Orthodox Jews over-subsidised in Israel-report
11:54 a.m. May 05, 1998 Eastern
By Janine Zacharia
JERUSALEM, May 5 (Reuters) - Israel's state comptroller said on Tuesday ultra-Orthodox Jews received unfairly high state subsidies while non-Jewish communities lacked funds, especially for education.
The criticisms were contained in an annual report by the state comptroller, Miriam Ben-Porat, who acts as an official watchdog on public spending.
Its comments on funding for ultra-Orthodox Jews were likely to sharpen bitter debate between secular and religious Israelis, highlighted last week by a cultural row during the Jewish state's 50th anniversary celebrations.
Ben-Porat's report listed several instances in which the government awarded unfairly high subsidies to the development of ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods by designating them as national priority areas, thus entitling them to special grants.
``The designation of preferred areas must be determined according to equal and unified criteria,'' the report said.
It also cited several cases in which ultra-Orthodox seminaries had reported ``unrealistically high'' increases in the numbers of their students. State contributions to seminary budgets are based on the number of enrolled students.
By contrast, the report found that Arabs, who make up around one million of Israel's 5.9 million citizens, were heavily disadvantaged, especially by low education spending.
Of the 50 Israeli towns with the lowest education budgets, 41 were Moslem, Druze or bedouin, the report said.
The vast majority of Israel's Jews do not observe Orthodox Judaism but Orthodox political parties wield considerable power as members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition.
Ben-Porat said the imbalance in the distribution of resources contradicted the principles of equality in Israel's declaration of independence.
``The ultra-Orthodox received above and beyond what was called for under the government's basic laws and the coalition agreement with the (ultra-Orthodox) party United Torah Judaism,'' Ben-Porat told a news conference.
One key religious party in Netanyahu's coalition, Shas, said the report was baseless.
``It's very popular to blame the ultra-Orthodox these days. Before she leaves office, she wants to stay popular among secular Jews,'' said Shlomo Ben-Izri, a senior Shas politician.
Ben-Porat is expected to leave her post shortly.
Last week, religious parties clashed with non-observant Israelis over a dance performance on the programme for the gala event of Israel's 50th anniversary festivities.
Members of the Bat-Sheva dance troupe pulled out of the show in protest at religious Jewish demands that they change a segment in which they strip to their underwear.
The National Religious Party and other religious groups complained that the routine was offensive. The dancers accused their religious critics of an assault on artistic freedom. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Czech far-right targets gypsies, NATO in campaign
07:26 a.m. May 06, 1998 Eastern
By Nigel Stephenson
PRAGUE, May 6 (Reuters) - Czech far-right Republicans have fired the opening shots in the campaign for June's election with controversial posters proclaiming the party's opposition to NATO and to programmes favouring gypsies.
Other posters declare opposition to the return of Sudeten Germans, who were expelled from their homes in Czech territory after World War Two.
All other parliamentary parties, saying they were strapped for cash, agreed in February they would not use billboards in the campaign for the June 19-20 vote which is being held two years early after the collapse in November of former premier Vaclav Klaus's centre-right coalition.
Some analysts said the Republicans, who won eight percent of the vote and took 18 seats in the 200-seat lower house in the 1996 election, may be setting the agenda and could pick up extra votes with their posters which are plastered nationwide.
``It could have such an impact but...this is highly dependent on the action of the other parties. They have to take up the challenge and address some of the issues raised on the billboards,'' said Jan Hartl, head of the STEM polling agency.
The Republicans are no strangers to controversy. Party leader Miroslav Sladek, whose face is on every poster, was acquitted on charges of spreading racial hatred in January after spending 17 days in custody on remand.
Sladek was widely reported to have shouted that it was a ``pity we killed only a few Germans during the war'' at a demonstration in January 1997 as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Klaus were signing a declaration on Czech-German relations.
A Prague district court judge ruled that the statements made by Sladek did not violate Czech laws when considered in the full context of his speech.
The Republicans' slogans, which include ``Republicans reject NATO'' and ``Republicans against advanatges for gypsies'' touch on sensitive issues.
The Czech parliament last week gave its final backing to the country joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, although polls show only 50 percent support for membership.
And the standing of the 250,000 gypsy population hit the headlines last year when hundreds flocked to Britain and Canada to seek political asylum, saying they faced persecution.
Asylum has been granted in only a few cases.
Both President Vaclav Havel and the government have called on Czechs to improve relations with gypsies, among whom unemployment is commonly 60 percent, compared with a national average of five percent.
The government has discussed plans to set aside public sector positions for gypsies, especially in the police force.
However, political analyst and presidential aide Jiri Pehe said there was no prospect of the Republicans gaining more than 10 percent of the vote in June and that there was no chance of a surge in support for the far-right.
``This is not a party which has a comprehensive programme,'' Pehe said. ``It is a political show, a political circus.''
He said that while the Republicans were strong in certain areas, such as the northern mining and industrial regions close to the German border, their support was patchy.
``The Republican leadership consists of people who do not appeal to the majority of the population here,'' Pehe said.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Netanyahu urges Poland's Jews to go to Israel
02:40 p.m Apr 24, 1998 Eastern
By Anthony Barker
WARSAW, April 24 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stung members of Poland's small remaining Jewish community on Friday by urging them to leave for the Jewish state.
Visiting Warsaw's sole synagogue during a trip to Poland in remembrance of the Holocaust, Netanyahu said: ``There is no future other than a Jewish future in the State of Israel.''
Moments earlier Jewish leader Jerzy Kichler had asked him in a speech to understand that the Jews of Poland were not just keepers of the graves of the millions of Jews who lived there before the mass murder inflicted by Nazi German invaders.
``We are not only the shadow of that great community of Poland, but also the beginning of a future community,'' said Kichler, head of Poland's union of Jewish congregations.
But Netanyahu said it was time Israel absorbed the last of the Jewish diaspora. He especially addressed children, many of whom are just discovering Jewish roots.
``The prime minister, in our synagogue and greeting our children kindly, did not address us as a living society of Polish Jews. Mr Netanyahu said the place for all Jews is in Israel,'' said Helena Datner, deputy head of the congregation.
``I must say that I regret...Benjamin Netanyahu did not recognise our presence,'' she told a news conference.
She said Jewish society in Poland was quietly struggling to keep going and the children were a sign it was developing.
But Poland's Jewish leaders said they were not surprised by Netanyahu's views which reflected Israeli thinking and were happy that he had chosen to visit them.
About 3.3 million Jews, 90 percent of whom were murdered by the Germans, lived in Poland before World War Two.
Most survivors later left after anti-Semitic episodes including a deadly pogrom in the town of Kielce in 1946 and an ``anti-Zionist'' campaign by the then-ruling communists in 1968.
Local leaders estimate about 10,000 people may now be linked with some form of Jewish activity in Poland and twice as many who do not openly recognise their Jewish origins.
Few synagogues now function in a country which was once the world's largest centre of Jewish life and learning.
Many members of larger Jewish communities elsewhere view the remaining Jews in Poland as a tiny group, unrepresentative even of Polish Jews who mostly now live in other countries.
Polish governments since the 1989 fall of communism have increasingly created conditions for revival of Jewish life.
Kichler especially welcomed a law last year paving the way for the return of Jewish communal property seized by post-war communist authorities, including synagogues and bath-houses.
He said the Jewish congregations in Poland had this week signed an understanding with the World Jewish Restitution Organisation to create a joint foundation.
Where Jewish communities operate, property will be returned and the foundation will oversee what happens with the rest.
The community needs the properties not only for direct use but to help to preserve 1,200 neglected cemeteries, build schools and help often traumatised older members.
Kichler said this arrangement was part of a breakthrough in the way other Jewish communities regarded the Jews in Poland.
``People don't believe we are here at all, or if we are, that we have a role to play,'' he said.
Netanyahu, leading thousands of Jews from around the world in a ``March of the Living'' at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Thursday, said that Israel was the only safeguard for Jews, who should live there.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Right-wing extremists enter east German assembly
01:31 p.m Apr 26, 1998 Eastern
MAGDEBURG, Germany, April 26 (Reuters) - The German People's Union (DVU) became the first right-wing extremist party to enter an east German state parliament on Sunday, with television computer projections showing it had won about 11 percent of the vote,.
Voters surveys in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, which has the highest unemployment and lowest economic growth in Germany, had widely predicted the DVU would clear the five percent hurdle needed to enter the state assembly.
But, in what was widely seen as a protest vote, none had expected quite so much support.
The DVU, led by Munich-based millionaire publisher Gerhard Frey, had spent about three million marks on an aggressive campaign that thumped out a message of racial hatred with a barrage of jingoistic slogans.
``It is a victory for democracy. The people of Saxony-Anhalt are very intelligent, it is not the end of the world that we are in the state assembly,'' Frey told journalists in the state capital of Magdeburg west of Berlin.
``The people of Saxony-Anhalt have spoken, the parties here have driven the car into the mud we are going to get it out,'' said Frey.
In a region where neo-Nazis boast having established ``foreigner-free zones'' and one in four people is on the dole, the chance was too good to miss for Frey, whose DVU is widely seen as a one-man party that survives solely on his personal fortune.
With slogans like ``German money for German jobs'' and ``Criminal Foreigners Out,'' the party was expected to find resonance among disillusioned youth as well as east Germany's dispossessed middle classes.
Although the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD) looked set to win the largest share of the vote, with 39 percent according to the ZDF exit poll, they were visibly shaken by the massive vote for the DVU.
``The entry of the DVU in the regional assembly is a bad omen and it means all democratic parties represented there will have to think hard about what went wrong,'' said state social affairs minister deputy Gerlinde Kuppe of the SPD.
Others said it was a ``depressing'' protest vote, that would plunge all mainstream parties into soul-searching.
``I'm very depressed about the DVU getting into the parliament -- it is a bad sign for democracy in eastern Germany,'' said Greens leader in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Jochen Tschiche, whose party failed to clear the five-percent hurdle.
The DVU, which was founded by Frey in 1987, is also represented in assemblies in the western German states of Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein.
Its top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt state was unemployed engineer Helmut Wolf, 49, who was previously unknown in politics there. ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Black Sunday for democracy in east Germany -papers
06:35 p.m Apr 26, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - The shock entry of right-wing extremists into an east German regional parliament marked a Black Sunday for democracy in the former communist East Germany, newspapers said on Monday.
The German Peoples' Union (DVU) success on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt with a projected 14 percent of the vote was a bad omen for Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling coalition ahead of a general election in September, they said.
The upset election result, which also put Kohl's rivals in the Social Democrats (SPD) well ahead of Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), heralded a third force in German politics which had been overlooked until now.
Commentators concluded that a grand coalition of Germany's two main parties, the SPD and the CDU, was a feasible government coalition that could be formed in the state.
``Black Sunday for the ruling coalition in Bonn. Black Sunday for all democrats,'' said Germany's best-selling daily newspaper, Bild Zeitung daily.
When the DVU just fell 190 votes short of entering the Hamburg state assembly last September, this was ``already a warning shot'' which fell on deaf ears, Bild said.
``Now it is ringing in our ears. Since yesterday it has become clear the general election is not just about Kohl and (SPD challenger) Gerhard Schroeder,'' Bild commented.
Other newspapers pointed to the disillusionment of east Germany's youth whom Kohl famously promised ``blossoming landscapes'' after unification, after voters surveys showed that half of the DVU voters were the young unemployed.
``No training places, no jobs, no youth club where you can forget about it all. In this depressing vacuum, the DVU with its propaganda campaign has made inroads into the political scene,'' the Berliner Morgenpost daily commented.
