A Schwarzenegger backlash in Austria By Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, December 27, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/26/news/austria.php BERLIN Sometime over the Christmas holidays, the authorities of Graz, a classically pretty Austrian town, took down the sign that for the past seven years has identified the local 15,000-seat sports arena as the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium, and as they did so, a rare combination of local hero worship, European indignation at the death penalty, and provincial Austrian politics came to a climax. The stadium had been named after Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of a kind of fealty toward the poor farmer's son and international celebrity who, though born in a little village nearby, was educated in Graz and has always readily identified it as his native place. But when Schwarzenegger, now governor of California, declined to commute the death sentence for Stanley Tookie Williams, the former Los Angeles gang leader who was executed in California two weeks ago, the reaction in Graz, where the death penalty is seen as a medieval atrocity, was swift and angry. "I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen," Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party said in an interview in Graz's stately City Hall, describing the first step in the chain of events that led to the renaming of the stadium. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the Council." But before a formal vote was taken on the petition, Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, informing him that he was withdrawing Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium. There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, Schwarzenegger wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of the City of Graz further concern. "It was a clever step," Binder said. "He took the initiative," she continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that has entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so, she said, because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on this point." Needless to say, Nagl, a member of the conservative Peoples Party who opposed the name-removal initiative, doesn't agree. He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview in his office in Graz, and on Dec. 1, he wrote a letter to Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council - consisting of Greens, Social-Democrats and two Communists - for trying to score some local political gain at Schwarzenegger's and - he believes - Graz's own expense. "One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of opinion," Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Schwarzenegger. "I would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the city of Graz which you received." The very heated nature of the debate revealed something very European about the collective consciousness, how a relatively small place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or diplomatic power, wants to play a role as a sort of moral beacon, waging the struggle for the good. Graz, a place of old, onion steeples, museums, and art nouveau architecture, designated itself five years ago, via a unanimous vote of the City Council, to be Europes first official city of human rights, and while the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a sort of goal to live up to. "We are against the death penalty not only in word, but really against the death penalty," Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz university, said. Benedek is also director of the European Training Center for Human Rights, created five years ago in Graz to further its ambition to be a human rights center. It is a sort of human rights academy designed to promote respect for the rule of law especially among the new democracies of Southeastern Europe. It was also the particular circumstances of this case that led to this reaction, Benedek continued, meaning the special circumstances surrounding Williams case, of a man who had written a children's book aimed at steering young people away from violence, had already spent two decades in jail , and who seemed, to many Europeans at least, to have reformed himself. "Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to react," Benedek said. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite-versus- popular opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found over 70 percent of the public opposed to removing Schwarzeneggers name from the stadium. This adds to a practical consideration very much on Nagls' mind, namely that Graz will no longer be able to count, as it has for years, on using its special relationship with the California governor to promote its image. "We had the great classical culture on the one side," Thomas Rajakovics, the mayors spokesman said, referring to other important figures who are associated with Graz, from the astronomer Johannes Kepler to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger to the conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other we had Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're not allowed to use his name any more." But what's done is done. The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is now simply Graz-Liebenau Stadium - Liebenau being a district of Graz - though there were other proposals. One was to name the Stadium after the Crips, the gang that Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after an Austrian Jewish sports club that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. But the number one city of human rights didn't seem quite ready for that either. It's not that there was vocal opposition, but, as Binder put it, Austrians don't generally want a day to day reminder of the terrible wartime past. Hakoah just seemed to go a bit far. Meanwhile, the city officials are holding on to Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, which arrived during the holidays. Rajakovics said they will keep it for him in the hope that, one day, he will take it back. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Know an art & music fan? Make a donation in their honor this holiday season! http://us.click.yahoo.com/.6dcNC/.VHMAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
