.. as a run up to the anti-muslim crusade and a warning to those restless Asian youth

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,917120,00.html

German court rejects attempt to ban neo-Nazi party

John Hooper in Berlin
Wednesday March 19, 2003
The Guardian

The German government's efforts to curb the neo-Nazi right were thrown into disarray yesterday when the country's top court blocked its key initiative - an attempt to ban the skinhead-dominated National Democratic party.
If the decision was an embarrassment for Gerhard Schröder's centre-left administration, the reasons for it were doubly so. The judges ruled that the government's case rested largely on the statements and actions of NPD members who had been shown to be agents of the German intelligence services.

Indeed, the party was, in part, responding to the government's dictates, the court said. "The presence of the state at the leadership level makes influence on its aims and activities unavoidable," it concluded.

It said evidence from the government showed that in recent years about 30 of the NPD's 200 top officials were secretly paid by the government. Eight of the spies have been unmasked in the two years since the case was brought.

They include a former deputy chairman of the party and author of an anti-semitic tract that formed a central part of the government's case. A number of other intelligence services' agents remain undetected.

Three of the court's judges said the issue of informants had blurred the government's case irreparably.

The reliance on informers created a "lack of clarity that can no longer be overcome", the presiding judge, Winfried Hassemer, said in announcing the narrow decision. Only three of the seven judges voted to reject the government's case, but the court would have needed a two-thirds majority for the case to proceed.

The centre-right opposition lumped the blame for the fiasco on to the interior minister, Otto Schily. The Christian Democrats' parliamentary home affairs spokesmen said in a joint statement: "Schily bungled." But that conveniently ignored the fact that the initiative to ban the NPD originated with a Christian Democrat, Bavaria's interior minister, Günther Beckstein, and that both houses of parliament voted for the move at a time when sentiment against the far right was at a high.

The authorities singled out the NPD as a target after a spate of attacks on disabled people and immigrants. In so doing, they ignored advice from the intelligence services and other experts in the field, who argued that outlawing the party would drive its members underground, into the arms of more extreme movements whose activities would be difficult to monitor.

Attempting to outlaw the party also ran up against a deep-seated reluctance in Germany to keep parties out of the democratic arena. Only two have been banned since the end of the second world war: a successor to the Nazis in 1952 and the Communist party in 1956.

The NPD won only 0.4% of the vote at the last general election and does not hold any seats in the national or state legislatures. But one of the government's reasons for pressing ahead was to bar it from access to television advertising and public funding.

In an unusual move, Mr Schily argued yesterday against the judges' decision. He said the agents were not employees of the state and had been recruited rather than infiltrated as agents provocateurs. He said the verdict was "very much to be regretted".

The NPD leader, Udo Voigt, said his party would now "press ahead energetically with its political work", starting with a campaign for a boycott of US products in protest at plans for war against Iraq.

 http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/16/wnazi16.xml




Neo-Nazis run rings around German intelligence services
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
(Filed: 16/03/2003)


Germany's biggest neo-Nazi party is to escape a legal ban after it was revealed that the party members who gave evidence against it in the country's highest court were agents provocateurs paid by the intelligence services.

The ruling, to be delivered on Tuesday, will embarrass Germany's Social Democrat-led government, which spent two years assembling its case against the 6,500-strong National Democratic Party (NPD).

It comes despite increased neo-Nazi violence and new evidence linking the far-Right party to proscribed militant Islamic groups.

The government targeted the NPD after at least three racially motivated killings, attacks on synagogues and the delivery of a fake bomb to the leader of the German Jewish community.

Although none of the neo-Nazi attacks was directly attributed to the NPD, the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, demanded the ban because the overtly racist party was blamed for promoting neo-Nazi violence.

The case against the NPD, brought in the country's constitutional court, began to unravel, however, when 10 out of 14 party members who supplied incriminating evidence were exposed as being in the pay of regional state intelligence services. Some were recruited to infiltrate the party.

The constitutional court argues that the government's use of paid informers leaves it open to charges that it was relying on agents provocateurs in its efforts to ban the party.

The government's failure to convince the court has infuriated Jewish leaders. "We will want to know how the government accounts for the blunders in this case. They are both inexplicable and irresponsible," said Michael Friedman, the deputy leader of Germany's Jewish community.

In one particularly galling blunder, a witness was said to have compiled a mass of evidence which disclosed that NPD officials had delivered overtly anti-Semitic speeches at party meetings. The court's investigation, however, established that the witness, Wolfgang Frenz, a regional NPD deputy leader, was not only a government mole but that he made the anti-Semitic remarks himself.

Other top NPD officials who were preparing to give evidence had worked for the intelligence services for up to six years before the government began its attempts to ban the party.

The constitutional court, in Karlsruhe, gave an early indication of its thinking last week when it refused to grant the preliminary hearing needed before any ban could come into force.

The failure of the government's case emerged as concern grew about the NPD's activities and its links with Islamic militants. In January, the government banned the German branch of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir on the grounds that it was an extremist organisation.

Two top NPD officials were found to have attended a meeting held by the Hizb ut-Tahrir in Berlin where they expressed their solidarity with "Islam's fight against America". Horst Mahler, the NPD lawyer, is facing charges for publicly applauding the September 11 attacks.

An investigation by German reporters published last week suggested that the authorities have grossly underestimated the scale of neo-Nazi violence encouraged by the NPD.

It revealed that 99 people have been killed in neo-Nazi attacks since German reunification, far more than the 39 officially recorded.

The most recent victim, Marinus Schoeberl, a 17-year-old white German, was killed in July last year after being kicked repeatedly in the head during a torture session that lasted four hours. His neo-Nazi attackers set upon him because he "looked Jewish".