German Hate Crimes Prompt Call for Party Bans

An outbreak of right-wing violence in recent weeks has increased pressure on the government to ban political parties harboring known extremists, but political leaders and law enforcement authorities lamented Wednesday that such a crackdown would only make martyrs of the troublemakers and force them underground.

As the debate about how to curb anti-foreigner violence intensified, police arrested a suspect in a bombing last week at a Duesseldorf commuter train station that wounded 10 immigrants from the former Soviet Union and killed the unborn child of a Ukrainian woman among them.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which was carried out with a bomb fashioned from a fragmentation grenade. Investigators have said only that they cannot rule out right-wing radicals as suspects.

But in an increasingly fearful atmosphere after a fatal attack on homeless men and brutal beatings of foreigners in eastern German cities, suspicion has soared that the Duesseldorf blast could also have been a hate crime.

In a disturbing diary of recent extremist outbreaks, Wednesday’s edition of the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel recounted 27 incidents of right-wing violence in July alone, from defacing of Holocaust memorials with swastikas to beatings so severe that three of the victims later died. All but four of the crimes it chronicled were committed in eastern Germany.

In an accompanying interview, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said the incidents were inflicting “devastating damage to the image of Germany abroad.”

The attacks have coincided with--as well as undermined--an effort to attract highly skilled computer experts from the Third World to fill Germany’s information technology gap.

Fischer said he is now often asked during foreign visits whether Germany is a safe place for dark-skinned foreigners.

“It is dreadfully shameful when one, as the foreign minister, cannot answer this question with an unqualified affirmative,” Fischer told the newspaper.

Economic leaders appealed for Germans to report suspicious incidents or abuses instead of turning away in fear or shame.

“It cannot be allowed that a minority damages the image of all Germany,” Holger Wenzel, manager of the German Industry and Trade Council, warned in a statement expressing the business community’s distress. “The right-wing extremist attacks are a disgrace for our country for which there is no excuse.”

The recent incidents have given substance to a report earlier this year by the Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution that right-wing violence is on the rise. More than 1,500 such cases of assault and vandalism were recorded last year--up 5% from 1998.

Some German political leaders have insisted lately that the government ban parties with known neo-Nazis in their ranks, in particular the far-right National Democratic Party, known here as the NPD. People associated with the party have been implicated in several recent attacks.

Those appeals, primarily from the leftist Greens, drew support from the German police union and a Vienna-based watchdog agency, the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia.

But such a move would face serious legal hurdles and has been dismissed by other justice and law enforcement officials as counterproductive.

“If the NPD is banned today, a new organization will rise in its place tomorrow with the exact same people, and we’d have to run after them with a new banning order,” said Eckart Werthebach, head of police and security affairs for Berlin.

The western state of North Rhine-Westphalia has already tried such a ban, to little effect other than scattering the neo-Nazis and making them harder to keep an eye on, Fritz Behrens, interior minister for the state that includes Duesseldorf, said in a radio interview.

Germany’s constitution makes it difficult to outlaw political parties unless they pose a clear and measurable threat to constitutional order, said the federal minister for family and social affairs, Christine Bergmann, adding that a ban “would not clear away the problem.”

Even some Greens, including party chief Renate Kuenast, concede that a ban would be unlikely to root out the underlying evil.

“It has to be a broadly based goal of society to integrate youths into the community before a sense of isolation develops to drive them to the fringes,” Kuenast told journalists.

Most recent attacks have occurred in depressed eastern German backwaters where unemployment exceeds 20%. Those who have failed to benefit from the fall of communism often feel alienated from the prosperous west and resentful of the few foreigners in their midst.