``Their (DVU) strong result, mainly among the young, is due to the disappointment of many voters about their own personal circumstances,'' it said. ``The result is a disgrace and should prompt serious soul-searching.''
This was a ``protest vote'' that should provide food for thought among those in power in Bonn and Saxony-Anhalt, the paper said.
``The political future of Saxony-Anhalt can only be with a grand coalition,'' the Morgenpost concluded.
The Hamburger Abendblatt daily said: ``The result was not a test for Bonn, but the receipt for its mistakes during German unification and its failure to take on board east Germans' experience and their needs.
``Above all unemployment, which with nearly 25 percent in Saxony-Anhalt has broken new records,'' the Abendblatt said of the state which has the highest unemployment in Germany.
``This piles on the blame not at the doorstep of the regional government, but of (the ruling coalition in) Bonn,'' it said.
It added that the environmental Greens, which crashed out of the parliament there, had reduced their position to that of a regional party with their proposal to triple petrol taxes.
``The Greens have become a regional party virtually only confined to west Germany,'' it said, adding: ``What the east needs most is a healthy middle class.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Opposition blames Kohl for extremists' success
03:00 p.m Apr 26, 1998 Eastern
BONN, April 26 (Reuters) - German opposition parties blamed Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government for the spectacular success of right-wing extremists in Sunday's election in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
``This is a protest against the broken government promises of Helmut Kohl,'' declared Gerhard Schroeder, Kohl's Social Democrat (SPD) challenger in September's general election.
Schroeder said the big losses suffered by Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) in the Saxony-Anhalt poll made clear the chancellor was deeply unpopular in eastern Germany and could not possibly win the federal election.
``He's been voted out of office in the east,'' Schroeder told reporters in his home city of Hanover.
The CDU and its allies acknowledged they had suffered a defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, but laid the blame for the success of the extremist German People's Union (DVU) at the door of the SPD.
They said the SPD had made extremists acceptable by running a state government with the informal support of former communists in Saxony-Anhalt for the past four years.
``Those who let a political force emerge on the extreme left have to expect that this will happen on the right as well,'' said Kohl's Finance Minister Theo Waigel. ``The SPD has failed in this key issue of democracy.''
CDU general secretary Peter Hintze said the reason for his party's showing was the poor economic situation in Saxony-Anhalt, which has the highest unemployment and lowest economic growth rates of Germany's 16 states.
But Hintze also noted the high level of fluctuation in voter behaviour in eastern Germany. This showed there were plenty of undecided voters still to be won in the former communist east, he said.
``The electorate in east Germany is ready to change, also in the short term,'' he told ARD television.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FOCUS-Far right soars in east German election
02:18 p.m Apr 26, 1998 Eastern
By Erik Kirschbaum
MAGDEBURG, Germany, April 26 (Reuters) - A far right-wing party accused of anti-Semitism and racism staged an upset in a German state election on Sunday, capturing some 12 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls.
The German People's Union (DVU) came from nowhere on the back of a swing against German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to enter the state assembly in Magdeburg for the first time, polls for leading television networks showed.
The election in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany's most economically depressed region, confirmed the trend of Kohl's sinking popularity five months before a general election.
The Social Democrats (SPD) retained power in Saxony-Anhalt, part of the former communist east Germany.
The SPD, which is in opposition nationally, took nearly 37 per cent of the vote compared with 34 per cent four years ago.
Kohl's Christian Democrats dropped 12 points to about 22 percent.
``It is a victory for democracy,'' said Gerhard Frey, leader of the DVU, a party with barely any structure or members in Saxony-Anhalt. Frey, 65, is a millionaire publisher from Munich.
Protesters shouted ``Nazi out'' as Frey entered the state government building to meet the press after polls closed.
Germany's constitutional watchdog accused the DVU in a 1996 report of creating anti-Semitic sentiment and racism.
The DVU campaigned on a staunchly nationalist platform, blaming foreigners for taking German jobs. Unemployment is running at 25 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, the highest rate in Germany's 16 states.
The party wants the repatriation of asylum-seekers and opposes abandoning the deutschemark for a single European currency.
``The people of Saxony Anhalt are very intelligent... it is not the end of the world that we are in the state assembly,'' Frey told reporters.
Rightists and neo-Nazis have found fertile ground in the six states of the former communist east where unemployment and anti-foreign sentiment have risen since unification with west Germany eight years ago.
The SPD blamed Kohl's economic policies for the swing to the DVU.
``The success of the DVU is due to the socially unjust policies of the Kohl government that have made people uncertain and made them turn to the DVU,'' Wolfgang Thierse, an SPD member of parliament from the east, told reporters.
The reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism polled up to 20 percent, little changed from 19.9 percent in 1994, the polls said.
Voter surveys had predicted the CDU would be soundly beaten by the SPD, which skilfully tapped into east Germans' frustration over failed promises of German unity and turned it against the veteran chancellor. But no pollsters had gauged the extent of the DVU surge.
Kohl, 68, in power atop a centre-right coalition since 1982, is seeking an unprecedented fifth term in September. He is Europe's longest-serving government leader.
Seven weeks after crushing the CDU in nearby Lower Saxony state, the SPD were eager to use Saxony-Anhalt as a further springboard in their drive to oust Kohl, who has defied predictions of political oblivion in past years.
In national voter surveys, the SPD is already around eight percentage points ahead of Kohl's conservatives with five months remaining before the federal ballot.
The chancellor, who was jeered at campaign appearances in Saxony-Anhalt, tried to lower expectations for his party by insisting at a CDU gathering in western Germany that a weak result would not mean September's general election was lost.
``The election result (on Sunday) is one thing, the general election is something else,'' Kohl said in a speech in the western town of Neuss on Saturday.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Munich publisher Frey ``buys'' way into east Germany
04:52 p.m Apr 26, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 26 (Reuters) - Gerhard Frey, leader of the first right-wing extremist party to win seats in a state assembly in once communist East Germany, is a little-known publisher who uses his fortune to promote a message of racial intolerance.
The plump, balding 65-year-old hit the spotlight on Sunday when his Deutsche Volksunion or German Peoples' Union (DVU) party shocked the nation by taking a forecast 13 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt state.
Frey, previously shunned by the media, was mobbed by more than 100 journalists when he arrived in a bullet-proof limousine surrounded by bodyguards at the press centre in the state capital of Magdeburg, west of Berlin.
Although he made himself available to Germany's television networks, most of them declined to give him the platform of a live interview, preferring to follow him around the building as he sweated profusely under their dazzling lights.
``Get out Nazi!'' shouted one man, to which Frey replied: ``Everyone has the right to vote. Go correct the voters' opinion.''
Frey was widely accused of fighting with financial, rather than political, means after he spent an estimated three million marks in the election on a barrage of leaflets and billboard posters hammering out an anti-immigrant and anti-European message.
He even hired light aircraft trailing banners reading ``Vote DVU'' to hover over the state, which has the highest unemployment rate and lowest economic growth in Germany.
Critics say the DVU is a one-man party which is entirely dependent on Frey's personal fortune, estimated in some German media at about 500 million marks.
Germany's Office for Constitutional Protection, which monitors extremist groups, accused the DVU of anti-Semitic and xenophobic tendencies in its 1996 report.
It cited party propaganda calling for ``criminal foreigners'' to be deported, for measures to give Germans jobs first and for asylum-seekers to be deported.
The 1996 report also said some of Frey's publications conveyed a ``thinly-veiled anti-Semitic message'' by attacking prominent members of Germany's Jewish community. It also said the DVU sought to play down and the crimes of the Nazis.
Frey inherited a chain of department stores from his brother in the late 1950s and, with the income from property in Munich and Berlin, he built up a publishing empire with nationalistic and sometimes overtly racist tendencies.
He also set up a tourist business which arranged trips to such places as Silesia, now in Poland, which was once part of the German Reich and which German right-wingers and neo-Nazis would like to reincorporate.
Frey and his wife Regine came under the scrutiny of Germany's extremist watchdogs after they started publishing book titles such as ``Concentration camp lies'' and issuing a wide range of Nazi memorabilia including war-time flags.
Frey has been on the verge of prosecution several times for violating Germany's strict laws against inciting racial hatred or playing down the Holocaust.
But his tirades against ``fake asylum-seekers,'' ``foreigners,'' ``gypsies'' and the European Union have found some support among voters in western Germany.
The DVU, which Frey founded in 1987 and claims about 16,000 members nationwide, cleared the five-percent hurdle and has seats in state parliaments in Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein.
The symbolic significance of its entry into the Saxony-Anhalt assembly was not lost on Frey. ``It is a victory for democracy and a victory for Saxony-Anhalt,'' he said. ``We helped combat voter apathy. Voter turnout rose because of us.''
Frey lives in a villa, which German reports say he has turned into a fortress, in the smart Munich suburb of Pasing.
Frey defended his multi-million campaign in Saxony-Anhalt, saying it was necessary because the media ignored his party.
``The other parties have the media on their side,'' he said. ``We are always treated like the devil. The entire media is against us.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Canadian Internet firm with hate group links to close
03:55 p.m Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Allan Dowd
VANCOUVER, April 27 (Reuters) - A Canadian company that hosted Web pages for groups with connections to white extremists has pulled the plug on its service, but government officials said on Monday they would continue their probe into hate on the Internet.
Fairview Technology Center Ltd., a firm based in British Columbia which has links to right wing extremists in Europe and Canada, said it dropped its Internet business because of a telephone company rule that could make Fairview liable for the contents of Web Sites.
Fairview's owner Bernard Klatt denied that he had bowed to pressure from human rights activists, but said he was concerned about the financial impact of the contract required by BC Telecom -- the company that provides Fairview with Internet access.
Spurred in part by complaints that the Oliver, B.C.-based company has violated Canada's anti-hate propaganda laws, authorities have been investigating both the company and ways to regulate what information is distributed over the Internet.
``Just because one provider has decided to withdraw its services, either permanently or temporarily, (will not) change the approach. Certainly they will continue to look at it,'' said Kate Thompson, a spokeswoman for British Columbia's attorney general.
BC Telecom complained to authorities earlier this month that Fairview was violating Canada's hate propaganda law. But a company spokesman said on Monday the liability requirement was not unique to Klatt's contract.
The telephone company had stopped short of terminating Klatt's access -- a move requested by human-rights activists -- saying it did not want to be in the legal position of regulating Internet content. Klatt has defended himself, saying he protecting free speech and has no control over its clients' Web Sites.
One human rights group labeled Oliver the ``Hate Capital of Canada'' -- a title hotly disputed by Klatt's neighbors who have protested against his activities.
Among the most controversial of the Fairview-hosted Web sites was that of a French Neo-Nazi group, the Charlemagne Hammer Skinheads, which allegedly contained death threats against Jews and European human rights activists.
French police earlier this year arrested 13 members of the Charlemagne Hammer Skinheads on charges that included inciting racial hatred, denial of war crimes and uttering death threats. They are scheduled to go on trial in the fall.
Klatt said the group's account with him expired in early March and he has had no contact with them since then. ``Last I heard some of them were still in jail,'' Klatt told Reuters in an e-mail message last week. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Frenchman fined for Holocaust denial, again
10:25 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
PARIS, April 27 (Reuters) - A former French university professor, who was sacked for denying the Holocaust took place, was fined 20,000 francs ($3,300) on Monday for again challenging the Nazi massacre of European Jews during World War Two.
Robert Faurisson, who has been sentenced several times on similar charges, was found guilty of ``challenging the veracity of a crime against humanity'' in a letter published in 1996 in the extreme rightist weekly Rivarol.
