazis. This event is etched on Serbian consciousness as if
it happened yesterday. Still, Gysi's voice appeared relatively isolated
amid what the conservative newspaper Die Welt called "a kind of
public emptiness."
German equanimity was clearly reinforced Thursday by the
fact that it was a "Red-Green" coalition of Social Democrats and
Greens that approved the decision to participate.
"The Federal Government has not easily taken the decision
that, for the first time since World War II, there are German
soldiers in an operational mission," Schröder said. But "our
fundamental values of freedom, democracy and human rights" were
being flouted in Kosovo, he said.
Just seven years ago, at the start of the Bosnian war,
Joschka Fischer, then a Green member of Parliament, opposed any
Western military intervention or deployment of German forces in
Bosnia. But Germany eventually played a role, in the air and on the
ground, in the United Nations peace-keeping force in Bosnia. As
the Foreign Minister since October, Fischer has argued passionately
for the West's responsibility to stop Serbian aggression in Kosovo.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Green colleague of Fischer and a
fellow militant in the revolutionary struggles of the 1960's, said
Bosnia had "simply transformed" the way the Foreign Minister
approached the question of the use of force.
Still, the German participation in air raids on Yugoslavia is
potentially explosive, for it will confirm every dark Serbian
suspicion about the West. If there has been a single obsession in
Serbian policy this century, it has been to prevent what Belgrade
sees as German expansionism in the Balkans.
"We are not ready to make a distinction between the bombs
of Adolf Hitler from 1941 and the bombs of NATO," Vuk
Draskovic, the Yugoslavian Deputy Prime Minister, said.
Strong German support for Croatian independence
from Yugoslavia, and Croatia's adoption of the hymn "Danke
Deutschland" when that independence came in 1991, only
reinforced Serbian misgivings.
The last time NATO bombed in the Balkans -- hitting
Serbian positions around Sarajevo in 1995 -- the action prompted a
response very similar to Draskovic's Thursday.
"By its length, this bombardment is even more brutal than
the bombardment conducted by Hitler on April 6, 1941, on
Belgrade, given the fact that Hitler's bombardment was stopped on
April 8, 1941, to allow the burial of victims under Christian
custom," Gen. Ratko Mladic, then the commander of Serbian forces
in Bosnia, wrote to a Western general.
With 2,500 German troops now in Bosnia, and another
3,000 in Macedonia, the possibility of some Serbian reprisal against
German forces exists, especially if the NATO bombing proves
prolonged or erratic.
This possibility has already created political tensions here.
Volker Rühe, the former Defense Minister in the Christian
Democrat Government of Helmut Kohl, said that the troops in
Macedonia had been sent as part of a peacekeeping force, and "not
to make war." They should therefore be withdrawn, he argued.
Within the coalition, the issue of Kosovo proved fraught
before the bombing began. It had much to do with the abrupt
resignation this month of the former Finance Minister, Oskar
Lafontaine.
Lafontaine was concerned that Germany's readiness to
follow America's Kosovo policy was reckless, according to a
minister who was present during the discussions.
When Scharping, the Defense Minister, asked for more
money because the preparations for Kosovo had used up the funds
earmarked for a pay rise for the military, Lafontaine refused,
officials said. At that point, Scharping threatened to resign.
But when Schröder sided with Scharping and ordered
Lafontaine to release the money, it was the Finance Minister who
quit. "Lafontaine objected to Kosovo policy in the same way as he
objected to the deployment of American Pershing II missiles on
German soil in the 1980's," said the Minister who attended the
discussions and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The deployment of the missiles was, of course, successful,
helping to end the cold war. This week, America again enlisted
Germany's help in a resolute course of action, but the outcome, for
Germany and for Europe, remains uncertain.
[PEN-L:4583] (Fwd) CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: THE ROLE OF GERMANY
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Fri, 26 Mar 1999 23:15:28 -0600
