GERMANY: Controversy in Germany is mounting as the president considers the request to pardon 1970s RAF guerrilla Christian Klar imprisoned since 1982.

Record ID: 784760

  • Title: GERMANY: Controversy in Germany is mounting as the president considers the request to pardon 1970s RAF guerrilla Christian Klar imprisoned since 1982.
  • Date: 9th February 2007
  • Summary: BOOK COVER (NOT BAUM'S) READING "THE RAF AND LEFT-WING TERRORISM"
  • Embargoed: 24th February 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVABVE48VTMAMJ5CUGA6MWNH6SGP
  • Story Text: Controversy is mounting as Germany's president Horst Koehler is considering a request to pardon Christian Klar, behind bars since 1982 for being involved in the murders of the head of West Germany's employers' association Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a top banker and a state prosecutor Klar was a member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a violent group of young revolutionaries that terrorised West Germany in the 1970s and 80s.
    Earlier this month, federal prosecutors filed a request for the release of Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a leading RAF member who was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for her role in the murders of leading German establishment figures, including industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer.
    The move, which comes as President Horst Koehler considers a pardon for Mohnhaupt's former colleague Christian Klar, has sparked a furious debate in Germany pitting outraged relatives of the RAF's victims against politicians who say the killers have done their time and no longer pose a threat to society.
    At the heart of the controversy is the country's readiness to draw a line under a turbulent period of violence and paranoia which shook West Germany's nascent democracy to its core.
    Berlin lawyer Matthias Zieger took part in several RAF trials in the 1970s.
    In an interview with Reuters Television he said "I can very well understand that the victims don't want to draw a line: the next of kin, the widows, the children."
    "From the perspective of those who were tried I would say that we live in a very different society today. The people are old now and they should be entitled to a decent part of life," Zieger said.
    In Zieger's view, "it's time to either pardon those who are still in prison or to release them on parole."
    The RAF, also known as the "Baader-Meinhof Gang" after founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, rose from the student protests of the late 1960s and the anti-Vietnam war movement.
    Its members started by experimenting in alternative lifestyles in the "free love" communes of West Berlin and Hamburg before turning violent in a coordinated campaign of assassinations, kidnappings and bombings against the German elite and U.S. military personnel stationed in Germany.
    Supported by about a quarter of Germans in its early years, the group became less ideological and more pragmatic as the years went by as it sought the release of jailed comrades and secured funds through armed robberies.
    The group, which announced it was disbanding in 1998, is suspected of killing 34 people between 1972 and 1991. Some 26 RAF members died during that period and another 26 were sentenced to life in prison.
    Many of them, mostly secondary members, have since been released or pardoned and now work as teachers, accountants, filmmakers and journalists -- some under assumed names. Only four, including Mohnhaupt and Klar, remain incarcerated.
    Mohnhaupt, 57, was a prominent member of a second generation of RAF members who continued the class war after Baader and Meinhof were caught and committed suicide.
    She and Klar, who have each spent over 24 years behind bars, were involved in the murders of Dresdner Bank head Juergen Ponto and federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, who was shot in April 1977 while waiting at a traffic light in his car.
    Their most public victim was Schleyer, a former Nazi party member, who was president of West Germany's powerful employers' association in the 1970s and an object of ridicule for the left, who denounced him as a caricature of the "arch-capitalist pig".
    Dragged out of his car by masked assailants in September 1977, he was held hostage for over a month as the RAF demanded the release of jailed comrades at Stuttgart's Stammheim prison.
    A black-and-white photograph of an exhausted-looking Schleyer with a hand-written slogan "prisoner for 31 days" became an iconic image of 1970s West Germany.
    Behind him on a white wall is the RAF's symbol of a star and a rifle.
    Schleyer was executed in a forest in France. The identity of the RAF member who shot him remains a mystery.
    One of the chief arguments of those who want Mohnhaupt and Klar to remain in prison is that neither has ever publicly expressed remorse for their crimes.
    "They don't distance themselves from their acts. They have not apologised," Bavaria's state interior minister Guenther Beckstein of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) said.
    "I believe that clemency requires remorse and remorse requires to say that these were the most terrible crimes which were carried out in Germany," Beckstein said.
    German media report that Mohnhaupt still views the RAF as her life. Klar has refused to talk to the press since giving an interview in 2001 in which he said remorse was "not an issue in the context of our battle".
    Many of those in Germany who support the release of Klar and Mohnhaupt say the issue of remorse is secondary. For them, the prisoners no longer pose a security risk and will have soon served the minimum term for a life sentence under German law.
    A court in Stuttgart will make a final decision on Mohnhaupt's release in the first half of February. Klar's sentence means he will be behind bars until at least 2009 unless he receives a pardon from Koehler before that.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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