Faurisson, 69, is currently under investigation for professing similar views on an Internet site called ``Aaargh! (Association of former amateurs of war and Holocaust stories)
The maximum sentence for challenging crimes against humanity, as defined by the post-war Nuremberg tribunals, is a year in prison and a fine of 300,000 francs.
($ - 6.007 French Francs)
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
French far-right hails Germany's DVU showing
10:46 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
PARIS, April 27 (Reuters) - France's far-right National Front said on Monday it was delighted with the regional election success of the extremist German People's Union (DVU) which rose from nowhere to win 12.9 percent of the vote.
The DVU, accused of anti-Semitism and racism, scored its biggest win since World War Two in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, riding on a wave of frustration over record German unemployment.
``The National Front, delighted with this success...observes that German voters opted for a platform similar to ours in its rejection of the euro, a globalist Europe, the dangers of immigration, high taxes and rising insecurity and unemployment,'' the French party said.
``This result underlines the fear of the German people, faced with losing their monetary sovereignty and handing over the mark in exchange for the euro,'' said the Front, whose firebrand leader Jean-Marie Le Pen advocates sending home millions of immigrants and reserving jobs and welfare for French-born nationals. It claims about 15 percent of the French vote.
The DVU's surge coincided with a battering for Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU).
Saxony-Anhalt, a region of three million people, is one of six states created out of the former East Germany after reunification eight years ago. It has the country's highest unemployment rate at 25 percent.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FOCUS-Business sees danger in Saxony Anhalt poll
11:08 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - Strong results for right- and left-wing extremist parties in Sunday's Saxony Anhalt state elections are a danger sign for German business, leading business groups said on Monday.
``This catastrophic election result damages Germany's image in the world and will accelerate the flow of foreign capital out of the country,'' said Michael Fuchs, president of the Association of German Wholesalers and Importers.
One-third of the east-German state voted either for the far-right German People's Union (DVU) or the reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
``The democratic parties are called upon to come to terms with this situation, to thoroughly reform the investment conditions in Germany, and to solve the problem of unemployment,'' the Federation of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHT) said in a terse statement.
Reinhard Hoeppner, the Social Democrat (SPD) state premier who was reelected in Sunday's election, tried to play down the extremists' results.
Asked at a news conference whether the DVU's success could hit investment in the Saxony Anhalt, he said: ``This is not the first radical right-wing victory in a federal state for the DVU. The democratic parties have dealt with this before in such a way that economic developments are not affected.''
The Association of German Trades (ZDH) said the extreme parties' successes were due to the federal government's failure to make progress on urgently needed reforms, especially to stimulate jobs creation.
``People's problems must be solved as quickly as possible through concrete political action,'' ZDH said.
The DVU in particular, which came from nowhere to score 12.9 percent of the vote, used anti-foreigner slogans to gain support among jobless youth.
Saxony Anhalt is one of Germany's poorest federal states, with the highest level of unemployment.
The SPD, favoured to topple Chancellor Helmut Kohl in September's general election, bolstered their position in the eastern state, gaining three percentage points to win with 35.9 percent.
Kohl's Christian Democrats took a battering, shedding nearly 12.5 points to garner only 22 percent of the vote. The PDS was the third strongest party in the region with 20 percent.
The BVMW, which represents smaller corporations, called on the CDU and SPD to form a ``coalition of reason'' in the state government
((Terence Gallagher, Bonn newsroom, 49-228-26097150, bonn.newsroom+reuters.com))
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German far-right taps voter reservoir in poor east
08:13 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Erik Kirschbaum
MAGDEBURG, April 27 (Reuters) - Karla Reuscher doesn't like foreigners. She says they take jobs away from Germans by working for a pittance, bother German women, smell bad and take housing built for Germans.
A 20-year-old woman with an earring in her nose and a green bomber jacket on her back, Reuscher said on Monday she was proud she had voted for the far-right German People's Union (DVU) and was confident it would clamp down hard on foreigners.
The anti-immigrant party came from nowhere to win nearly 13 percent of the vote in an election on Sunday in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
It was the highest result for the extreme-right in Germany since World War Two and sent a shock wave across the country.
``The foreigners take all the jobs away from us,'' said Reuscher, a chain-smoking apprentice at a hair salon, whose views were echoed in Magdeburg's working class Olvenstedt district where the DVU claimed nearly 14 percent of the vote.
``They're willing to work for next to nothing,'' said Reuscher, who added that her friends had all voted DVU too. ``They don't pay taxes and they live off of us. And they're always hitting on German girls.''
Reuscher was one of the 192,086 people in Saxony-Anhalt who cast their ballots for the DVU, a staunchly nationalist party accused of anti-Semitism and racism by the government's constitutional watchdog agency.
Pollsters, political analysts and voters themselves said the DVU was able to tap a deep reservoir of resentment in the formerly communist east by spending enormous sums on advertising, posters and mail shots during the closing weeks of the campaign.
The DVU did not run in the last state election in 1994, but jumped to six percent in opinion polls a few days before Sunday's voting.
Their full strength was not reflected in opinion surveys before the vote in part because many DVU voters concealed their true intentions. The party also attracted a huge number of votes from people who had never before cast their ballots.
The voter turnout jumped almost 20 percentage points to 70 percent and about 103,000 votes for the DVU came from voters who had never before participated in an election, the Infratest research institute said. Another 27,000 came from those who had previously backed Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats.
``It is very disturbing,'' said a 40-year-old amputee in a wheelchair. ``But I think only a small percentage are genuine neo-Nazis. Most of them are just looking to cause trouble.''
The DVU's message appealed in particular to the so-called ``losers of unification'' -- especially young unemployed easterners who see little prospect of a job or career.
Pollsters said one in four under 30 voted DVU. The party also scored strongly among the working class with 19 percent.
``The DVU came in here with their grand propaganda and it touched a nerve with the young people,'' said Hans-Guenther Sellin, a 54-year-old unemployed master steelworker. He said high unemployment and the perception that the state was helping foreigners more than Germans contributed to their win.
``If a foreigner goes to the housing agency to get an apartment, he'll get it immediately,'' said Jackie Kulling, an 18-year-old sales clerk who voted for the DVU. ``But if a German goes for help, it can take up to a year to get an apartment.''
Kulling said she was afraid of the foreigners in Magdeburg, a city of 280,000 that lies 160 km (100 miles) west of Berlin. Many were involved in drug dealing and prostitution, she said.
``The foreigners are dangerous,'' she said. ``They attack Germans for no reason at all.''
Ironically, Saxony-Anhalt has one of the smallest foreign populations in Germany. Only 1.9 percent of the three million are foreign compared to seven percent of Germany's 82 million. Many here are from Turkey, Albania, Africa and the Middle East.
``My eight-year-old son was born in Germany, speaks German like a German and feels German,'' said David Rodriguez, a 45-year-old Cuban native who has lived in Magdeburg since 1988.
``But the far-right are pushing him aside. The German people already made one mistake with Hitler. They should know what happens with the far-right. They should know better by now.''
Saxony-Anhalt was once the industrial heartland of communist East Germany, but has been wracked by upheaval since unification in 1990.
In a region where unemployment during the communist era was unheard of, the state now has the dubious distinction of having Germany's highest unemployment rate -- 25 percent.
``There is no perspective for the young people,'' said Volker Moldenhaven, a 36-year-old machinist. ``They don't have jobs, see no future, just sit around, drink too much, and get frustrated.''
The DVU tapped that frustration, blanketing the state with posters promising a tougher stance on ``foreign criminals'' and to find ``jobs for Germans.'' Their call to ``Throw out foreign criminals'' sounds like the ``Throw out foreigners'' cry heard at any neo-Nazi rally in Germany.
``The DVU is speaking our language,'' said Fritz, a 62-year-old unemployed steelworker who declined to provide his surname. ``They have the right ideas. Give Germans jobs. Get rid of foreigners. The DVU is going to put Germany back in order.'' REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German Far-Right in Best Result Since WW2
01:30 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Erik Kirschbaum
MAGDEBURG, Germany (Reuters) - German right-wing extremists have scored their biggest win in an election since World War Two by riding a wave of youth frustration over record unemployment.
While Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) took a battering, the German People's Union (DVU) --- accused of anti-Semitism and racism -- shot from nowhere to win 12.9 percent of the vote in the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, according to official provisional results on Monday.
The DVU's surge contrasted with a sharp drop in support for Kohl, whose CDU fell nearly 12.5 points to 22 percent.
Kohl is campaigning for a record fifth term in office in federal elections in September, but many commentators and opposition politicians predicted he was heading for defeat.
``The result is a debacle for Kohl, a disaster,'' said ZDF television's editor in chief Klaus Bresser, adding that the DVU's strong showing was an ``alarm signal'' for democratic parties.
``The east is voting Kohl out of office,'' said Gerhard Schroeder, nominated by the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) to challenge Kohl for the chancellorship in September.
The SPD gained three percentage points to win in Saxony-Anhalt with 35.9 percent of the vote.
The region of three million people east of Berlin is one of six states created out of the former communist east Germany after reunification with west Germany eight years ago.
It has the country's highest unemployment, 25 percent, and its lowest economic growth.
Easterners' frustration with Kohl's unfulfilled promises has soared.
Kohl, once hailed as the ``chancellor of unity'' in the east, was jeered at campaign rallies in Saxony-Anhalt last week.
``We used to get a nice tailwind from Bonn,'' said Christoph Bergner, the state's CDU leader. ``But this time we were running into a headwind.''
The reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) won 20 percent in Sunday's ballot, the penultimate state election before the September 27 federal vote.
The environmental Greens fell out of the state assembly with 3.2 percent and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) also fell short of the five percent hurdle needed for representation with 4.2 percent.
``The CDU suffered a horrible defeat in Saxony-Anhalt,'' said Wolfgang Thierse, an eastern SPD leader. ``This is another step in the right direction towards the end of the Kohl era. The Kohl chapter is almost over.''
The DVU's surge recalled another chapter in German history -- the rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazis in the early 1930s.
The Nazi leader took advantage of high Depression-era unemployment to win democratic elections before disbanding parliament after gaining power in 1933.
Rightists and neo-Nazis have found fertile ground in the east where unemployment and anti-foreigner sentiment have risen amid the social upheaval that followed reunification.
The DVU campaigned on a staunchly nationalist platform, blaming foreigners for taking German jobs. They blanketed the state with posters promising to take a tougher stance on ``foreign criminals'' and to find ``jobs for Germans.''
Saxony-Anhalt has one of the lowest percentages of foreign residents in all of Germany -- 1.9 percent.
The DVU, which spent some three million marks on the posters and direct-mailings in the closing weeks of the campaign, wants the repatriation of asylum-seekers and opposes abandoning the deutschemark for a single European currency.
The party's message appealed in particular to young unemployed easterners who have little or no prospect of finding a job. Pollsters estimated that one in four voters under 30 voted DVU.
``It is a victory for democracy,'' said Gerhard Frey, leader of the DVU, a party with barely any structure or members in Saxony-Anhalt. Frey, 65, is a millionaire publisher based in Munich.
``It is also a victory for the parliamentary system because with the DVU in opposition, we will ensure that the situation in Saxony-Anhalt improves,'' he said.
Protesters shouted ``Nazi out'' as Frey entered the state government building to meet the press after polls closed. Frey shot back that the voters had spoken.
The protesters chased him to his bullet-proof car hours later when he left.
Germany's constitutional watchdog accused the DVU in a 1996 report of creating anti-Semitic sentiment and racism.
Since World War Two no far-right party has won more than 11 percent of the vote in any state or federal election.
