German
Fischer was militant student, not
guerrilla by Emma Thomasson BERLIN - German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer
[wearing
black helmet in
photos] said on
Wednesday that he had played a militant
role in left-wing student protests in the
1970s but had opposed violent guerrilla
tactics. "Yes,
I was militant. But I always rejected the
armed struggle and fought it politically,"
Fischer told the Stern weekly in an
interview due for publication on
Thursday. Fischer is due to testify in Frankfurt
in two weeks as a character witness at the
trial of a man charged with helping jailed
guerrilla Carlos the Jackal to
kidnap OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in
1975. Hans-Joachim Klein, 52, faces
charges of kidnapping and involvement in
the murder of two bodyguards and a
delegate in the raid, the most spectacular
attack by Carlos, a Venezuelan whose real
name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez. Fischer, now one of Germany's
most popular
politicians, knew Klein as a fellow member
of the left-wing protest movement of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, but said he
had never considered following him and
joining extreme leftist guerrilla
groups. "I always thought that was wrong, even
suicidal," he said. "The whole time, for
God's sake, we were working hard against
this step to armed struggle, to
terrorism." Shown
photographs which Stern magazine said
depicted a masked Fischer attacking a
police officer, the dapper foreign
minister, now 52, said he had been
involved in protest violence, but
denied he had thrown petrol bombs or
used
a gun. "We occupied houses and when they were
supposed to be cleared we defended
ourselves. We threw stones. We were beaten
up but we also fought back strongly. I
have never kept that a secret," he
said. Conservatives
attack Militancy Conservative
opposition Christian Democrat Union party
(CDU) said Fischer's admission meant he
was not for high office. "Whoever behaved
like that is no representative of a
violence-free civil society. One cannot be
foreign minister of Germany with such an
attitude," Wolfgang Bosbach, the
CDU's deputy parliamentary leader, told
the Berliner Morgenpost daily. Fischer rejected allegations that he
had knowingly allowed Klein to use his car
to transport weapons and said he had given
the vehicle to his fellow protester to
repair it. "If I had known that he was going to
use it to drive around with weapons I
wouldn't have given him the car," he said.
Fischer said he had been shocked when he
saw an injured Klein on the front page of
the newspaper after the OPEC kidnapping,
but said he had not helped Klein to hide
or supported him during Klein's decades
underground. Klein was shot in the stomach during
the kidnapping but was treated and allowed
to fly to Algiers with his accomplices and
their hostages, who were released on
payment of a ransom. He later took refuge
in Libya before going underground. Klein, who denies shooting during the
kidnapping, was extradited in 1999 from
France, where he had lived for 23 years
under a false name. Fischer, who entered
the German parliament in 1983 as a member
of the ecologist Greens, said he had
become disillusioned with the protest
movement in 1976 when left-wing extremists
who hijacked a plane singled out Jewish
passengers. © 2001
Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
The photos have
been added from a larger series published
on the following website to which
acknowledgment is made: http://www.bettinaroehl.de/Der_Fischer___/Schlacht/Bilderserie/bilderserie.html.
Upper picture
shows helmeted Fischer beating the young
police officer during a Marxist riot in
Frankfurt's west-end. The officer is
outnumnbered five to one and his helmet
has been ripped off; lower picture shows
Fischer (left) warning his fellow thugs
that more police are coming. |