BERLIN: After the angry fall-out with the US over the Iraq war, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s red-green government is now busy attempting to improve ties with Washington.
Schroeder now says he could envisage a Bundeswehr peace-keeping force being sent to the Middle East under the UN banner. Germany has never ducked being helpful when it’s a question of creating and securing peace in a region that is close to Europe, he says.
Germany already has some 10,000 soldiers, out of a total Bundeswehr (armed forces) strength of 285,000, serving as peace-keepers in countries like Afghanistan and Bosnia. But government officials say more could be allocated for similar duties in Iraq, if required.
While France and Russia continue to call for the United Nations to be given the lead in Iraq’s post-war reconstruction — a notion that the Bush administration rejects — Germany of late has been noticeably less dogmatic over who should play what roles in the rebuilding of the country.
Anxious to heal the rift in relations with Washington, Schroeder has been quietly signalling his government’s willingness to help where it can, as efforts aimed at stabilising Iraq get stepped up, and retired General Jay Garner goes about his task of establishing a US-backed, Iraqi-led, interim government.
Already, Berlin has been showing practical goodwill by organising a flow of humanitarian aid to Iraq, totalling more than an equivalent of 50 million dollars, in the chaotic aftermath of war. The Schroeder government, however, still holds to its belief that the Iraq war could have been avoided had UN arms inspectors been allotted more time to complete their work.
Both Schroeder and foreign minister Joschka Fischer are relieved the Iraq war has ended without too much bloodshed, and that casualty figures have been a lot lower than many predicted.
With Saddam Hussein’s regime toppled, Fischer feels the Middle East roadmap plan, aimed ultimately at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, might now stand a better chance of success.
The German foreign minister was heartened by Wednesday’s successful talks in Ramallah, West Bank, when a compromise cabinet for the governing Palestinian authority, was approved by Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian premier-designate Mahmoud Abbas, after intense international pressure.
The agreement broke a ten-day stalemate that had threatened to stall the presentation by President George W. Bush of the new Middle East peace plan. This envisages, if subsequent negotiations are successful, the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005, and formal recognition of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
With an official US declaration on the end of hostilities in Iraq expected shortly, Joschka Fischer says he sees no sense in continuing the debate about the war’s legality. Looking back won’t help. We must move on, he says.
Three weeks earlier it was a very different story, as some German government officials spoke openly of a war that carried unquantifiable risks, and which would destabilise the entire region. Kerstin Mueller, a deputy minister in the German Foreign Office, in a speech to the German-Israeli Society in Berlin, warned of people becoming increasingly radicalised, and hatred of the US as well as Israel, growing the longer the war lasted.
There are two points l would like to make, she said. Firstly wars waged for the purpose of regime change are not sanctioned by the UN charter. Secondly, can democracy come through the barrel of a gun? That is surely not the vision we have for the century that lies ahead.
Mueller said that in Israel not a day passed without fear of terrorist attacks, without people being killed or injured. The bus-stop, the supermarket, the restaurant, homes, nowhere can people feel safe. I often wonder how we in Germany would react if that which we hold most dear — our own lives and those of our friends and loved ones — were daily under threat.
I do think the Chancellor should get on the phone to Bush and resolve his differences, says a Berlin garbage collector. The war’s over, now the peace must be won. The problem is the two men just do not hit it off, claimed a government official in Berlin. Bush’s view of the world is not Schroeder’s.
In the late 1970s there was similar strain when the political chemistry between Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and US President Jimmy Carter did not work. Both men found they had a problem of communication, said a British diplomat in Berlin. —Dawn/InterPress News Service
