Cracking Down on the Right

By DANIEL BENJAMIN BERLIN

SOMETIMES ONLY DEATH WILL STIR THE living. Last week the continuing horror at three deaths from a fire bombing -- of a 51-year-old grandmother, her niece and her granddaughter -- and the torrent of denunciations that followed the deaths did just that, shocking German officialdom into wakefulness. Demonstrations that began the day after the Nov. 23 attack in the northern city of Molln persisted through a funeral gathering in Hamburg that attracted 10,000, and then into last weekend, when a crowd many times as large gathered in Munich. Images of marchers carrying banners asking such questions as HOW MANY CHILDREN WILL HAVE TO FALL TO TERROR SO THAT BONN WILL BE ALERT? flashed across the nation's television screens. Pointed criticism poured in from abroad, including condemnations from the governments of Turkey and Israel. THE SILENCE OF TOO MANY ACCOMPLICES, headlined Italy's La Stampa.

Confronted by events and opprobrium, Bonn finally lurched into action -- prodded as well by the realization that right-wing violence was spilling beyond the asylum seekers' hostels, the traditional confines of xenophobic attacks. Not only were the 14th, 15th and 16th fatalities of this year's violence Turks -- members of an influential, 1.7 million-strong community whose labors helped make Germany an economic powerhouse -- but word came of two more murders, both of Germans, committed by rightist thugs. In Berlin a leftist was stabbed; in Wuppertal a man was stomped and burned by assailants who apparently -- and mistakenly -- thought he was Jewish. In Bonn, said an official, the feeling set in that "it was another turn of the spiral, and it showed what would happen if we didn't say, 'Stop now!' "

That demand came in a blitz of initiatives. Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters banned the Nationalist Front, a 130-member radical group with no apparent connection to Molln but a bent for terror, and set his sights on other right- wing extremists. Police raided 51 houses across the country in one day, uncovering caches of weapons and propaganda. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's denunciation of the murders, unlike many of his earlier comments on violence, ^ bore a note of genuine concern: "What has appeared here is an act of brutality that for every humane sensibility is incomprehensible."

That was only part of it. Eckart Werthebach, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, announced an expansion of his agency's surveillance of the far right into "a department that has never before existed in such a dimension." Chief federal prosecutor Alexander von Stahl took charge of the Molln case -- his first involving right-wing terror, despite some 3,400 acts of violence by radicals in the past two years -- and within days officials rounded up two suspects from a loosely knit far-right group in the Molln area.

For many, none of this came soon enough. Turkey complained that its warnings about threats to its citizens had not been heeded. In Israel reaction to the neo-Nazi violence was even stronger. Calls for economic and tourist boycotts were widely voiced, and a Knesset delegation canceled a trip to Germany in protest. Said Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: "We turn to ((Germany)) with a demand to implement existing laws, pass new ones and outlaw all those who threaten the right to life of any human being."

The reproaches hit their mark. Explaining Bonn's rush of energy, Bundestag member Friedbert Pfluger of Kohl's Christian Democrats noted that "people realized what a devastating effect this was having in other countries. There is a loss of confidence in us, and loss of political credit, and there is an economic loss. Industry has complained massively to Bonn about the economic price we are paying." Industrialists were not alone in complaining. Declared historian Golo Mann, 83: "If I were 50, I would arm myself. Trust in the state's protection clearly no longer suffices."

Will the crackdown reassure him and others? Even as Bonn was girding for action, a spate of new attacks swept the country. Police moved quickly and arrested suspects, many of whom were then charged with attempted murder. That alone represents an improvement; until recently many suspects in violent attacks were charged with nothing more serious than disturbing the peace. The chairman of the German Union of Judges, Rainer Voss, admitted last week that the public saw the judges as "inappropriately lenient" and urged his colleagues "to confront decisively the enemies of humanity and democracy." The Molln case may have provided an instance of the kind of leniency the judges stand accused of. In the week before the attack, prosecutors tried repeatedly to have Michael Peters, 25, one of the two suspects in the case, arrested in connection with several attacks on foreigners. Each time the indictment was rejected by a judge.

Though the expansion of surveillance and pressure on police to act decisively will almost surely help in cracking down on the right, some of the other measures taken by the authorities are dubious. The banning of extremist groups will probably mean little in practical terms. Most of those who commit the crimes either belong to groups that barely deserve to be called extremist or are lone operators. Officials admit that a ban also forces the more organized groups underground, making it tougher to track them. Nonetheless, political scientist Gerd Mielke maintains that the ban "is a blow against right-wing extremists in making their activities illegal. Much more important is its function as symbolic politics, as drawing a line for the public." Not enough of that defining, of what is acceptable and what is not, has been done thus far, he says, adding that the bans will backfire if nothing is done "to attack the social circumstances that allow the ((violence)) to arise."

That sentiment finds wide agreement among experts on right-wing extremism, who see a crackdown as only part of the solution. "Xenophobia in the public is still relatively strong, and it is being separated ((from the criminal acts)). There is nothing in this ((program)) to overcome it," says Wilhelm Heitmayer, a social scientist at the University of Bielefeld. He argues that the crackdown has the misleading effect of "reinterpreting" the attacks as being those of a few criminals on the periphery. Among the statistics experts use to illustrate the depth of the problem is a poll this month by the Allensbach Institute showing that sympathy for those attacking asylum seekers' lodgings has risen sharply, to 16% in western Germany and 15% in the east. Surveys have also shown a third of German youth to be openly antiforeign or inclined in that direction and about a quarter of Germans agreeing with the right-wing slogan "Foreigners out."

Given the current political climate, it is difficult to imagine a far- reaching reshaping of popular attitudes. Although the cost of supporting the estimated 500,000 asylum seekers who are expected in Germany this year is less than 5% of what is being pumped into the rehabilitation of eastern Germany, most western Germans, polls reveal, consider the asylum seekers to be the country's biggest problem. Xenophobia has been on the rise since the mid-' 80s, says Eberhard Seidel-Pielen, an expert on the right-wing scene, and "since the economic problems of unification have become dominant, foreigners are used even more as scapegoats." The political crusade to change liberal asylum laws, he contends, "has fed the latent aggression against foreigners of millions of citizens."

Although a constitutional amendment that would restrict the provision of asylum is imminent, few analysts believe it will make much difference. Germany is not about to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers overnight; a continuing influx of illegal immigrants is considered unavoidable; as Molln showed, there are other targets as well -- the 6.2 million foreigners living in Germany.

Compounding matters are economic troubles that are bound to heighten resentment and play into extremists' hands. The costs of reviving eastern Germany -- now running at more than $100 billion a year -- are not diminishing. And as Kohl finally acknowledged in a recent speech, Germany is entering the recession that has had much of the West and Japan in its grip. Most domestic political considerations argue against the Kohl government's using the opportunity of the police crackdown to confront German xenophobia. After Molln, though, every humane consideration demands it.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem and James O. Jackson/Bonn