Germany's Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis told the Neue Ruhr Zeitung daily he was horrified by the success of the right-wing extremists.
``I have great fears (for the future),'' he was quoted on Monday as saying.
Germany's best-selling daily newspaper Bild Zeitung gave the verdict: ``Black Sunday for the ruling coalition in Bonn. Black Sunday for all democrats.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FOCUS-Poll defeat starts debate in Kohl's party
08:02 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Robert Mahoney
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - The collapse of Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats in east Germany rekindled a party strategy debate on Monday about the federal election that polls predict the chancellor will lose.
Kohl's critics stopped short, however, of calling for his removal as the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate just five months before the general election.
The German People's Union, or DVU, shot from nowhere to win 12.9 per cent of the vote in Sunday's election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on a nationalist platform that blamed foreigners for rising crime and accused them of taking jobs away from Germans.
Finance Minister Theo Waigel, who heads the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), said the government should put more emphasis on law and order and immigration in its campaign.
``Aside from jobs, (the CDU) needs to put more stress on internal security, immigration and crime policies,'' Waigel told reporters before a party meeting in Munich.
``The CSU has been doing this for some time already and we feel that course is justified by the result in Saxony-Anhalt,'' he added.
These two issues and record unemployment drew thousands of first-time and young voters to the far right-wing DVU.
The CDU crashed 12.5 points to 22 per cent of the vote, a result which German media saw as a body blow to Kohl's chances of winning a record fifth term in September.
The Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party in Saxony-Anhalt with a 35.9 percent share of the vote, two points up on the last contest.
The SPD, currently leading a minority government with the ecologist Greens in the region, now looks likely to form a coalition with the CDU after the Greens failed to secure any seats in parliament.
Kohl loyalists acknowledged that the CDU had received a stinging slap in the face from east German voters but they rejected the assessment of Gerhard Schroeder, the SPD's challenger for chancellor, that Kohl had lost the east.
Saxony-Anhalt, a region west of Berlin with a population of three million, is one of six states created out of the former communist east Germany after unification with west Germany eight years ago.
Kohl was boosted by grateful east Germans in both his 1990 and 1994 election triumphs. But now many blamed him for the more than 20 per cent unemployment that has accompanied the overhauling of the east's decaying, labour-intensive industries.
``We could have put up Arnold Schwarzenegger as a candidate and he would have lost,'' said Berndt Seite, the CDU premier of neighbouring Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state, referring to the strongman film star.
He urged the CDU to go on the offensive in the two months before the summer holidays, otherwise the party would be hard pressed in the election on September 27.
Neither Seite nor Labour Minister Norbert Bluem thought dumping Kohl in favour of his more popular anointed successor, Wolfgang Schaeuble, made electoral sense.
Some young CDU members of parliament were more forthright.
Peter Altmeier, part of a group known as the CDU's ``Young Wild Bunch,'' said no area should be off-limits in the party's analysis of its defeat.
He said the party should put Schaeuble more in the limelight and should consider short-term measures to help create jobs.
An opinion poll on Monday in the weekly Der Spiegel showed that 68 per cent of Germans thought the wheelchair-bound Schaeuble should play an important role in running the country compared with 39 percent for Kohl.
The most popular politician was Schroeder with 72 percent, according to the poll by the Emnid group.
Emnid put support for the SPD at 43 percent against 35 percent for the CDU/CSU. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German markets react mildly to weekend election
03:41 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
FRANKFURT, April 27 (Reuters) - German equities and bonds reacted calmly on Monday to Chancellor Helmut Kohl's CDU party's battering in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt although the extreme right's success caused some ripples of worry.
The blue chip Xetra DAX share index started out slightly weaker, trading some 0.3 percent lower at 5,128.47 points at 0700 GMT. Bunds, meanwhile, shrugged off the news with the June futures contract up two basis points at 107.26.
``The political story is not going to be a big negative for markets,'' said Bank Julius Baer chief economist Gerhard Grebe, who said the elections heralded a broad coalition arrangement for Germany in the future -- a boon for structural reform.
Grebe and other analysts downplayed the surprising success of the right-wing German People's Union's (DVU) party in the east German state's elections.
``I think the strong result of the DVU was incidental and will not have any bearing on the national scene,'' said Hans Jaeckel, economist at DG Bank in Frankfurt.
``I do not see any great danger of the right winning significant votes in west Germany,'' Grebe said.
``In any case, France already has a large right-wing element. I think the international community is a lot less concerned about these things than Germany is.''
The DVU --- accused of anti-Semitism and racism -- shot from nowhere to win 12.9 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, according to official provisional results.
That marked the biggest win for right-wing extremists in a German election since World War Two and sparked reactions of shock and outrage in the German media.
Chancellor Kohl's Christian Democrats on the other hand fell nearly 12.5 points to 22 percent while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) gained three percentage points to win in Saxony-Anhalt with 35.9 percent of the vote.
Kohl is campaigning for a record fifth term in office in federal elections in September but is coming under a strong challenge from the SPD.
Traders and economists said they had expected Kohl's poor showing.
``The CDU defeat came as no surprise, it was long priced in by the market, so all in all we see a very limited impact from the vote,'' one bond trader said.
However the market consensus was that the Saxony-Anhalt results could not be extrapolated for the whole of Germany, and particularly not for west Germany where economic conditions are far more conducive to the political middle ground.
Saxony-Anhalt, a region of three million people east of Berlin, has the country's highest unemployment rate, 25 percent, and its lowest economic growth.
The DVU campaigned on a staunchly nationalist platform, blaming foreigners for taking German jobs. They blanketed the state with posters promising to take a tougher stance on ``foreign criminals'' and to find ``jobs for Germans.''
Saxony-Anhalt has one of the lowest percentages of foreign residents in all of Germany -- 1.9 percent. ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German far-right gains provoke national outrage
08:51 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Tara FitzGerald
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - Immigrant, Jewish and business groups in Germany united on Monday to condemn the strongest performance by a far-right party in Germany since World War Two in Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt.
The German People's Union (DVU), branded anti-Semitic and racist by government anti-extremist authorities, gained 12.9 percent of the vote in the economically-depressed eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday.
German media also expressed horror at the result.
``Black Sunday for the ruling coalition in Bonn. Black Sunday for all democrats,'' said Bild newspaper, Germany's best-selling daily.
The Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an organisation which tracks Nazi criminals, called the DVU gains ``an ominous development that will have far-reaching implications in Germany and far beyond its borders.''
``The election results will bolster other political extremists from Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky to France's (Jean-Marie) Le Pen to America's (former Ku Klux Klan leader) David Duke,'' it said in a statement.
Ignatz Bubis, the leader of Germany's vestigial Jewish community, said it was now up to the country's mainstream democratic parties to work much harder to counter the threat of the extreme right.
``If the democratic parties leave things as they are... what could emerge in the next two, three or five years could be very dangerous,'' he told Reuters.
Yasar Bilgin, a spokesman for the Council of Turkish citizens in Germany, the country's largest ethnic minority, said he was appalled by the rise of the DVU.
``A vote of 13 percent for the DVU is absolutely terrible. It's bad news these radicals can come into power,'' Bilgin said of their entry into the Saxony-Anhalt regional parliament.
Unemployment is currently at around 25 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, the highest level of Germany's 16 states and a fact which led commentators on Monday to draw comparisons with the Germany of the 1930s, when high unemployment and political disillusionment saw Hitler's Nazis rise to power.
German business interests were also alarmed, with the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHT) and German BGA trade group fearing the increase in support for the DVU could discourage investment from foreign companies.
``This catastrophic election result has damaged Germany's image in the eyes of the world and will speed up the draining away of foreign investment from Germany,'' said BGA President Michael Fuchs.
The surge in the DVU vote contrasted with a 12 percentage point slide in support for Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats to 22 percent, while the opposition Social Democrats climbed three percentage points to 36 percent.
The federal government's commissioner on foreigners' affairs, Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen, warned against seeing support for the DVU as a one-off protest against the political mainstream.
``Given that this organisation has become the strongest party among first-time and young voters (in the region), we must recognise that such parties already have the structural support of a great number of young people in eastern Germany,'' Schmalz-Jacobsen said. ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German extremists unlikely to enter national scene
12:43 p.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - The extreme right has had their best election result in Germany since World War Two, but unlike their colleagues in other European countries look unlikely to break into the national scene.
Since the end of the Cold War, Europe has seen a series of election gains for parties accused of xenophobia and anti-Semitism across the continent, from the former Soviet Union across Eastern Europe right up to the Atlantic coast.
When the German People's Union (DVU) won 13 percent in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, its victory brought back bitter memories of Adolf Hitler's meteoric rise to power in 1933.
But while the far right may be resurgent across Europe, the view of analysts is that German neo-fascists are divided, lack a charismatic leader, and because of Germany's federal system of checks and balances pose no real threat to democracy.
``In France, Austria and Italy right-wing extremism is a populist ideology with accepted leaders,'' political scientist Hans-Gerd Jaschke told Reuters.
In France, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has 15 percent national support for his platform pledging to ship home millions of immigrants and push for preference in jobs, education and other state benefits for native-born French.
In Austria, Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party won 22 percent of the vote in the 1995 elections, and his approval rating in polls has been as high as 38 percent -- suggesting he could head a coalition government after 1999 elections.
In Italy, Gianfranco Fini heads the far-right national alliance (AN) which polled 15.7 percent at the last general election in 1996, up from 12.5 percent in 1994. The AN, Italy's third party, wants illegal immigrants to be deported and made headlines recently for saying homosexuality is abnormal.
The highest post-war vote for right-wing extremists in Germany was 4.3 percent in 1969, leaving the National Democratic Party short of the five percent needed to enter the Bundestag lower house of parliament in Bonn.
Surveys and polls since then have shown national support for rightists consistently below five percent.
``These movements group accepted personalities on the right-wing scene and see themselves as constructive political opposition. That is not the case with the DVU,'' Jaschke said.
The DVU, which was founded in 1987 and claims 16,000 members, is widely seen as a one-man party which would collapse without the financial support of its shadowy leader, Munich-based millionaire publisher Gerhard Frey.
Political analysts say the DVU's success represents a backlash against European integration and a protest vote against Bonn's inability to address social upheaval in ex-communist east Germany since unification in 1990.
``Right-wing extremism is a kind of resistance movement to protest against globalisation, the euro and Europe as a whole,'' Berlin-based Jaschke said.
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl is one of the staunchest advocates of an integrated Europe and single currency to banish the spectre of nationalism that fuelled two world wars.
But his drive for integration has clearly come with a price. ``This is a backlash against an openness to the world, with people saying we want to remain a homogenous ethnic community,'' Jaschke said.
Eastern Germany has seen a rise in right-wing extremism, neo-Nazism and racism since the collapse of Communism nearly 10 years ago as factory closures have led to mass unemployment, poverty and crime -- virtually unknown in the rigid Soviet satellite state.
Nearly half the racist attacks in 1997 were in the east, where only a fifth of Germany's 80 million people live.
The DVU won seats on state assemblies in Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein in western Germany in the early 1990s, but its candidates were swiftly voted out a couple of years ago.
The DVU is not Germany's only rightist party. The extremist Republicans are also represented on a regional level in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg
An expert from Germany's Electoral Research Institute said the DVU had no chance of clearing the five-percent hurdle to break into federal politics in the September general election.
``Mainly young people on the dole or afraid of losing their jobs voted DVU,'' Dieter Roth told Saar Radio. Speaking of the state with the highest unemployment and lowest growth, he said: ``Saxony-Anhalt's problems do not translate on to federal level.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German press aghast at far-right surge in poll
05:03 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - Germany's media on Monday expressed horror on Monday at the prospect of extreme right-wing politicians taking seats in an eastern state parliament after scoring best regional far-right result since World War Two.
