The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (35 page)

For women as for men, anti-imperialist strategy had never eschewed struggles within the FRG, but had understood these as occurring in the context of a global war, one that was made visible by the national liberation movements in the Third World, and the guerilla in the First. As such, anti-imps were keenly aware of the clashes taking place abroad, most specifically in Central America (Nicaragua and El Salvador) and the Middle East (Iran, Turkey, and, of course, Palestine). At home, the anti-imperialists' main interest in West Germany's domestic affairs had
always been prison conditions and other forms of repression, for it was there that the conflict with the state was laid bare. Within this context, groups like WAIW would struggle to add an antipatriarchal component to anti-imperialism. The prevalence of violence against women provided an alternate lens with which to expose the lie of “peace” in the metropole. Further dimensions were added to this analysis, when, starting in 1982, the questions of population control and eugenics increasingly served to tie these two systems of domination together conceptually for many radical women.
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The explicitly gendered concerns of WAIW were a significant departure from the RAF's traditional analysis and provided a breath of fresh air and space for women who had been active in the feminist movement to find common ground with the guerilla. Yet the import of this development would be overshadowed by an even greater change in the anti-imperialist worldview.

Since Bremen, many anti-imps had begun showing interest in the opposition to the deployment of short- and medium-range missiles, NATO's Double-Track strategy of anti-Soviet brinksmanship. Strictly speaking, this campaign would not have fit into the RAF's traditional analysis, which considered the conflict between imperialism and the Third World to be paramount. Nevertheless, the antimissile movement and the anti-imps did share a common adversary in the form of U.S. imperialism, as well as an opposition to NATO and U.S. military power within Europe. In this way, the antimissile movement was able to complement an orientation built around solidarity with the national
liberation movements. As new forces buoyed the left, with Cruise missiles and Bremen as their reference points, this view quickly gained ground. So much so that for many anti-imps, any superpower sabre-rattling eventually came to be seen as “imperialist,” whether directed against the Third World or the USSR, or even against the people of Europe.

Unlike WAIW's antipatriarchal innovations, this shift in emphasis, decentering the Third World and drawing more heavily on anti-American and anti-NATO sentiment, was not limited to the support scene; in fact, it could be discerned as early as the RAF's Haig communiqué, and would only become more apparent in the years following.

The new approach was facilitated by the fact that U.S. and NATO forces were not indifferent to the West German radical left. There was talk of CIA agents being stationed in West Berlin to deal with the movement,
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and the revelations that during the squatter battles of late 1981, the U.S. military commander had offered to assist the police against the rioters
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and that the CIA had infiltrated squatter protests.
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There had been frequent NATO training exercises simulating civil unrest in the FRG, and many felt that either the Atlantic Alliance or the CIA was likely behind the false flag attacks that had dogged the guerilla throughout the 1970s.

Such views were reinforced when Ronald Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency in 1981, his new secretary of state being Alexander Haig: the man whom the RAF had tried to assassinate, and who had subsequently—and somewhat predictably—become a strong advocate of a more aggressive “antiterrorist” strategy. Soon after his appointment, Haig announced that “International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern because it is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”
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As one anti-imp noted, “Reagan's open declaration of war against ‘international terrorism,' and the way in which this war is being carried out… make one thing clear: war has been declared against us—a war that only one side can win: us or them.”
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Nor were such claims pure hyperbole; as recounted in the NATO journal
The Atlantic Community Quarterly,

A lively debate occurred in the German press in the spring of 1981 following reports that the United States planned to send to Germany special antiterrorist task forces, which until then had operated only in the Panama Canal Zone and other sensitive areas. Although the specific purpose of the task forces was reported to be guarding nuclear installations, the task forces were said to have been trained in Florida in tactics for combatting urban guerrillas and to have studied the strategies and methods of the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells.
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Anti-imps drew conclusions which they then applied directly to the prisoners' struggle. Believing the Stammheim prisoners to have been murdered, many suspected a NATO death squad of carrying out the executions. Events in other countries shaped people's understanding of what might occur in the FRG. While it took place thousands of miles away, the 1980 military coup in Turkey (see sidebar) was a particularly poignant example for German radicals. Not only because it corroborated claims that NATO would prefer a military dictatorship in any of its member states rather than risk revolution,
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but also because Turkey was the birthplace of many of the FRG's “guest workers,” and the Federal Republic soon emerged as one of the junta's most vocal and enthusiastic supporters.

Patsy O'Hara, INLA POW and martyr who died on hunger strike on May 21, 1981.

Closer to home, Northern Ireland provided another example. There, prisoners from the Irish Republican Army and the socialist Irish National Liberation Army had been struggling for years to regain official recognition as POWs, after this status had been withdrawn by the UK's Labour government in 1976. In 1980, faced with a new hardline Tory government, seven prisoners had participated in a first hunger strike, which ended after fifty-three days with no concessions being made. Less than three months later, on March 1, 1981, they embarked upon a second hunger strike. By the time it was called off, on October 3, 1981, ten of their number would be dead.

With both British and West German governments facing simultaneous hunger strikes demanding a special status and association for political prisoners, it was only natural for RAF and Republican prisoners to view each other as comrades engaged on the same side in a greater conflict, ultimately against the same foes. INLA prisoner Patsy O'Hara— one of those who would die during the 1981 hunger strike—had sent a solidarity message to the striking RAF prisoners saying just this: “To achieve our aim, our hope for socialism, we cannot, I believe, limit ourselves to national boundaries. Our perspective is internationalist, that is the nature of socialism…. Together with the other INLA-IRSP prisoners on the blanket I send you the warmest greetings and I hope that your struggle will succeed without loss of life.”
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In a telegram to the FRG Relatives Committee, the Irish Republican Socialist Party had no trouble drawing the connection between how the Irish and West German prisoners were being treated:

The Irish Republican Socialist Party completely opposes the German government, which hopes to break the will of your political prisoners. We completely support your prisoners' demands and the purpose of your campaign. While recognizing that your struggle differs from ours, we support your right to better prison conditions. We condemn the brutal torture experienced by the prisoners during the hunger strike, particularly the barbaric forcefeeding, which was responsible for the death of the Irishman Michael Gaughan, who hunger struck in an English prison.

For an end to repression. Victory to the women and men on hunger strike. Venceremos.
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The declarations of solidarity went both ways, WAIW and other groups routinely expressing support for the Irish hunger strikers.
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Just as the prisoners in these different contexts viewed one another as comrades, each government would encourage the other to maintain its
hard line against their demands, and NATO was indeed one structure which tried to elaborate a multinational strategy against attempts to have the Geneva Convention and other international legal agreements applied to captured revolutionaries.

For the RAF prisoners and their supporters, there even seemed to be a smoking gun, as an article in the October 1980
NATO Review
warned against recognizing prisoners' political status, specifically lamenting “governments conceding to terrorist convicts the privileged status of political prisoners,” and “yielding to demands… for official enquiries, or international investigations, into alleged ill-treatment of terrorist suspects or convicts.” As the article's author, Paul Johnson, argued, “The terrorists succeed when they provoke oppression; but they triumph when they are met with appeasement.”
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