Berlin Is Also Responsible

Whenever anyone in Germany does or says anything he’s not qualified to say or do, he makes himself unpopular as well as suspect, whether in the workplace, the sport club or, most of all, in politics.

Many lawyers are regular responsibility fanatics, and the worst among them are those who are politically engaged with national security. Yes, we’re talking once again about Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s Minister of the Interior. He pointed out that accepting prisoners from Guantanamo was solely a decision to be made by the interior ministers of each separate German state – something that implicitly means Germany would reject the prisoners.

The Minister of the Interior is wrong. All governments and politicians for whom the word “humanity” has meaning are responsible for accepting the Guantanamo prisoners.

Those who will, hopefully, soon be released from the prison camp are people who have been denied proper trials because the Americans don’t have sufficient evidence against them. The Obama administration will legally pursue those alleged terrorists and those who conspired to commit murder already interned by Bush.

Many of them, however, already held in cages for years because they just happened to be in Afghanistan or Iraq, in the wrong place at the wrong time, fulfill nearly all the criteria the European Union recognizes as necessary for them to be classified as asylum seekers. That they may not wish to remain in the United States after being freed is completely understandable.

Europeans should offer to accept these people. They should be individually investigated for any possible danger they might pose, a process we already undertake for every asylum seeker.

Germany, especially, has good reason to show itself to be open and responsible. This concerns giving help to those who have been tortured, those whose internment has also taken away their homelands. Besides that, it would be a gesture to the new America that old friends are willing to extend a helping hand to a changed policy. German-American relations have unfortunately cooled considerably. The fault for that was changing times and the Bush administration. But both sides also sometimes show a tendency toward an almost exaggerated lack of interest toward one another.

In addition, the red-green coalition (and especially Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will run for the Chancellor’s office in the next election), bears a special co-responsibility for the long incarceration of one Guantanamo prisoner in particular. While the Kurnaz case shouldn’t become the driving force behind permissive policies, it should at least be part of the motivation toward a policy change. * Unlike Schäuble, Steinmeier supports the acceptance of freed Guantanamo prisoners.

Under no circumstances should this disagreement lead to a partisan fight over whether it’s better to show magnanimity or to be security conscious. Berlin’s political class hardly recognizes any taboos, especially in political campaigning. The objections to accepting one or two dozen traumatized people should be settled by a firm word from the Chancellor.

* Murat Kurnaz was a Turkish citizen born in Bremen, Germany, who was arrested while visiting Pakistan, held prisoner and tortured by U.S. authorities for five years. He was the first former Guantanamo inmate to testify before the U.S. Congress concerning his detention. While Steinmeier served as Vice-Chancellor in Gerhard Schroeder’s government, nothing was done in regard to the Kurnaz case despite public pressure for action.