Germany sheds its pacifism

NY 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. 

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company  


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)