Taking It To The Streets

BONN (DW) -- It's the Thursday morning after Colin Powell made his closing arguments to the United Nations Security Council -- the multimedia presentation the U.S. secretary of state gave last week in an attempt to convince his allies of the need to unleash an American-led force against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Kristian Golla, a pacifist who has made a profession of promoting peace, is running a little behind schedule. He pushes a handtruck piled high with empty yellow mail containers through the courtyard that leads to his office in the former German capital of Bonn, an office he calls his "little shack."

He parks the handtruck, turns on the lights and offers the visitor some butter cookies lying on a desk before he sits down to talk about his work, a calling that has carried him along the ebb and flow of the German peace movement over the last 22 years.

As the United States prepares for war in the Persian Gulf, Golla's immediate thoughts are on the closing arguments Europeans plan to present at mass demonstrations in the continent's asphalt-paved courtrooms on Saturday.

"To justify a war based on that press conference, that just leaves me speechless," Golla says. "That is simply nothing."

The man in the movement

The thoughts come quickly and the words flow smoothly as 40-year-old Golla talks in the corner of his one-room office, its desks crammed with computers. Golla's dark hair is streaked with gray, and it nearly stands at attention in some places on his head. A thin silver ring pierces the lobe of his right ear. A piece of masking tape sticks to the left side of his blue and white sweater -- the place right over his heart. "Kristian," it says in handwritten letters. It is a name tag left over from a Sunday meeting of one group planning the latest protests.

Behind him, a poster proclaims its message of peace. It shows a U.S. Army howitzer whose barrel is covered with a condom. "Prevent Wars," the poster says in screaming orange capital letters.

Dovish ideas are nothing new to Golla; they began circulating through his head many years before the gray began to spread its tentacles through his hair. They form the basis of his working life. "I find it personally very satisfying ... to cause (politicians) problems, to spit in their soup in order to get other issues on the agenda," he says.

A game of nuclear poker

The time of awakening for peace activists like Golla was the late 1970s. Europe, with East Germany and West Germany in its center, was firmly in the middle of a nuclear poker game being played by the world's two superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union. As the game entered its third decade, the Soviets decided to up the ante and deployed a new generation of mid-range nuclear missiles, the SS-20. The missiles posed a particular menace because they were mobile, carried three independently targetable warheads and could target all of Western Europe.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with the support of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, decided to call the Soviets' bluff. NATO installed nuclear-capable cruise and Pershing II missiles to the alliance's arsenal in West Germany and other alliance members to counter the threat. This vision of nuclear death helped spawn the West German peace movement, whose many followers knew all too well the devastation that German wars had caused. The idea, as Golla describes it, was to "stand in the way of this nuclear madness." But the more universal message was: "No More War."

Bonn became the focal point of protest and the city's Hofgarten often the journey's end. The Hofgarten is a courtyard that stretches out like a green carpet the size of two football fields before the ocher-colored walls of the city's university. Today, students can spend a Sunday afternoon leisurely kicking around a soccer ball on the Hofgarten's wide open spaces.

But on Oct. 10, 1981, there was hardly enough room to fit even one soccer ball -- even an airless one -- between the mass of demonstrators. In all, an estimated 300,000 people converged on the Hofgarten lawn to protest the alliance's nuclear buildup. It was the biggest political demonstration held in West Germany since World War II. And true to its name, it went off peacefully.

An even bigger demonstration followed nine months later. On a sunny June day, an estimated 350,000 protesters gathered near the Rhine River to serve as a welcoming committee for U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the other NATO leaders who were meeting on the opposite side. It was an event filled with rock music, balloons and speeches -- including one from Gert Bastian, the former West German general who had taken off his uniform to join the ranks of the armament opponents.

Supporting the cause

Golla's memories of the time remain vivid. "When you are standing on the Hofgarten, surrounded by all of these people, you know that you are doing your part for the cause," he says.

Looking back, he can also feel good about something else -- the missiles eventually disappeared, buried in the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the renunification of Germany that followed in 1990.

As the years passed, Golla made a transition, too, turning from a demonstrator into a full-time activist for peace. In 1988, Golla joined the staff of peace organization in Bonn. The mission of the group's small office, which he jokingly acknowledges is staffed by 2.3 people, is simple: "A large part of our work is not to take to the streets ourselves in protest of something, but to get people to take to the streets."

Such services were called for in 1991 as a U.S.-led coaliltion of military forces prepared to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait. As war approached, Germany's peace movement roused itself from the slumber into which it had fallen with the end of the Cold War. In the days leading up to the Gulf War, the Green Party's Joschka Fischer, who is now foreign minister, stepped to the forefront, urging German troops bound for duty in Turkey to refuse to serve.

Thousands of other people followed, marching under the banner of "No Blood For Oil." At one protest, they temporarily blocked off the entrance to a U.S. air base that shares runways with the Frankfurt International Airport. The war was taken so seriously by Germans that many cities either cut back or called off winter carnival celebrations.

Time for intensified protest

Once the air war against Iraqi forces began on Jan. 17, Golla and many others like him knew it was time to revive their Hofgarten ritual. Golla's days of protest in the early '80s had been carefree, but now he had new responsibilities as technical director of the huge event. "I had to make sure everything was in place," he recalls. "By that I mean not only that the stage was set up and the speakers were there, but also that the complete setting was ready -- the garbage bags, the signs for the bus parking lot and the special trains."

But the protests didn't stop the U.S.-led coalition from going to war. And after the battles ended and Kuwait had been liberated, Germany's peace movement went back into hibernation, sleeping through the ethnic slaughter of Bosnia and Germany's first military action since World War II, the NATO-led offensive against Yugoslavia in 1999. During this conflict, it was Foreign Minister Fischer's turn to urge German soldiers to serve and to push a new rallying cry: "Not Another Auschwitz."

Today, the story has changed once again. With a second U.S.-led war against Iraq hanging on the horizon, the peace movement is wide awake. There is even talk of desertion again. This time on the part of singer Konstantin Wecker. Police are investigating the German celebrity to determine whether he incited a crime by issuing the call at a demonstration.

Preventing war

Golla says the movement learned important lessons from the first Gulf War, when it was too slow to react to the threat. "Today, we are not interested in rushing out onto the streets once the shooting has started. It is too late then for the people who are being shot to death and killed," he says. "We are trying to stop it all from happening."

As he directs his energy into the organization of Saturday's protests, he says he is guided by a principle shaped by more than two decades of work on behalf of non-violence.

"I know that I have achieved something and we have to keep up our activities," he says. "The person who does not do anything is the one who loses out." And that means working long hours in a job that requires him to be everything from bathroom cleaning man to political director.

Turning his attention back to the butter cookies lying on the desktop, he says: "I have one rule. I am never here later than 10 p.m. because I know I will have to back at 8 a.m."