Bonn May Be Reappraising Its ‘Dialogue’ With Tehran

After years of keeping communication lines open to Tehran, much to the annoyance of Washington, there are signs that Germany may be reappraising its policy of “critical dialogue” with the Iranian government.

Until now, Bonn has claimed that by pursuing talks with Tehran’s Shiite fundamentalists, Germany was keeping alive a special, neutral relationship that could be used to help persuade the Iranians to abandon their support for international terrorism. Bonn argued that its approach, also embraced by the European Union, would, in the end, be more productive than the United States’ policy of isolating Iran.

But criticism is mounting, within Germany and outside, that Bonn’s cordiality toward Tehran is really motivated by a desire to help German companies do business in the Islamic state. Opponents say the policy has produced minimal political results and ought to be scrapped.

“It has no future under the circumstances,” said Freimut Duve, a member of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee for the Social Democratic Party, Germany’s largest opposition group. “It never should have developed into the institutionalized philosophy that it is today, with its own momentum.”

In the clearest suggestion that senior German officials may be losing patience with their own foreign ministry, the attorney general recently issued an arrest warrant for Ali Falahian, Iran’s top spymaster.

The warrant charges Falahian, Iran’s minister for intelligence and security, with four counts of murder and attempted murder in the gangland-style deaths of three exiled Kurdish leaders in a Berlin bar, the Mykonos, in 1992. The Kurds’ translator was also fatally shot in the attack; another man was injured.

In 1993, one Iranian and four Lebanese were arrested and charged with the murders. They are now standing trial in Berlin.

But almost from the beginning, there were also hints that the hit was orchestrated by Tehran.

Iran denies any involvement, but German opinion makers have been calling since 1993 for federal prosecutors to go after the suspected Iranian mastermind, not just the triggermen.

The attorney general’s office says it will not comment on the latest developments until Falahian is actually taken into custody--something that may never happen.

But observers here assume the long-awaited arrest warrant was finally issued in light of the recent suicide bombings in Israel and complaints by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that Iran’s hard-line Islamists were behind the attacks.

The charges against Falahian have thoroughly disrupted German-Iranian relations.

The Iranian ambassador to Bonn has filed a formal protest and warned that if any Iranian citizen is sentenced in connection with the Mykonos slayings, there will be “extensive consequences.”

The official Iranian news agency, IRNA, has quoted the Iranian Cabinet as saying that Germany’s “illogical behavior” could lead to Germans being “put on trial in absentia [in Iran] and declared guilty.”

Iran also made a vague threat to take legal action against Kay Nehm, the German prosecutor general, in an unspecified international tribunal.

The disturbances are the latest in a relationship that has been controversial for years.

In 1993, as the trial of the Mykonos suspects was beginning, with suspicions already in the air that the real culprit was Falahian, the German government shocked the public by receiving him as a state guest.

He was invited to dinner in the chancellery and held discussions with counterparts in German intelligence. He thanked intelligence coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer for the “technical help” that Germany had extended to Iran: sales of electronic eavesdropping gear, computer training, a photo lab and other spying assistance.

When the German Parliament hauled Schmidbauer in to explain these transactions, he said that Germany had extracted promises from Iran not to commit terrorist attacks on German soil.

Still, opponents assert that the Iranian Embassy in Bonn has developed into a nerve center for repressing and spying on Iranian dissidents in Europe.

News reports indicate that since 1980, 33 Iranians--many of them exiled writers and politicians--have died in Europe, presumably the victims of revolutionary death commandos.

The Germany-Iran relationship became controversial again last November, when Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel invited Ali Akbar Velayati, his Iranian counterpart, to a high-level international conference on Islamic affairs.

Kinkel refused to withdraw the invitation after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani called the murder “divine revenge.”

German lawmakers from across the political spectrum--including Kinkel’s own Free Democratic Party--demanded that the Iranian be shut out of the conference after his president’s remarks.

But even when the Parliament voted in favor of retracting the invitation, Kinkel merely postponed the whole conference, a move seen as a slap in the face of the moderate Islamic states that had planned to send ministers.

“Why is there this almost enthusiastic support for this regime?” Salman Rushdie--the British writer who labors under an Iranian assassination threat because of his writings--demanded in an interview with the German news weekly Der Spiegel.

Duve, of the foreign relations committee, suggested that the Bonn-Tehran ties have “an economic dimension.” Germany is Iran’s largest trading partner, selling mainly machinery, electrical appliances and cars.

But Kinkel has steadfastly argued the merits of the critical dialogue. “Iran is of such a big strategic importance for the whole region that you cannot isolate it,” he said.