Germans Raise Genocide Issue Against Serbs

The German Parliament accused Serbia on Wednesday of “attempted genocide” and endorsed the deployment of a German destroyer in the Adriatic Sea despite opposition party vows to challenge Bonn’s military powers in the nation’s constitutional court.

The legislators were summoned back from summer recess for the special session to debate the government’s decision last week to dispatch the destroyer Bavaria and three surveillance planes to help monitor a U.N. embargo against Serbia and its ally, Montenegro.

The opposition Social Democrats claimed that Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Cabinet did not have the right to bypass the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, in making such a decision.

They argued that participation in the patrols violates a clause in the constitution forbidding deployment of German forces for any purpose other than defense, and then only within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization arena.

“This debate is about the problem of defining a new role in Europe for a reunited Germany,” said Gerd Wartenberg, a Berlin deputy from the opposition Social Democratic Party.

Wartenberg said in an interview after the debate that deciding what to do about the bloodshed in the former Yugoslav republics is “extraordinarily hard” for Germany, given its own history of twice leading the world to war.

Other Balkan developments, as reported by wire services:

* U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali rejected a call endorsed by the Security Council for peacekeepers to take control of heavy weapons across Bosnia as part of a cease-fire, saying the peacekeepers were already “stretched to the breaking point.”

* U.N. peacekeepers near the Sarajevo airport came under fire Wednesday, and their commander, Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, warned that an airlift of relief supplies was hanging by a “very thin” thread. Relief flights, halted Monday and briefly Tuesday by fighting, were continuing.

* Croatian Radio said more than 50 people were killed or wounded overnight in shelling in Gorazde, one of the last holdouts in the Serb-held east. Gorazde’s mayor said the town had enough food for just 48 hours and might have to surrender to Serbian forces, Jose Maria Mendiluza, a special envoy for the United Nations’ refugee agency, said.

Germany has wrestled with the question of its military role in Europe since gaining sovereignty from the World War II Allies after unification with formerly Communist East Germany nearly two years ago. The four Allied powers--the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union--agreed to German sovereignty on condition that the country remain in NATO.

The German destroyer joins units from other Western alliance nations. They have explicit orders not to engage in force.

Kohl’s center-right Christian Democrat majority in the Bundestag adopted a resolution Wednesday supporting the German role in the Adriatic. It also said the Bundestag “believes the violent acts of the Serbian army against the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina qualify as attempted genocide according to the United Nations convention on preventing and punishing genocide.”

Social Democratic faction leader Hans-Ulrich Klose told the Bundestag that a formal U.N. charge of war crimes against the Serbs might “impress some of the Serbian soldiers if they knew they would eventually be held responsible for their monstrous crimes.”

Klose called deployment of the Bavaria a “helpless gesture.”

Defense Minister Volker Ruehe argued that Germany must fulfill its NATO and European obligations. “The world has undergone revolutionary changes,” he said. “Germany must develop a new security policy for a new time,” he said.