German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is on the campaign trail. He is running as the left-wing SPD party's candidate to replace incumbent center-right CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Bundestag elections set for September 27, 2009.
For Steinmeier - a rather dull
53-year-old technocrat-turned-politician who had previously served as
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief of staff - this marks the first
time ever that he is competing for elected office. To avoid any risk
that this political novice stumble in his first campaign, the SPD party
gave him a safe district in the former East German state of Brandenburg.
Back in 2002, Steinmeier's boss ran on a populist, anti-Bush
platform and made a successful, last-ditch effort to save his faltering
re-election campaign by confronting Washington head-on over the Iraq
war along with French president Jacques Chirac.
Seven years later, Schroeder's disciple Steinmeier is pursuing a very different political strategy vis-à-vis the US: Given President Obama's phenomenal popularity ratings in Germany (remember that speech in front of 200,000 fans in Berlin last July?), Steinmeier is now over-eager to appear as someone who is held in high esteem by the new president and his administration - especially with regard to the issue of granting select Guantanamo inmates political asylum in Germany.
In fact,
Steinmeier has been one of the EU's earliest and most outspoken
proponents of the notion that Europe should help the Obama
administration close down Gitmo by accepting those allegedly "innocent"
and "harmless" inmates who cannot be returned to their countries of
origin for fear of being persecuted and tortured there. In the case of
Germany, Steinmeier is specifically pushing for the admission of nine
Uighurs, Muslim-Chinese men who were arrested by US forces during
anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan back in 2002-2003.
Washington is in dire need of European support on the crucial
Guantanamo issue if it wants to comply with President Obama's ambitious
executive order to close down the camp by January 21, 2010.
Just two weeks ago, US Attorney General Eric Holder and Dan Fried, the new Guantanamo special envoy, toured several European capitals to drum up support for the permanent relocation of about 30 of the remaining 241 Guantanamo inmates to countries such as France, Germany, and the UK.
Of course, Dan Fried, who until recently served as the State Department's top Europe man under Condi Rice, knows full well that in recent years, prominent EU leaders like Mr Steinmeier had repeatedly rebuffed similar attempts by the Bush administration to enlist Europe's support in the closure of Guantanamo.
While European politicians would
routinely decry Washington's blatant disregard of international law
with respect to Guantanamo, none of these leaders wanted to be seen as
cooperating with the hugely unpopular Bush administration on this very
complex and difficult issue. Clearly, the German foreign minister's
sudden change of heart on the Gitmo dossier smacks of hypocrisy and had
probably more to do with political expediency during an uphill election
campaign rather than genuine human rights concerns.
Mr Steinmeier's obvious political opportunism was also betrayed by
the fact that he failed to first discuss his Guantanamo asylum
initiative with those German political players that really matter on
this controversial issue: conservative CDU Interior Minister Wolfgang
Schaeuble and his counterparts from Germany's 16 different states.
Under German law, it is only Schaeuble who can give the green light to grant asylum to Gitmo inmates on political or humanitarian grounds, provided that there is at least one state that is willing to accept them. Wolfgang Schaeuble and virtually all other conservative CDU/CSU and even some SPD regional interior ministers have already come out strongly against Washington's request to accept Uighur Guantanamo prisoners for fear that they would pose incalculable risks to Germany's security.
As Schaeuble put it bluntly: "It is not evident why Germany in particular should consider admitting these persons. What we have received from Washington in terms of documentation so far is not sufficient to make an asylum decision in any of these cases."
For his
part, the SPD interior minister of Saxony-Anhalt in former East Germany
voiced doubts that the Uighurs detained in Afghanistan "were all just
traveling with the Taliban by pure chance". The interior ministers'
guarded assessments are mirrored by state security officials who are
warning against the potentially dangerous consequences of being rushed
into admitting these nine Uighur men to Germany - be it motivated by a
desire to score quick political points on the campaign trail or to
please the Obama administration.
Furthermore, Germany's influential mass tabloid "Bild", citing
classified US intelligence sources, recently reported that eight of
the nine relevant Uighur men imprisoned in Guantanamo attended
terrorist training camps run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement
(ETIM), a militant Muslim separatist group in Xinjiang province in
northwest China. Declared a terrorist group by the State Department in
2002, ETIM is believed to have established training and financial ties
with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, as well as the Uzbek Islamic Djihad Union
(IDU). The IDU has been at the center of several thwarted major terror
plots in Germany, including plans to attack Frankfurt airport and a key
US military installation on September 11, 2007.
Yet Steinmeier's reckless Gitmo gamble not only threatens Germany's
homeland security, it may also end up backfiring in terms of public
opinion. While there is no statistically reliable polling data
available, Internet-based votes suggest that about two-thirds of all
Germans are opposed to granting political asylum to any Guantanamo
prisoners.
The rationale behind that strong opposition is rather obvious and boils down to one simple, straightforward question: if the Uighurs in Guantanamo are really innocent and harmless, then why isn't the Obama administration allowing these folks to settle down in the US? Of course, if the matter wasn't that dead serious, one would hope that Mr Steinmeier practice what he preaches and let the voters in his new district decide how comfortable they would feel with a bunch of men allegedly connected to al Qaeda living in their midst.
Ulf Gartzke is a contributor to The Weekly Standard blog.
This article first appeared on the Weekly Standard Online and is republished here with permission of the author.
Related materials from the Atlantic Community:
- Tyson Barker: The Case for Germany First
- Matthew Yglesias: How to Repair Our Relationship with Germany
- Thomas Bauer: Congratulations Mr Presidents - Here is our Agenda
- Mark Brzezinski & Lanny A. Breuer: Repairing America's Image Abroad will Take Time
- Jan Techau: America Votes, but Europe Decides on the Future of Transatlantic Relations
- 7