The German People's Union (DVU), which has been accused of anti-Semitism and racism, took 12.9 percent of the vote in the economically depressed state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, official provisional results showed.
Support for Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) slumped and the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), which were re-elected to form a state government there, performed below pre-election opinion poll forecasts with five months to go to a general election.
``Black Sunday for the ruling coalition in Bonn. Black Sunday for all democrats,'' said Bild, Germany's best-selling daily newspaper.
It added that when the DVU narrowly failed to enter the Hamburg state assembly last September it was ``a warning shot'' that fell on deaf ears, Bild said.
``Now it is ringing in our ears. Since yesterday it has become clear the general election is not just about Kohl and (SPD challenger) Gerhard Schroeder,'' Bild said of the general election set for September 27.
The respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper called the result a disappointment for all democrats, adding that ``most shocking was the triumph of the radical right...and the fact that the DVU attracted young voters.''
Die Welt daily said the state election's high turnout of more than 70 percent could not be interpreted as a new enthusiasm among Germans for the political process.
``One would like to be happy that voters who were indifferent in 1994 streamed to the polls this time. But this happiness is soured by the fact that a third of these voters chose protest parties,'' it said of the DVU and the reform communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
Other newspapers also pointed to the disillusionment of east Germany's youth, whom Kohl famously promised ``blossoming landscapes'' after unification, as voter surveys showed that half of the DVU voters were the young unemployed.
``No training places, no jobs, no youth club where you can forget about it all. In this depressing vacuum, the DVU with its propaganda campaign has made inroads into the political scene,'' the daily newspaper Berliner Morgenpost commented.
``Their (DVU) strong result, mainly among the young, is due to the disappointment of many voters about their own personal circumstances,'' it said.
Hamburger Abendblatt, another daily, said: ``The result was not a test for Bonn, but the receipt for its mistakes during German unification and its failure to take on board east Germans' experience and their needs.
``Above all unemployment, which with nearly 25 percent in Saxony-Anhalt has broken new records,'' Abendblatt said of the state which has the highest unemployment in Germany.
``This piles on the blame not at the doorstep of the regional government, but of (the ruling coalition in) Bonn,'' it said. ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
East German court bans anti-immigrant rally
11:27 a.m. Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
BONN, April 27 (Reuters) - A Leipzig court said on Monday it had banned an anti-immigrant rally planned in the centre of the east German city this Friday.
The far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) had called on supporters to march through the city under the slogan ``Jobs for Germans first'' on Labour Day, May 1.
But a municipal court in Leipzig said it was banning the demonstration because the resources needed to police the march were not available. It said over 6,000 police would be needed to guarantee public safety if it went ahead.
The NPD said they were expecting around 15,000 people to take part in the rally, while police were expecting a further 4,000 counter-protesters.
The court said annual trade union rallies planned for the same day all over the region meant police resources were already stretched.
Last year an NPD march planned for Labour Day in Leipzig was also banned. There were scuffles between right-wing and left-wing extremists after a number of skinheads defied the ban.
The NPD has the option of appealing to a higher court against the latest ban. There has been strong local resistance among church groups, traders and politicians to the rally.
The extreme right has gained ground in eastern Germany by tapping into widespread disenchantment, especially over unemployment.
The anti-immigrant German People's Union shot from nowhere to win 12.9 percent of the vote in an election on Sunday in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, which has the country's highest jobless rate at 25 percent. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Argentina rushes Croat camp chief's extradition
06:58 p.m Apr 28, 1998 Eastern
By Stephen Brown
BUENOS AIRES, April 28 (Reuters) - Argentina will ensure a speedy extradition to Croatia for Second World War concentration camp commander Dinko Sakic so he can stand trial, a Foreign Ministry official said on Tuesday.
A spokeswoman for the Croatian embassy in Buenos Aires told Reuters she expected his arrest ``in the next few days.''
The Argentine Foreign Ministry said it received Croatia's extradition request on Monday and had already forwarded it to the State Prosecutor ``so that he can be extradited as soon as possible.''
``For the Argentine government, conceding this extradition is a matter of the utmost urgency,'' a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters.
``What I don't know is how long it will take them to find him. That's a matter for the judge and police,'' he said.
Argentina and Croatia are under international pressure to ensure that Sakic, 76, stands trial in his homeland for alleged war crimes committed when he ran the Jasenovac camp under Croatia's Nazi-puppet Ustasha regime.
Sakic, who has lived in Argentina openly for 50 years, disappeared when his past was revealed by an Argentine television program last month. There was no answer when a reporter called his home in the beach resort of Santa Teresita on Tuesday.
A family spokeswoman told Reuters from Santa Teresita two weeks ago that the aged Croat was not on the run and would turn himself into police when an arrest warrant came. She said Sakic was eager to stand trial ``to prove his innocence.''
His wife Esperanza told Reuters earlier this month that her husband was ``as innocent as a breast-feeding baby.''
Sakic said in the Channel 13 interview that alerted the world to his whereabouts that when he ran the camp, treatment was humane: ``When I was there, no guard or administrator was allowed to so much as touch a prisoner.''
He was commander of Jasenovac, which became known as the ``Auschwitz of the Balkans,'' from 1942 to 1944, when he was in his early 20s. The number of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews killed there has long been disputed. The Serbs say 700,000 died and the Simon Wiesenthal Center puts the toll at 600,000. Croatian estimates say it was around 85,000.
Jewish groups and the U.S. State Department have urged Argentina to arrest Sakic without delay. Israel says it ``fully supports'' his extradition to Croatia, while in Belgrade, the government of Yugoslavia says it also wants to try him.
There is no extradition agreement between Argentina and Croatia, but Buenos Aires has made it clear it will ``show the same attitude'' with Sakic as it did with former Nazi Capt. Erich Priebke, who was extradited to Italy in 1995. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German right-winger may fight in general election
09:16 a.m. Apr 28, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
MUNICH, April 28 (Reuters) - The leader of a shadowy party that scored the extreme right's best election result in Germany since World War Two said on Tuesday he wanted to join forces with other far-right parties for September's general election.
Bavarian publisher Gerhard Frey said his German People's Union (DVU), which grabbed 13 percent of votes in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, was talking with other groups about forming an ultra-right alliance.
The DVU's strong showing has brought back memories of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
Frey pledged to lead the DVU, accused of racism and anti-Semitism by Germany's watchdogs against extremism, to election triumphs particularly across the formerly communist east.
``Voting right wing for young people has become part of youth culture there, just like skateboarding and techno (music),'' Frey said at his first news conference since his party emerged as the region's fourth political force in Sunday's shock result.
Frey said he was holding talks with Franz Schoenhuber, the former leader of the right-wing extremist Republicans, and other groups about joining forces ahead of the general election.
``We will decide on cooperation in the next few days,'' he told journalists in Munich's Mathaeser, a traditional Bavarian restaurant and meeting place for the local right-wing scene.
Frey said the DVU, or Deutsche Volksunion, which says it has about 16,000 members nationwide, had 300 members in Saxony-Anhalt at the start of the campaign and this grew to 1,500.
In the same way, Frey hoped a potentially strong right-wing alliance could change Germany's political landscape, not just by winning elections but by influencing the mainstream parties.
He noted that Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), had become tougher on refugees, and that even the candidate for chancellor of the left-leaning Social Democrats, Gerhard Schroeder, spoke out last year against ``foreigners who abuse their rights as guests.''
``When the old parties start behaving in a normal way and start to recognise our national interests, then I can feel I have more than fulfilled my task,'' Frey said, urging Germany's established parties to return to their ``national roots.''
Unemployment, now at a post-war record high of 4.6 million, should be tackled by channelling Germany's European Union contributions into job creation and by preventing foreigners from taking jobs from Germans, he said.
``Fake asylum-seekers'' and ``criminal foreigners'' should be deported immediately.
``In Saxony-Anhalt 10 percent of foreigners are criminals and 25 percent are in organised crime,'' he said.
Frey distanced the DVU from the skinhead scene, saying any ``criminals'' had been expelled, and denied it was racist, saying it included ``Indians, blacks and yellows'' in its ranks.
``Integrated foreigners have our friendship and devotion,'' said Frey, who counts other European ultra right-wingers, such as French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky, among his friends. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German bosses tackle youth jobs, unions critical
08:34 a.m. Apr 28, 1998 Eastern
By Tara FitzGerald
COLOGNE, Germany, April 28 (Reuters) - German employers on Tuesday launched an initiative to help Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government fight youth unemployment, but trade unions said too little was being done to cut dole queues.
The Federal Association of German Employers (BDA) said that as many as half a million youth unemployed lacked qualifications and announced measures to combat the problem by offering more on-the-job training.
``If we concentrate our efforts we can create between 15,000 and 20,000 jobs a year,'' BDA president Dieter Hundt told a news conference.
``That is a concrete contribution to solving the problem.''
The BDA initiative is linked to a new government jobs programme announced last week that focused particularly on young people and the long-term unemployed.
The government programme was laid out in line with a European Union (EU) agreement made last year at a special jobs summit in Luxembourg, but came under fire from trade unions and opposition politicians who said it lacked substance.
Kohl has been slammed for his record on unemployment, which stood at 4.6 million in March, the highest for the month since World War Two. Unemployment is the number one issue in the campaign for September's general election.
The German Trade Union Federation (DGB) said that despite the new jobs programme, Kohl's government was not doing enough to combat the high numbers of youth and long-term unemployed.
Since 1991, the rate of youth unemployment had doubled and every 10th person under 25 could expect to be unemployed for more than a year, DGB deputy leader Ursula Engelen-Kefer said.
The success of the extreme-right German People's Union (DVU) in an eastern state election on Sunday showed the results of such feelings of hopelessness, she added.
The DVU, campaigning on a nationalist platform and blaming foreigners for taking German jobs, took nearly 13 percent of the vote at its first attempt in Saxony-Anhalt, the state with the highest unemployment in Germany.
Their message appealed particularly to the young, with pollsters estimating that one in four voters under 30 backed the DVU.
Germany's opposition Social Democrats (SPD), riding high in opinion polls ahead of September's vote, said they would act immediately to restore an ``alliance for jobs'' between employers and trade unions if they oust Kohl.
Walter Riester, deputy leader of the powerful IG Metall union who has been tipped in the media as a possible SPD labour minister, blamed Kohl for allowing talks on building such an alliance to collapse in 1996.
``The Kohl government wrecked the alliance for jobs two years ago,'' Riester told the Bild daily in an interview due to appear on Wednesday. ``We will create such an alliance -- a different, more effective one.''
The head of Germany's Federal Labour Office, Bernhard Jagoda, said at the BDA presentation he expected unemployment to fall in April by about the same amount as it did a year earlier.
He forecast that jobless data due out next week would show a fall in unadjusted unemployment roughly in line with a month-on-month drop of 130,000 in April 1997. ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
No risk of national far-right success - Kohl party
10:09 a.m. Apr 28, 1998 Eastern
BONN, April 28 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats tried on Tuesday to reassure the world that the far right's strong showing in a state election on Sunday could not be repeated at national level.
Karl Lamers, foreign policy spokesman of Kohl's party in parliament, told international journalists that the strong support for the anti-immigrant German People's Union (DVU) was due to factors prevalent only in east Germany.
He said DVU success in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt was a reaction to widespread feelings of insecurity among east Germans, caused by the rapid change from communism to capitalism and the high unemployment that resulted.
