The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (50 page)

In a pattern familiar the world over, the alleged “left” political party opted to prove its bonafides by trying to out-right the right. In point of fact, the two parties had a symbiotic relationship; as was noted in 1977, “The repressive politics of the Social Democrats make the Christian Democrats' wider-ranging efforts seem more tolerable to some, while the latter's excesses sustain the former's self-image of moderation to others.”
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SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was indistinguishable from the CDU's fearmongers, warning of the guerilla's “intellectual pioneers that live in some of the institutions and the media of our society.”
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Throughout most of the 1970s, his Social-Liberal government defended itself against the right's accusations by engaging in ever-more-repressive measures, granting the BKA and
Verfassungsschutz
free reign.

This dynamic not only occurred between the main political parties, but also within them, as so-called “domestic security” issues provided a useful tool for technocrats to marginalize more progressive or liberal factions within the SPD and FDP. For the SPD, this game reached its tipping point in 1977, when it suddenly found some of its own most prominent members publicly excoriated as RAF sympathizers, just as its lurch to the right was leaving it shorn of much of its own base.
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Beyond these domestic political realities, there were also international factors behind West Germany's hard line. Guerilla warfare had come to the First World as an exotic import, radicals in Western Europe inspired by what was clearly a winning strategy in the Third World,
while also referring back (at times awkwardly) to their own countries' antifascist partisan experiences, or lack thereof. Against this development, the FRG and United States pushed to create a consensus within the NATO states that would drive out this new scourge or—if that proved impossible—at least deprive it of any legitimacy. As we have seen, this strategy depended on denying captured combatants any kind of special status, all the while singling them out for special treatment in court and in prison. Given that the FRG had been lobbying other countries to adopt this hard line against their respective political prisoners, it was not completely free to do otherwise in regard to its own.

Despite the aforementioned obstacles, certain elements within the state recognized that the hard line played into a cycle that fed rather than choked the guerilla's growth. Paradoxically, one can trace the first ascent of a more flexible and far-sighted “soft counterinsurgency” line to a time when undifferentiated repression seemed to hold sway. In 1977, President Walter Scheel had spoken at Schleyer's funeral, where he had described “terrorism” as “a barbarism trying to destroy all order.”
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But just months later, Scheel began to complain that anonymous denunciations of alleged sympathizers were polarizing society and undermining the “private sphere of fellow citizens”—a reference to his fellow politicians and members of the intelligentsia who were coming under attack from the right.
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Significantly, Scheel was from the FDP—the “liberal” part of the Social-Liberal coalition—which had less to lose by questioning such ham-fisted repression than the SPD. With its base in the professional middle class, the FDP fancied itself the standard bearer of classical liberalism, and within its left wing were several individuals sincerely committed to expanding civil liberties. Unlike the SPD and CDU, which had taken turns as the largest force in government throughout the postwar period, the FDP was the perpetual third party. Yet due to this very fact and to its distinct ideological location between the two larger parties, it had become kingmaker in West German politics: with the exception of eight years in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Free Democrats had been a junior partner in every coalition government since World War II, effectively determining who would hold power. While the FDP normally supported the right-wing CDU/CSU, between 1969 and 1982 the party's
leadership was controlled by its more progressive faction, and as such supported the SPD, and on some issues even outflanked its senior coalition partner to the left.

As a result of this kingmaker role, the FDP remained largely impervious to attacks from the right, as the CDU/CSU strategists knew all too well that their road back to power would depend on reconciling with the liberals.

Gerhart Baum had become Minister of the Interior in 1978, replacing fellow Free Democrat Werner Maihofer, who had held the position since 1974, and who had been a staunch advocate of giving police and security forces any powers they desired.
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Gerhart Baum

Baum would quickly prove to be cut from different cloth. As early as January 1978, in a speech before the Catholic Academy in Freiburg, he expressed dismay that security measures had taken pride of place in the antiterrorist arsenal, suggesting that it might be better to work on refuting the guerilla's ideas.
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Baum felt that the state should be approaching those who were open to the guerilla's arguments, identifying sections of the left or even the radical left that could be engaged in dialogue—one of the goals being to deprive the guerilla of its base, leaving it isolated and vulnerable.

