November 3, 2001	Saturday	Shaba’an 16, 1422

BERLIN, Nov 2: Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author, complained on Friday that intellectuals were being muzzled in their criticism of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan by political officials’ charges of anti-Americanism.

Grass told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that it was the countries that ally themselves with the United States in particular that had an obligation to question its actions.

“If I am friends with someone and feel solidarity with him, I must also be in a position to stay his hand and contradict him when he is doing something wrong, as otherwise it would be blind solidarity that limits the power of thought,” he said.

“And that is the point that reactions have now reached. Any criticism of US behaviour is immediately annihilated with the blanket accusation of anti-Americanism.”

He cited comments by German Interior Minister Otto Schily, who had warned that overt criticism of the US-led bombing campaign would be counter-productive in the fight against terrorism.

“Individual intellectuals who are criticized in this way for being intellectuals will survive the accusation, but this way of limiting fundamental democratic rights and trying to muzzle people effectively amounts to a triumph for terrorists,” he said.

Grass called it “humiliating” that despite German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s repeated offers of “unlimited solidarity” to the United States, the Americans had not yet approached Germany for significant assistance in the war on terrorism.

And he said a similar mood of hyper-sensitivity to criticism had taken hold in the United States.—AFP