``Overcoming unemployment is the key to overcoming right-wing radicalism,'' Lamers said.
He said the strength of the far right in the east was a serious cause for concern, but the ex-communist region accounted for less than 20 percent of Germany's population.
There was no sign of a rise in support for extremists in western Germany, Lamers said.
He also predicted the DVU would score less well in Saxony-Anhalt in September's general election than the 13 percent share of the vote it garnered on Sunday.
``In a general election, people vote much less according to a mood of a protest and much more according to what they want to achieve,'' Lamers said. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Israeli envoy alarmed by German right-wing surge
02:42 p.m Apr 28, 1998 Eastern
BONN, April 28 (Reuters) - Israel's ambassador to Bonn said on Tuesday he was alarmed that Germans had turned to the far-right in a state election and was baffled that voters were looking to ``the ghosts of the past'' to solve today's problems.
Avi Primor told the Cologne-based Express newspaper that Israel expects the German public to react to the surge in support for the far-right German People's Union (DVU), which won 13 percent of the vote in the depressed state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday.
``It causes me great concern,'' Primor said, according to an advance text released ahead of publication on Wednesday.
``It was completely unexpected for us that Germans, of all people, would turn to a right-wing extremist party. There are many ways to protest. But why, 53 years after World War Two, are Germans turning to the ghosts of the past? We just can't comprehend that.''
Primor said he and Israel were waiting for Germany to condemn the far-right party. He said the overwhelming majority of Germans were democrats.
``But there is nevertheless a minority that hasn't let go of the past,'' he said. ``If the majority of Germans show that they will not simply accept this development as a matter of course then our confidence will be restored.''
Bavarian millionaire publisher Gerhard Frey, founder of the DVU, said on Monday he was talking with other groups about forming an ultra-right alliance for September's federal election.
Frey pledged to lead the DVU, accused of anti-Semitism and racism by Germany's internal security service, to election triumphs particularly across the formerly communist east where unemployment is especially high. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FEATURE-Holocaust still shapes Israel's character 50 years on
09:11 p.m Apr 27, 1998 Eastern
By Jeffrey Heller
JERUSALEM, April 28 (Reuters) - The Nazi Holocaust still hangs like a dark cloud over Israel half a century after the Jewish state rose from the ashes of six million dead.
A week before the country celebrates its Jubilee with song, dance and fireworks, sirens sounded on April 23 and Israelis paid homage to Holocaust victims on an annual remembrance day.
But only a fraction of those who stood to attention in streets, offices, homes and schools were witness to Adolf Hitler's ``Final Solution'' for the Jews of Europe.
By the time Israel marks its 75th anniversary, the youngest survivors will be nearing 80.
But Israel is taking steps to ensure the Holocaust will not fade to just another entry in a textbook as the estimated 250,000 Israelis who lived through the horror pass on.
Each year, thousands of Israeli teenagers undergo a unique rite of passage in high school, travelling to the sites of Nazi death camps in Poland to see the ashes for themselves.
``We cried buckets,'' said Gilat Skital, 17, who recently visited Auschwitz and other camps with a group of 160 students from Maccabim-Reut High School in central Israel.
``What broke me were the baby clothes and the seven tonnes of human ashes that I saw right in front of my eyes,'' she said.
LITTLE SYMPATHY AT FIRST
Coming to Israel, a country where the Volkswagen Beetle -- the product of Hitler's vision of a car for every German worker -- was once the most popular vehicle on the roads, Holocaust survivors often encountered cruel twists on the path to recovery.
Back in pre-state Israel, Jews who came of age with a gun in their hand fighting Arabs looked down on their European brethren as weaklings who went to their deaths like lambs led to the slaughter.
They called the newcomers ``sabon,'' or soap in Hebrew -- slang for ``meek'' and a horrific allusion to accounts, now disputed by some historians, that Nazis made soap out of the remains of Jews they killed in gas chambers.
Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial to the Holocaust, makes no attempt to gloss over the cool welcome accorded to the 250,000 survivors who arrived after World War Two.
In a commentary for this year's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, the Jerusalem-based institute and museum acknowledged that the Jewish inhabitants of then-Palestine gave little thought to the survivors' scars.
``(They) were uninterested in the survivors' stories and their emotional burdens and most of the new arrivals enclosed themselves within a wall of silence,'' it said.
Some survivors have spoken out about the stares of disdain their concentration camp number tattoos drew in public places.
But as Israel matured as a country, sensitivities changed.
At Remembrance Day ceremonies, Israeli leaders now recite the names of their family members killed in the Holocaust, honouring them much in the way Israeli soldiers killed in combat are commemorated.
In the run-up to this year's memorial day, Army Chief of Staff Amnon Shahak convened the General Staff at Yad Vashem to discuss with Holocaust experts the meaning of the tragedy for the Jewish people.
``We visited the memorial today in order to remember...and understand the importance of a secure Jewish homeland for the Jewish people and the enormous responsibility that we bear as the General Staff of the Israel Defence Forces,'' Shahak wrote in Yad Vashem's visitors' book.
Two years ago, a wave of revulsion swept Israel in response to news that a Tel Aviv shop planned to auction what its owner said was a bar of soap made from death camp victims.
A public outcry forced the store to cancel the sale of what one Israeli expert said was soap which contained no human remains and was issued to German troops.
COMING TO TERMS WITH POST-WAR GERMANY
As survivors struggled to come to terms with their own past, Israeli political leaders walked through a minefield of emotions in dealing with post-war Germany.
In 1952, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, announced in parliament that his government would seek reparations from Germany for the Jewish people.
The decision immediately drew the ire of opposition leader Menachem Begin, who was vehemently opposed to any dealings with Germany. The controversy touched off riots outside the Knesset but an agreement with Bonn was signed.
Holocaust survivors worldwide have been paid more than $54 billion in compensation by Germany since World War Two.
Israeli-German relations have normalised to the point that Germany is now a main European trading partner and regarded as one of Israel's closest allies.
Some 200,000 German tourists come to Israel each year, a figure surpassed only by visitors from the United States.
``I don't think today's Germany is like the old Germany,'' said Omer Koren, 17, just back from Poland where he lit a memorial candle at Auschwitz for relatives killed by the Nazis.
EICHMANN TRIAL KEPT MEMORIES ALIVE
In acts of punishment and remembrance, Israel has twice held Nazi war crimes trials.
Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents in Argentina in 1961.
Convicted of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, the ``man in the glass booth'' was hanged in 1962 and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean. No one has been executed in Israel since.
Twenty-five years later, Israel put on trial John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born U.S. auto worker accused of being ``Ivan the Terrible'' of the Treblinka death camp.
One by one, white-haired survivors took the witness stand in a Jerusalem theatre converted into a courtroom, pointed fingers at Demjanjuk and identified him as the brutal guard who operated engines that poured carbon monoxide into death chambers.
Demjanjuk denied wrongdoing, insisting he was a victim of mistaken identity. His lawyer accused Israeli authorities of turning the televised proceedings into a show trial intended to teach a history lesson to a generation born since Eichmann was put to death.
The court convicted Demjanjuk of war crimes in 1988 and sentenced him to death. But the ruling was overturned in 1993 by Israel's Supreme Court after evidence emerged that another man was ``Ivan.''
EMOTIONAL LESSON IN CAMP VISITS
On their school trips to Poland, Israeli youngsters, carrying Israeli flags into the death camps and speaking Hebrew on the street, see the faces of evil from the past and some echoes of it in the present.
``A lot of kids in the delegation ran into real anti-Semites,'' said Rakefet Keidar, 16. ``One man walked by some of my friends and spat. Another made an obscene gesture.''
Rakefet and her schoolmates said the experience had reshaped their feelings about Israel, a nation in which Jews are sharply divided by politics, ethnic differences and religious observance.
``I was thinking before the trip about emigrating,'' Omer said, complaining about a lack of mutual respect and tolerance in Israeli society.
``But after the trip, I believe I will stay in Israel. Nothing will move me from here because this truly is my country,'' he said.
Rakefet said the visit had strengthened her view that Israelis must strive to put aside their differences.
``Peace is the most important thing but before we make peace with others we have to make peace among ourselves because we are one people,'' she said. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Germany braces for right-left May Day clashes
12:34 p.m. Apr 29, 1998 Eastern
By Deborah Cole
BERLIN, April 29 (Reuters) - German officials said on Wednesday they were bracing for clashes between leftists and neo-Nazis across the former communist east on May 1.
Right-wing extremist parties and left-wing activists have threatened to take to the streets in several eastern cities for the Labour Day holiday on Friday and Berlin Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm pledged to control any gatherings with a heavy police presence.
``I will not tolerate any violence,'' he told a news conference.
Schoenbohm said he intended to prevent incidents like those in recent years in which Berlin leftists rampaged through eastern districts of the city and attacked police with pavement stones and bottles.
The Berlin police would get support from border guards in the neighbouring states of Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, he said, while city barkeepers in traditional flashpoint areas had promised to close their doors for the day.
Earlier in the week, authorities in the city of Leipzig said they had banned a rally by the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) scheduled to take place there on May 1 because of security concerns.
The NPD, whose members have been mobilising for weeks with placards and flyers and over the Internet, now says it intends to gather in the eastern cities of Halle and Gera instead.
A police spokesman in Halle said the NPD were expecting around 6,000 demonstrators to gather in the city and authorities were reviewing possibilities to block the event due to public safety worries.
Gera Mayor Ralf Rauch said he would also attempt to block the NPD march.
``We are working on getting an injunction,'' Rauch said. ``May 1 is a labour union holiday and it should stay that way.''
A court in the state of Saxony is still reviewing an NPD appeal against the ban on the Leipzig march.
Berlin's Schoenbohm said leftists planned to shadow the right wing on Friday and disrupt their demonstrations, then meet for their own rally in Berlin in the evening.
He also said he had heard reports the leftists planned to gather in Saxony-Anhalt to protest against the 12.9 percent support the far-right German People's Union (DVU) won at a regional election there on Sunday.
This result was the strongest showing by a far-right party since World War Two. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German opposition urges action on far-right crime
10:03 a.m. Apr 29, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 29 (Reuters) - German opposition parties called on Wednesday for ``zero tolerance'' of ultra right-wing crime after extremists scored their best post-war election result in a regional poll.
Greens' immigration spokesman Cem Ozdemir and Social Democrat (SPD) legal affairs spokeswoman Herta Daeubler-Gmelin called for tough measures to combat far-right crime and warned other parties in parliament against a shift to the right.
``For people who make the Hitler salute or collect Nazi memorabilia...we know only too well what it can lead to in this country,'' Ozdemir said, referring to the Nazis' slaughter of Jews and other minorities.
``We want zero tolerance towards ultra-right crime,'' he told a news conference.
Ozdemir also criticised the Christian Social Union (CSU), Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Bavarian allies, who responded to gains made by the German People's Union (DVU) in a regional poll by calling for a return to traditional right-wing values.
The DVU grabbed 13 percent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday. It was the extreme right's best election result in Germany since World War Two.
``I appeal to my parliamentary colleagues to stand firm and not to make concessions to the DVU,'' he said.
Ozdemir, the only deputy of Turkish origin in the Bundestag lower house of parliament, proposed creating a central office to document crimes of the ultra right to help investigators.
He also called for swifter prosecution of rightist criminals and said teachers and youth workers should be urged to address the problem more effectively.
``A democratic society must protect minorities, whether they are foreigners, gays or lesbians. Victims need more protection. Sometimes we are more concerned about the perpetrators,'' he said.
