Germany Debates Army's Role After Terror Scare
January 13, 2003
Defense Minister Peter Struck has been looking for answers since a pistol-toting, mentally-disturbed man stole a motorized glider and threatened to crash it into Frankfurt’s financial district on Jan. 5.
Germany’s constitution prevented the Bundeswehr from shooting down psychology student Franz Stephan Strambach, 31, who terrorized the city and threatened to crash into the European Central Bank's headquarters during his two-hour joyride. Struck thinks the military should be given more flexibility to deal with domestic threats.
“We won’t be able to get around amending the constitution,” Struck told the news magazine Der Spiegel. The Social Democrat has commissioned a working group to examine the Bundeswehr’s legal basis for dealing with domestic threats, according to the newsweekly.
Limits of the law
Currently, Germany's constitution only permits the Bundeswehr to conduct missions domestically in cases where the country faces the threat of invasion or when natural catastrophes or large accidents occur. The military is also prohibited from assuming police-like functions, like running crowd control at public demonstrations.
Although two military sharpshooters were prepared to shoot down the hijacked glider, for example, the defense minister was unable to give them permission. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt incident has kindled a spirited debate on the domestic role of the military in a country where memories of World War II still linger.
Friends and foes
Angela Merkel, who heads the parliamentary group of the oppositional Christian Democractic Union (CDU), described Struck’s comments as an interesting development. The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, both support the passage of a constitutional amendment to modernize the country’s domestic security policies, Merkel told Reuters.
Her colleague, Wolfgang Schäuble, foreign policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, declared an amendment necessary to deal with the changing threats to Germany’s security. In an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper, Schäuble maintained that only the Bundeswehr could protect Germany from the dangers that airplanes could present.
Meanwhile, leading members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and oppositional Free Democrats (FDP) disagree with the defense minister's new direction. The SPD's parliamentary group spokesman for domestic policy, Dieter Wiefelspütz, called a constitutional amendment superfluous. “In article 35, the constitution allows the armed forces to operate against terrorist attacks within the country when the police’s resources alone are insufficient,” Wiefelspütz wrote in the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper.
The FDP's parliamentary group leader, Jörg van Essen, stressed that the Bundeswehr has policed German air space since the air force was first constituted and as such already has a legal basis for acting in cases like the Frankfurt hijacking.
The chairman of the German police’s union, Konrad Freiberg, also voiced his opposition to a constitutional amendment over the weekend. Freiberg said he believes the Bundeswehr already had a legal basis for acting against Strambach. Not only would a change to the constitution be unnecessary, but in the context of a “pending Iraq war, such a suggestion is a political powder keg,” he said.
With fears of a terror attack in Germany running high with the arrest of two alleged high-ranking al Qaida members in Frankfurt and trials continuing in two cases involving suspected terrorists in Hamburg and Frankfurt, the issue is likely to smolder for months to come.