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John Hooper in Werne, western Germany
Thursday September 19, 2002
The Guardian
Germany's knife-edge general election campaign took an extraordinary new turn yesterday when the conservative candidate, Edmund Stoiber, pledged himself to the deportation of 4,000 alleged Islamic militants if he is voted in as chancellor on Sunday.
"There always has to be a difference between tolerance and stupidity," he declared.
Behind in most polls, the Bavarian governor - a hard-liner on law and order - appeared to be making a last-gasp effort to tap into fears over a link between immigration and terrorism in Europe. He told a rowdy crowd, packed into the market square of Werne, on the edge of the Ruhr district, that there were 30,000 identified Muslim fundamentalist extremists in Germany.
Mr Stoiber added: "Among these 30,000 so-called Islamists, there are 4,000 who are ready for violence. The police know that; 4,000 are known by name as being disposed to violence and are suspected of belonging to foreign terrorist organisations such as the Algerian GIA. I say to you: these 4,000 - I will expel them from the country."
Mr Stoiber made no reference in his speech to any kind of judicial process, and it was not clear how he intended to carry out the deportations under existing laws. Legislation that came into effect last December abolished a ban on the investigation of foreigners based in Germany and considered to be terrorist suspects by other states. But the law as it stands does not allow the authorities to deport anyone on mere suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organisation.
Mr Stoiber's undertaking can be expected to provoke indignant criticism from representatives of Germany's Muslim minority, coming as it does only two days after he and his lieutenants pulled the issues of race and immigration into the election for the first time.
The Bavarian governor, who is trailing by up to three points in the polls after Gerhard Schröder staged a remarkable comeback, said that with 4 million unemployed it would be "irresponsible to open the market to everyone".
Mr Stoiber's home affairs spokesman went much further, declaring that immigrants should not only be made to take integration courses, but they should also be made to pay for them. Günther Beckstein added that foreigners intending to live in Germany should recognise underlying values "moulded by Christianity".
Yesterday's pledge is likely to be depicted by Mr Stoiber's opponents as an attempt to jump on the rightwing populist bandwagon that has rolled successfully through the Netherlands, where followers of the late Pim Fortuyn are installed in government.
But the governing Social Democrat-led coalition is nevertheless vulnerable to charges of being soft on security. Though it has passed legisla tion to put fingerprints on passports and ID cards, it has shied away from implementing it because of opposition from the Greens, the junior partners in the alliance.
The issue of security versus civil liberties had already been put on the election agenda by the September 11 anniversary and the discovery in Heidelberg of a suspected plot to blow up a US forces' supermarket a year after the attacks.
Mr Stoiber said afterwards that suspicion of belonging to an illegal organisation should be enough to justify the expulsion of foreigners from the country. But his remarks yesterday went beyond anything he had so far urged.
The conservative challenger for the chancellorship reminded his audience that the attacks in the US last year had been planned in Hamburg where Mohammed Atta, the operational leader of the plot, and two of the other pilots studied at university.
"Atta and his friends who steered the aircraft on the orders of Osama bin Laden took advantage of German liberalism - others would say German somnolence - to operate undisturbed in a way they could not in any other European country," Mr Stoiber said.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was seized by Pakistani police at the weekend, was one of three members of the "Hamburg cell" who did not take part in the operation itself and fled Germany shortly before September 11. A fourth alleged conspirator was arrested and charged in Hamburg last month.
Germans have already been on the receiving end of a post-September 11 Islamist attack, on the holiday island of Djerba in April.
Recent security alerts and the arrest of terrorist suspects have focused public attention on the threat. Earlier this month, police raided the warehouse of a textile company and questioned its Syrian-born owner and his family on suspicion of harbouring Islamic extremists.