The SPD's Daeubler-Gmelin said while right-wing radicals elected to regional or municipal parliaments could be fought with logical arguments, criminals required tougher action.
``I mean skinheads with Rottweilers, who terrorise small towns and fill people with fear. That is a task for the police, something which cannot and will not be tolerated,'' she told German radio.
The DVU's shock election victory plunged Bonn's mainstream parties into soul-searching as to where they had gone wrong.
Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), who head the ruling coalition, plummeted nearly 12.5 percentage points to 22 percent as voters in Saxony-Anhalt deserted them in droves.
The Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) failed to gain the five percent of the vote necessary under German law to win seats in the state assembly. Only the left-leaning SPD slightly improved their showing.
The FDP, Kohl's junior coalition partners, said the problem of extremist crime was not confined to the right and suggested a parliamentary investigation into extremism in general.
The CDU said mass unemployment in the former communist east was feeding right-wing radicalism. It said this was at the root of what was primarily a protest vote in Saxony-Anhalt.
The CSU, the CDU's more conservative sister party, has said the DVU's success showed that apart from jobs they needed to put more stress on law and order and immigration policies.
Ozdemir said that ascribing the radicals' success only to unemployment was to play down a real ultra right-wing threat. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Far right gains surprise German pollsters
09:01 a.m. Apr 29, 1998 Eastern
By Douglas Busvine
BONN, April 29 (Reuters) - Last weekend's stunning gains by the extreme right in a German state election caught the nation's political establishment off guard. But it seems no one was more surprised than Germany's public opinion pollsters.
Surveys in the runup to Sunday's vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt had shown the far-right German People's Union (DVU) scoring between four and eight percent of the vote.
The DVU's final tally of 13 percent, a post-World War Two record for a far-right party, led to recriminations from shocked mainstream politicians that pollsters had let them down badly and had yet again under-represented support for the far-right.
But pollsters rejected the accusations and argued the vote in the former communist region was marked by special circumstances which made accurate forecasting extremely difficult.
``The situation in Saxony-Anhalt was unique,'' Dieter Roth of the Electoral Research Group told Reuters on Wednesday.
Research showed a lack of enthusiasm for the Social Democrat-led coalition of state premier Reinhard Hoeppner, while the candidate of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), Christoph Bergner, had a weak public image.
That, on top of public anger at the region's 25 percent unemployment rate, left the door open for parties to attract the protest votes of a volatile electorate which has yet to develop set voting habits.
But what pollsters found hardest to cope with was the late entry in the state election campaign of the DVU, which did not put up any local candidates but instead saturated the streets with placards bearing such slogans as ``Foreign Criminals Out!.''
Roth admitted that this led to a late surge that pollsters did not latch on to until a few days before the election.
``In the last four days the DVU had a share of eight percent. We knew at the middle of the week before the election that something big was going to hit us,'' he said.
Other pollsters also found an unwillingness among some voters to reveal their true intentions to canvassers.
``People who intent to vote for extreme-right parties do not have the same readiness to admit their voting intentions as others,'' said Klaus-Peter Schoeppner, head of the Emnid research institute.
And, because the DVU was running in Saxony-Anhalt for the first time, there was no basis on which to adjust poll findings to better reflect the final election result.
The success of the DVU was particularly bad news for Kohl's CDU, which plunged 12.4 percentage points to 22 percent of the popular vote. But the SPD, ahead in polls nationally, only managed to gain two percentage points to 35.9 percent.
Pollsters also underestimated the showing of the right-wing Republican party in state elections in the prosperous western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 1992, when it won 11 percent of the vote.
But they got it right four years later, when they correctly predicted a fall in Republican support to nine percent.
Looking ahead to the general election on September 27, they said the costly campaign blitz by Frey's DVU in Saxony-Anhalt, which lies to the west of Berlin and has just over two million voters, would be impossible to repeat at national level.
Frey has in the past scored successes in polls in small states like Schleswig-Holstein and Bremen, and just fell short of the five percent hurdle required to gain election to the Hamburg city senate last year.
But pollsters said Frey would not be able to challenge the established parties in large states -- or even in eastern states which face economic difficulties but have leaders who enjoy greater public respect.
``At a national level the DVU will not be in a position to run a campaign like it just has,'' Roth said. ``Protest voters won't risk an extreme right-wing party can sharing power.''
``But what you can certainly expect is that the right overall will gain in the next national opinion polls because of the Saxony-Anhalt effect.'' REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German Greens warn against right-wing extremism
08:53 a.m. Apr 29, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 29 (Reuters) - Germany's Greens party called on Wednesday for ``zero tolerance'' of ultra right-wing crime, after right-wing extremists scored their best post-war election result.
Greens' immigration spokesman Cem Ozdemir called for tough measures to combat right-wing extremist crime and warned other parties in parliament against moving towards the right.
Ozdemir also criticised the Christian Social Union, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Bavarian allies, who responded to gains made by the German People's Union (DVU) in a regional poll, by calling for a return to traditional right-wing values.
The DVU grabbed 13 percent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday. It was the extreme right's best election result in Germany since World War Two.
``For people who make the Hitler salute in the evenings or collect Nazi memorabilia...we know only too well what it can lead to in this country as we have a fateful history,'' Ozdemir said, referring to the Nazis' slaughter of Jews and other minorities.
``We want zero tolerance towards ultra-right crime,'' he told a news conference. ``I appeal to my parliamentary colleagues to stand firm and not to make concessions to the DVU.''
Ozdemir, the only deputy of Turkish origin in the Bundestag (lower house), proposed creating a central office to document crimes of the ultra right to help investigators.
He also called for a swifter prosecution of rightist criminals and said teachers and youth workers should be called on to address the problem more effectively.
``A democratic society must protect minorities, whether they are foreigners, gays or lesbians. Victims need more protection. Sometimes we are more concerned about the perpetrators.''
The DVU's shock election victory plunged Bonn's mainstream parties into soul-searching as to what they had done wrong.
Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), who head the ruling coalition, plummeted nearly 12.5 percentage points to 22 percent, as voters in Saxony-Anhalt deserted them in droves.
The Greens and the liberal Free Democrats failed to gain the five per cent of the vote necessary under German law to be represented in the state assembly. Only the left-leaning Social Democrats slightly improved their showing.
The CDU said mass unemployment in the former communist east was feeding right-wing radicalism. It said this was at the root of what was primarily a protest vote.
The Christian Social Union, the CDU's more conservative sister party, has said the DVU's success showed that apart from jobs they needed to put more stress on law and order and immigration policies.
Ozdemir said that ascribing the radicals' success just to unemployment played down a real ultra right-wing threat.
DVU leader Gerhard Frey, a Bavarian millionaire publisher, said on Tuesday his aim was not just to repeat their election success, but to change Germany's political landscape by influencing the mainstream parties.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
U.S. Senate panel approves Holocaust asset search
06:16 p.m Apr 29, 1998 Eastern
WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) - The banking committee of the U.S. Senate approved on Wednesday legislation to create a presidential advisory commission to look for the assets of Holocaust victims hidden in the United States.
Advocates of the legislation say they do not expect to find much but they want the United States to set a good example to other countries where more Nazi-era assets might have gone.
``While we have sought answers from Switzerland and other nations on the disposition of dormant bank accounts and Nazi gold, we have not pursued the issue here in the United States. It is time that we begin this search,'' committee chairman Senator Alfonse D'Amato said at a session to draft the legislation, known as the U.S. Holocaust Assets Commission Act.
D'Amato, a New York Republican, has led a campaign to press Swiss banks to dig out records for Holocaust assets.
``By creating this commission we establish even greater moral authority and diplomatic credibility with other nations from which we seek answers to these important questions. Thus far, 12 nations have already set up national commissions to look into these issues,'' D'Amato said.
The legislation, which is backed by the administration, including Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, needs to pass in the Senate and the House of Representatives. No date has been set for sending it to the full Senate.
The commission will focus on conducting research on the collection and disposition of the assets if they came into the United States, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System or any Federal Reserve Bank, from 1933 to 1945.
The historical commission would seek to find dormant bank accounts of Holocaust victims in U.S. banks, brokerage accounts, securities and bonds, art work and religious artifacts, insurance policies and German-looted gold shipped to the United States through the Tripartite Gold Commission.
It will have a budget of $3.5 million, with the costs split between the interested agencies through Dec. 31, 1999, the date its report is due to be submitted to the president.
The proposed 21-member commission would have members appointed by both the Congress and the president as well as ``private citizens who have demonstrated their leadership on issues relating to the financial community, public service and the history of the Holocaust,'' D'Amato said.
``We are obliged to set history straight and correct any injustices in our own country. The United States has a moral responsibility to address the same issues to which we have sought answers from Switzerland and other nations in Europe. The spirit of American decency demands no less,'' he added.
The version of the bipartisan legislation reviewed by the Senate Banking Committee contained technical changes to make the bill conform with a House version. All changes were negotiated with the Clinton administration.
The commission will have the mandate to make recommendations for legislative, administrative or other actions it deems necessary or appropriate. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
New Argentina bureau will hunt any remaining Nazis
08:45 p.m Apr 30, 1998 Eastern
By Stephen Brown
BUENOS AIRES, April 30 (Reuters) - Argentina created a special bureau on Thursday to track down any remaining Nazi war criminals hiding in a country that was once the refuge of top Nazis like Adolf Eichman, Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele.
The launch coincided with the arrest on Thursday of Croatian concentration camp chief Dinko Sakic, sought for extradition to his homeland for alleged war crimes when he ran Jasenovac camp under the Ustashe Nazi regime from 1942 to 1944 during the Second World War.
Victor Ramos, head of the government's Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, said Argentina wanted to ensure there were no more like Sakic and former Nazi Capt. Erich Priebke, who was extradited to Italy in 1995.
``Some people said when Priebke was arrested that because of his age -- these crimes were committed in the '30s and '40s -- he was the last Nazi,'' Ramos told Reuters. ``But Sakic triggered a red light. It made us think there could be more.''
Argentina has moved rapidly on Croatia's request for the extradition of Sakic, which arrived Monday. Ramos said he will be extradited immediately if he does not appeal.
Eager to shake off its image as a Nazi haven, Argentina has promised to block him from ever returning to the country that was his home for 50 years, as it did with Priebke, who lived openly in the Andean town of Bariloche for decades.
Priebke was found guilty by an Italian court last July of participating in the massacre of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944.
Following his extradition, President Carlos Menem ordered the creation of a committee to investigate Nazi activities, including reports that Nazi gold was stashed in Argentina.
The founders of Menem's Peronist Party, post-war leaders Juan and Eva Peron, are said by historians to have had Fascist sympathies. Sakic said they helped him settle in Argentina.
But Ramos said the Office of Analysis of Nazi activities was not just meant to atone for the past. ``It will help us combat a resurgence of neo-Nazi activities. Something is wrong in a country where 10 skinheads attack (someone) because they think he is Jewish,'' Ramos said in a telephone interview.
Three men got three years in jail two weeks ago for that attack, when a gang of 10 wearing leather jackets with swastikas beat a 32-year-old man they wrongly thought was Jewish.
Buenos Aires is home to one of the world's largest Jewish communities -- which has suffered two serious bomb attacks. In 1992 a bomb at the Israeli embassy killed 29 people and in 1994 a bomb at the AMIA Jewish community center killed 86.
Neither crime has been solved, provoking criticism from Israel and Jewish communities all over the world. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FEATURE-Fascist's return will force Croatia to examine past
09:31 p.m Apr 30, 1998 Eastern
By Laura Lui
ZAGREB, May 1 (Reuters) - A Croatian pensioner candidly tells of his wartime exploits in a television interview half a world away from Croatia.