So it was that at the same time as police were gunning down guerillas in the street, the Ministry of the Interior initiated an ambitious social-science research project, which eventually resulted in five books, published between 1981 and 1984, intended to foster a more sophisticated approach to countering political radicalism. As Baum explained:

Even though I am the minister responsible for the police, I am called upon to combat terrorism with more than just police methods.
Preventing and hindering future crimes means addressing the questions posed by people who are not yet clear about which way they'll go—whether they'll go the normal democratic way, whether they'll achieve their goals using democratic instruments and means, or whether they will support the terrorists. As a result, I hold scientific research into the causes of terrorism to be necessary.
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Baum became known for his brash style and the pleasure he took at upsetting conservative shibboleths. At the height of the hysteria about the West Berlin squats, for instance, he stated that, “The heart of the matter is that there are young people, and older ones as well, who answer the question about the meaning of life in another way than the majority that until now has made policy.”
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Characteristically, Baum suggested that rather than excluding or punishing people who held alternative values, it would be better to reach out to them. Nor did he lack a sense of humor. When asked how he was going to respond to media criticism that he was downplaying the “terrorist” threat, his reply was simple: “I'm going to bomb
Südwestfunk
[Southwest Radio]. Will that do?”
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Baum hoped to temper the more odious aspects of the national security state, even if this meant locking horns with the BKA. In the fall of 1979, FDP members of the
Bundestag
attempted to have three important security laws repealed: §88a (publishing material encouraging violence), §130a (instructions for carrying out crimes), and the Contact Ban.
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That same year, Baum limited the BKA and the
Verfassungsschutz's
access to the NADIS computer database (which contained information gathered from a variety of police and nonpolice sources) and made a point of announcing that he had had thirty thousand entries removed from the BKA's PIOS system (devoted to “terrorists”).
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Publicly clashing with Horst Herold, Baum's moves against the security establishment pushed the BKA chief to take an early retirement in 1981.
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All of which not only provoked the ire of the right—some grumbled that Baum himself was a “security risk”—but also upset many within the SPD, where Chancellor Schmidt accused him of grandstanding and acting as if he were the only one who cared about the rule of law.

While Baum's domestic reforms were making headlines, a parallel strategy was being pursued on the international stage, but with less fanfare and controversy, as Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski
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worked to seal off the RAF's rear base areas in the Arab world.

The Social-Liberal government had been pursuing this goal for years, with full support from the chancellor himself. In 1978, Colonel Muammar Khaddafi traveled to the FRG to receive medical treatment in Wiesbaden: Schmidt personally contacted the Libyan leader and asked him to deny sanctuary to West German guerillas. Khaddafi not only agreed, but also promised to pressure the PLO to do the same.
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In exchange, the
Bundeswehr
sent a major to begin secretly training Libyan security forces in Tripoli, in a program that would last until at least 1983. (According to some sources, it in fact continued with the help of “private” West German corporate partners until as late as 2006.)
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Discussions between the PLO and West German officials in Lebanon were followed in 1979 by a meeting in Austria, hosted by the more left-wing Social Democratic government of Bruno Kreisky. Here it was agreed that the PLO would cooperate with Austrian and West German security forces to prevent guerilla attacks in Europe. PLO security chief Ali Hassan Salameh offered to locate RAF members in the Middle East, though he stopped short of agreeing to have them extradited back to the FRG.
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He also encouraged the Europeans to pursue their multilateral international “antiterrorist” strategy, and provided what information he could about the RAF's plans and capacities.
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It was ironic that Salameh—also known as Abu Hassan—was the one negotiating these terms, as it was he who had been in charge of the training camps where the first RAF members had been hosted in Jordan in 1970.
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It was also he who, in 1972, had organized the Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, whose demands included the release of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and other unnamed RAF members.
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In offering to help the FRG in its fight against the RAF, the PLO was not simply buckling under Libyan pressure, rather, it was pursuing its own strategy of quiet rapprochement with Western intelligence agencies. Despite his personal history, this
strategy very much revolved around Salameh, who had been the PLO's liaison with the CIA since 1974.
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In exchange for these favors, it was hoped that the Europeans might help the PLO gain standing as the Palestinians' sole legitimate representative—and indeed, there had been overtures in this direction leading up to the Austrian meeting.
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The Israeli colonial project at that time relied on denying Palestinians any national recognition, pretending that they did not even exist, and so it was of some significance that in 1978 the PLO was granted observer status at a United Nations conference in Vienna, receiving the same privileges as other participants. That same year the
Informationsstelle Palästina
(Palestine Information Agency) was recognized by Bonn as the PLO's unofficial representative in West Germany, and in 1979, the Kreisky government extended official diplomatic recognition to the PLO.
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This was part of a complex dynamic that challenged the Palestinian people's exclusion from the international political arena, while simultaneously encouraging neocolonial tendencies within their own liberation struggle.