Combative Kohl Testifies in Slush-Fund Inquiry

In long-awaited testimony on allegations that he sold government favors, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl attacked his accusers Thursday and condemned their parliamentary investigation as a politically motivated smear campaign “to drag 16 good, successful years for Germany through the garbage.”

Kohl struck a pose before his interrogators so confident as to border on smug, and his rambling, 75-minute diatribe before submitting to questions oozed contempt for the legislative probe into whether $1 million in illegal donations he admits to having taken were tantamount to bribes.

Denying that his decisions were ever for sale, the man once revered by Germans for reunifying their divided country a decade ago did little to disperse the dark clouds shrouding his legacy as he again refused to identify those who filled his slush funds.

“I’m not of a mind to name names,” the former chancellor told the inquiry panel, saying he promised anonymity to his secret backers.

Kohl’s repeated claims of having “no recollection” of the suspect arms sales and privatization deals at the core of the investigation led lawmakers to adjourn their questioning nearly three hours early. Several panel members also were distressed to learn that Kohl had met with allies on the committee ahead of the session to discuss his testimony--contact they said might have compromised the investigation.

The former chancellor’s failure to cooperate and his attitude of persecution prompted renewed calls for Kohl to resign his seat in Parliament for holding his word above its laws.

Instead, an unremorseful Kohl confronted the panel and the German media with charges of plotting his political ruin.

“I can only assume that the reason this panel did not call me for seven months was to give opponents the chance to drag 16 good, successful years for Germany through the garbage,” Kohl fumed. “In the last months, every means has been employed to cover me in scandal.”

The affair has besmirched Kohl’s reputation as one of modern Europe’s greatest statesmen and disgraced the Christian Democratic Union he has belonged to since the party’s post-World War II founding. He has become a virtual pariah in his homeland, although foreign leaders, including President Clinton, still pay courtesy calls when they visit.

Kohl’s summons before the panel, which comprises mostly lawmakers from the governing Social Democrats and Greens, had been billed by German media as a “High Noon” showdown that would leave only one of Kohl’s dueling legacies standing: revered father of reunification or reviled political outlaw.

But the former chancellor left the inquiry as combative as when he went in, insisting that he already has taken personal responsibility for hiding the illegal donations and owes no further explanation. From the onset of the controversy, he has said the payments never influenced his judgment and therefore cannot be considered bribes.

Kohl also is under investigation by prosecutors in the former capital, Bonn, for criminal deception of the public, for which he could face jail time if charged and convicted. He referred to that probe Thursday in invoking his right against self-incrimination to evade answering several questions about the donations.

The man who celebrated last November’s 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the international spotlight--then spent his 70th birthday in shamed isolation five months later--accused his interrogators of “pursuing an unprecedented defamation through falsehoods, insinuation and distortion.”

He saved his greatest wrath for the German media.

“I have never come across such a scandalous attempt to blacken the record and falsify the facts of my life,” Kohl said of reports, first aired by ARD public television, that late French President Francois Mitterrand clandestinely funneled nearly $16 million into CDU coffers to secure a French company’s bid for a refinery in eastern Germany.

“The allegations that I could be bought are absurd. I have never in my life been for sale,” Kohl asserted.

Until recently, Kohl was seen to be recovering some of the respect he had enjoyed among Germans before last fall, when prosecutors investigating corruption charges against a Bavarian arms dealer uncovered the first of several illegal CDU slush funds. Those now running the party, which Kohl headed for 25 years, recently showed signs of wanting reconciliation after months of giving him the cold shoulder.

Kohl derailed his own comeback last week, however, by comparing his isolation to the plight of Jewish merchants who were the targets of Nazi boycotts. His statement drew denunciation from offended Jewish leaders and refreshed his CDU colleagues’ motivation for keeping their distance.

On the eve of his testimony, Kohl was hit by further accusations of wrongdoing when a government-appointed investigator told the parliamentary committee that reams of official records were destroyed at the chancellery in the month after Kohl lost his reelection bid to Gerhard Schroeder in September 1998.

“I can see no legal basis for the deletions,” the investigator, Burkhard Hirsch of the Free Democratic Party that ruled alongside Kohl’s CDU, said of the erased computer files equivalent to 1.2 million typewritten pages.

Hirsch estimated that two-thirds of the Kohl administration archives were destroyed, including records relating to the controversial arms sales and privatization deals.

“This wasn’t just a slip of the finger,” he added. “This was instead a massive annihilation of data and document manipulation.”

It was not immediately clear whether Kohl will be called again to testify before the investigative committee, which so far has decided against slapping noncompliant witnesses with contempt charges despite their uniform refusal to disclose information that might impugn Kohl.

However, the report by Hirsch appeared likely to jump-start the criminal probe underway in Bonn, which prosecutors said at the time it was announced could take several years.