Within weeks, his testimony looks set to reverberate through his homeland as it forces the young country to finally re-examine and evaluate its attitude towards its own history.
In an interview on Argentine television in early April, 76-year-old Dinko Sakic told of his time at the helm of one of the most notorious World War Two death camps -- Jasenovac, which came to be known as the ``Auschwitz of the Balkans.''
Sakic was then only 20 and his country was the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), run by the Nazi-backed Ustashe regime which persecuted and killed tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Serbs and anti-fascist Croats.
Jasenovac closed in 1945 when the NDH collapsed and Sakic has since led a quiet life in Argentina.
But present-day Croatia, which has basked in nationalist sentiment ever since gaining independence from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, is now demanding Sakic's extradition to try him for war crimes.
His sudden re-emergence could have a shocking effect, forcing the country to come to terms with its past and end its tightrope walk between its Nazi and anti-fascist World War Two legacies.
TAMPERING WITH HISTORY
``This country has been tampering with history for the past eight years. And once that starts, it's hard to come clean from such a mire,'' history professor Ivo Goldstein told Reuters.
``In the name of a feigned reconciliation of divided Croat-hood, the government tried to promote reconciliation between Ustashe and (anti-fascist) partisan fighters and their descendants. But you can't reconcile two different ideologies,'' he said.
After centuries of foreign rule, Croatia came closest to being an independent state between 1941 and 1945 under the fascist Ustashe regime.
Yet at the same time many Croatians joined the anti-fascist partisan movement led by the Communist Party and Marshal Josef Tito, a Croat who later ruled communist Yugoslavia for more than 30 years.
Franjo Tudjman, who came to power in Croatia just before it seceded in 1990, was one of Tito's youngest generals. Despite his own anti-fascist background, Tudjman himself has fuelled a virulent debate about Croatia's history.
Although condemning Ustashe crimes several times, the 75-year-old president at least once referred to them as the precursors of modern-day Croatia.
``One should realise that the NDH was not just a quisling creation but an expression of the Croatian people's wish to have their own independent and sovereign state,'' Tudjman said in a 1996 interview with Croatian media.
HARDLINERS RETURNED TO FIGHT FOR STATEHOOD
When cracks in the Yugoslav federation started to show, many Ustashe who fled abroad after 1945 and their descendants came back to feature prominently in Tudjman's 1990 presidential campaign.
Several hardliners returned to fight for the dream of Croatian statehood and won high places in the regime.
The opposition of the minority Serb community to the idea of Croatian independence was only strengthened by the nationalist rhetoric, and the fear of a resurgence of the Ustashe was the driving force behind its rebellion.
Although the Ustashe regime was never reinstated, the government often turned a blind eye to the reintroduction of Ustashe symbols.
The kuna currency, first used as paper money under the fascist regime, was reintroduced. Rightist parties started to raise hands in Ustashe salutes during rallies.
A Catholic priest held a mass for Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic, whose pictures crept back into bars and restaurants. The priest was criticised by church officials but remained in orders.
At the same time the government advocated, or tacitly approved, the wiping away of many signs of Croatia's partisan past, despite claiming it was proud of its contribution to the Yugoslav anti-fascist movement in World War Two.
It renamed the ``Square of the Victims of Fascism'' in Zagreb the ``Square of Great Croatian People.'' The same fate befell many streets and schools named after communist leaders. Many partisan monuments were blown up.
TIME TO SHAKE OFF HISTORICAL BURDEN
``Our authorities have a hypocritical attitude toward our anti-fascist past. They are anti-fascists when the need arises but, when they want to fawn upon the other side, then they are not,'' Goldstein said.
``The reconciliation project was aimed at striking a balance between Ustashe and partisan crimes, in an effort to cast doubt on the gravity of the Ustashe crimes. The consequence of this has been the reappearance of some Ustashe symbols,'' he added.
The project culminated in Tudjman's proposal to re-bury Ustasha and partisan victims, as well as Croats killed in the 1991 war with minority Serbs, side by side in Jasenovac, which would turn the site into a symbol of all-Croat reconciliation.
According to independent Croatian estimates which Croatian Jews regard as most accurate, some 85,000 Serbs, Jews, gypsies and anti-fascist Croats perished in Jasenovac. Serbs and some international Jewish groups put the toll at 600,000.
The return of the former Jasenovac commander is now polarising the Croatian public. While nationalists see it as yet more Western pressure, others think the time has come for Croatia to finally shake off its historical burden.
It took a first step last August when it formally apologised to the Jewish people for crimes committed during World War Two, enabling full diplomatic relations with Israel.
Unlike Germany, which has had 50 years to try and come to terms with its Nazi past, Croatia under communism never had that opportunity. But, seven years after independence, many believe it is high time the debate was held and resolved.
``The truth about Sakic and the NDH must be told and accepted as a precondition for Croatia becoming part of Europe. Because of such fumbling with fascism and anti-fascism, Croatia has lost its anti-fascist identity,'' Goldstein said.
Ivo Banac, a history professor at Yale University and a human rights activist, agrees.
``It is not evil in itself to have fascists in your past -- most European states had them at one point in time or other. But it is a pity if you relate to them benevolently,'' he said.
``It is bad when the state gets involved on the side of those who want to change history.'' ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
CORRECTED - FEATURE-Fascist's return will force Croatia to exami
11:56 p.m. Apr 30, 1998 Eastern
By Laura Lui
ZAGREB, May 1 (Reuters) - A Croatian pensioner candidly tells of his wartime exploits in a television interview half a world away from Croatia.
Within weeks, his testimony looks set to reverberate through his homeland as it forces the young country to finally re-examine and evaluate its attitude towards its own history.
In an interview on Argentine television in early April, 76-year-old Dinko Sakic told of his time at the helm of one of the most notorious World War Two death camps -- Jasenovac, which came to be known as the ``Auschwitz of the Balkans.''
Sakic was then only 20 and his country was the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), run by the Nazi-backed Ustashe regime which persecuted and killed tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, Serbs and anti-fascist Croats.
Jasenovac closed in 1945 when the NDH collapsed and Sakic has since led a quiet life in Argentina.
But present-day Croatia, which has basked in nationalist sentiment ever since gaining independence from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, is now demanding Sakic's extradition to try him for war crimes.
His sudden re-emergence could have a shocking effect, forcing the country to come to terms with its past and end its tightrope walk between its Nazi and anti-fascist World War Two legacies.
TAMPERING WITH HISTORY
``This country has been tampering with history for the past eight years. And once that starts, it's hard to come clean from such a mire,'' history professor Ivo Goldstein told Reuters.
``In the name of a feigned reconciliation of divided Croat-hood, the government tried to promote reconciliation between Ustashe and (anti-fascist) partisan fighters and their descendants. But you can't reconcile two different ideologies,'' he said.
After centuries of foreign rule, Croatia came closest to being an independent state between 1941 and 1945 under the fascist Ustashe regime.
Yet at the same time many Croatians joined the anti-fascist partisan movement led by the Communist Party and Marshal Josip Broz Tito, a Croat who later ruled communist Yugoslavia for more than 30 years.
Franjo Tudjman, who came to power in Croatia just before it seceded in 1991, was one of Tito's youngest generals. Despite his own anti-fascist background, Tudjman himself has fuelled a virulent debate about Croatia's history.
Although condemning Ustashe crimes several times, the 75-year-old president at least once referred to them as the precursors of modern-day Croatia.
``One should realise that the NDH was not just a quisling creation but an expression of the Croatian people's wish to have their own independent and sovereign state,'' Tudjman said in a 1996 interview with Croatian media.
HARDLINERS RETURNED TO FIGHT FOR STATEHOOD
When cracks in the Yugoslav federation started to show, many Ustashe who fled abroad after 1945 and their descendants came back to feature prominently in Tudjman's 1990 presidential campaign.
Several hardliners returned to fight for the dream of Croatian statehood and won high places in the regime.
The opposition of the minority Serb community to the idea of Croatian independence was only strengthened by the nationalist rhetoric, and the fear of a resurgence of the Ustashe was the driving force behind its rebellion.
Although the Ustashe regime was never reinstated, the government often turned a blind eye to the reintroduction of Ustashe symbols.
The kuna currency, first used as paper money under the fascist regime, was reintroduced. Rightist parties started to raise hands in Ustashe salutes during rallies.
A Catholic priest held a mass for Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic, whose pictures crept back into bars and restaurants. The priest was criticised by church officials but remained in orders.
At the same time the government advocated, or tacitly approved, the wiping away of many signs of Croatia's partisan past, despite claiming it was proud of its contribution to the Yugoslav anti-fascist movement in World War Two.
It renamed the ``Square of the Victims of Fascism'' in Zagreb the ``Square of Great Croatian People.'' The same fate befell many streets and schools named after communist leaders. Many partisan monuments were blown up.
TIME TO SHAKE OFF HISTORICAL BURDEN
``Our authorities have a hypocritical attitude toward our anti-fascist past. They are anti-fascists when the need arises but, when they want to fawn upon the other side, then they are not,'' Goldstein said.
``The reconciliation project was aimed at striking a balance between Ustashe and partisan crimes, in an effort to cast doubt on the gravity of the Ustashe crimes. The consequence of this has been the reappearance of some Ustashe symbols,'' he added.
The project culminated in Tudjman's proposal to re-bury Ustasha and partisan victims, as well as Croats killed in the 1991 war with minority Serbs, side by side in Jasenovac, which would turn the site into a symbol of all-Croat reconciliation.
According to independent Croatian estimates which Croatian Jews regard as most accurate, some 85,000 Serbs, Jews, gypsies and anti-fascist Croats perished in Jasenovac. Serbs and some international Jewish groups put the toll at 600,000.
The return of the former Jasenovac commander is now polarising the Croatian public. While nationalists see it as yet more Western pressure, others think the time has come for Croatia to finally shake off its historical burden.
It took a first step last August when it formally apologised to the Jewish people for crimes committed during World War Two, enabling full diplomatic relations with Israel.
Unlike Germany, which has had 50 years to try and come to terms with its Nazi past, Croatia under communism never had that opportunity. But, seven years after independence, many believe it is high time the debate was held and resolved.
``The truth about Sakic and the NDH must be told and accepted as a precondition for Croatia becoming part of Europe. Because of such fumbling with fascism and anti-fascism, Croatia has lost its anti-fascist identity,'' Goldstein said.
Ivo Banac, a history professor at Yale University and a human rights activist, agrees.
``It is not evil in itself to have fascists in your past -- most European states had them at one point in time or other. But it is a pity if you relate to them benevolently,'' he said.
``It is bad when the state gets involved on the side of those who want to change history.'' REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German far-right parties reject election alliance
09:54 a.m. Apr 30, 1998 Eastern
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, April 30 (Reuters) - Two of Germany's main ultra-right parties on Thursday rejected a proposal to form an alliance for September's general election by the party that scored the far right's best election result since World War Two.
Gerhard Frey, the leader of the German People's Union (DVU) which grabbed 13 percent of votes in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, said far-right parties should stop fighting among themselves and unite.
Pledging to change Germany's political landscape by winning more elections and influencing mainstream parties, Frey said he was holding talks with Franz Schoenhuber, the former leader of the far-right Republicans, and other groups.
But two other main far-right parties said they had not received an offer for talks and were not interested in working with the DVU, which they dismissed as a ``pseudo-party.''
``We've always been open to talks. But our experience of cooperation over the years with Frey has not been positive,'' Ulrich Eigenfeld, the leader of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), told Reuters.
``It's too late