Germany Plans Inquiry of Foreign Minister

Prosecutors in Frankfurt informed Parliament on Friday that they plan to investigate Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on allegations that he lied during court testimony last month about contact with terrorists in the 1970s.

Fischer, who will travel to Washington on Monday for the German leadership’s first Cabinet-level contacts with the Bush administration, stands by his court statements and welcomes the inquiry as a means of clearing his name, said his spokesman, Andreas Michaelis.

“We want this kind of procedure,” said Michaelis, insisting that the foreign minister, who has made no secret of his days as a radical more than a quarter of a century ago, still has nothing to hide. “We are approaching this with great calm.”

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder also reiterated his support for Fischer, who serves as vice chancellor by virtue of his role as the ranking Greens party member in the coalition with Schroeder’s Social Democrats.

“I have without reservation the fullest trust in my foreign minister,” Schroeder said, adding that he couldn’t say anything about the accusations from Frankfurt because of the legal proceedings pending.

The accusations arise from letters sent to the Hesse state prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt after Fischer’s Jan. 16 testimony as a character witness for Hans-Joachim Klein, a friend from the early 1970s who was sentenced Thursday to nine years in prison for murder and terrorism.

At least seven people wrote to contend that Fischer had closer contacts with key figures in the Red Army Faction terror group than he had admitted in sworn testimony during Klein’s trial for aiding a 1975 terrorist raid on a Vienna meeting of oil ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The accusers contend that Fischer gave refuge to RAF terrorist Margrit Schiller in 1973 by allowing her to stay in the communal house used by a coterie of radicals and anti-establishment activists at that time.

Notification of the impending probe was sent from the Hesse prosecutor’s office to Parliament Speaker Wolfgang Thierse, who referred it to the parliamentary committee on legislative immunity. That panel seldom invokes an investigation subject’s right to immunity from prosecution at such a preliminary stage, but if the probe results in criminal charges, the committee would have to vote on whether to lift Fischer’s immunity.

Opposition politicians wasted no time waiting for clarity, insisting that Fischer make a full disclosure of his associations with radicals who later became terrorists, such as Klein and Schiller. Leading members of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, which has its own political scandals weighing down its prospects in two state elections next month, called on the popular foreign minister to resign to spare himself and Germany further international shame.

“What is called for is an extensive and truthful confession,” CDU chief Laurenz Meyer said. “Truth is not divisible.”

But another radical-turned-establishment politician, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, accused the CDU-ruled Hesse government of orchestrating the perjury probe to deflect attention from state Gov. Roland Koch, against whom fresh accusations of slush-fund activity have just surfaced.

Fischer regularly ranks as Germany’s most admired politician, and the release of photographs of the future foreign minister during a riot in the early 1970s has done little to damage his public standing. But the suave and witty diplomat has many enemies from the nonconformist past he outgrew, people who see him as a traitor and resent him for finding a route to legitimacy and power.

If prosecutors discover cause for charges against Fischer, the maximum penalty for lying under oath is five years in prison.

But as became clear during the Klein trial, gathering evidence of contacts among those on the chaotic alternative scene nearly 30 years ago is difficult. Fischer told the Frankfurt court that he couldn’t provide specific times and places of meetings and activities it asked about because the passage of time has overtaken the limits of memory.