Weblog Archives

Personal Home Page

My FM Home Page

Listen to Hober

 

In Reversal, Germany Will Join Lebanon Force

BERLIN, Sept. 20 — German warships will set sail for the Mediterranean on Thursday, after Parliament voted Wednesday to send up to 2,400 troops to patrol the waters off Lebanon. Haunted by the Holocaust, Germany had resisted sending soldiers to the Middle East for fear of potential clashes with Israeli troops.

The deployment, the country’s first in the Middle East since World War II, was approved by a three-to-one ratio. It thrusts Germany into an uncertain phase of its steady development into a nation that projects military force outside its borders.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government pushed for the deployment despite the deep misgivings of many Germans, described the mission as having a “historical dimension.”

“There is perhaps no other area of the world,” Mrs. Merkel said in Parliament, “where Germany’s unique responsibility, the unique responsibility of every German government for the lessons of our past, is so clear.”

German soldiers now patrol dusty towns in northern Afghanistan, jungles in central Africa and wooded hills in Bosnia and Kosovo.

To avoid conflicts with Israeli soldiers, this deployment will include no ground troops — only two frigates with helicopters, two supply ships and four fast-patrol boats. Even with a full complement of 2,400 troops, it would rank third in size for Germany’s foreign deployments, after Afghanistan and the Balkans.

Still, Mrs. Merkel said it was Germany’s duty to support the foreign peacekeeping force being assembled in southern Lebanon, to enforce a truce between Israel and the Hezbollah militia.

The German ships, which will try to prevent the smuggling of weapons to Hezbollah, are part of a maritime force that includes ships from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. The German sailors will be authorized to stop ships suspected of carrying weapons — by force if necessary — board them, and turn them over to Lebanese authorities.

On Tuesday, the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said, “We in the international community are obliged to draw on our strength to help Lebanon as long as it is not itself in a position to do so.”

Whether Germany should play any military role in the Middle East conflict has been a source of debate here for weeks. Parliament approved the mission a day after the chief of the Israeli military said Israel hoped to pull its last forces out of Lebanon by sundown on Friday.

The vote in the lower house of Parliament — 442 to 152, with 5 abstentions — was not a surprise, given the commanding majority of Mrs. Merkel’s “grand coalition.”

But opposition leaders voiced strident criticism, warning of the risks of sending troops to a volatile region where Germany has built up good will with its diplomacy rather than its military might.

“We should be under no illusions just because this is a navy mission and not a ground mission,” said Guido Westerwelle, the leader of the opposition Free Democratic Party. Oskar Lafontaine, a leader of the Left Party, said Germany was risking terrorist attacks.

Germans have been on edge since August when the police discovered suitcases with unexploded bombs on two trains in western Germany. Two Lebanese men who had been living in Germany were arrested, and intelligence officials said the timing of the bungled plot might have been linked to the war.

Some critics said Mrs. Merkel’s avowed support of Israel — combined with the decision to commit troops — would jeopardize Germany’s traditional role as a go-between in the Middle East.

“In the past, Germany could be a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians,” said Günter Meyer, director of the Center for Research on the Arab World at the University of Mainz. “But by clearly siding in this mission with the Israelis, we are alienating the rest of the Arab world.”

The German public opposes the deployment, polls indicate, though people differ on how vociferously. Some of the opposition, experts say, is a reflexive tendency in postwar Germany toward pacifism. Some, they say, also reflects anger at how Israel conducted the war in its early days.

Critics fault Mrs. Merkel for not initiating a national debate about Germany’s proliferating military engagements. The lack of discussion outside the capital could come back to haunt her, they say, should this deployment or, more likely, the Afghanistan mission, become messy.

“A lot of people are having doubts about these missions,” said Rainer Arnold, a spokesman on military issues for the Social Democratic Party, which is in a coalition with Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “I’m very concerned about the risks to German soldiers in Afghanistan.”

On Thursday, Parliament is expected to extend the army’s mission in Afghanistan by a year, though.

Mr. Arnold said the German military would soon reach the limits in resources for foreign deployments, not because it lacks troops — 8,000 out of 250,000 military personnel are serving in foreign missions — but because it lacks the specialists these missions require.

“If you compare that with the United States, it’s a smaller percentage,” said Sascha Lange, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “But we are in a transformation to make it possible to deploy troops outside of Germany, and this is only the beginning.”

[I'm sure there so many people out there who are not surprised about this alliance, but I had no clue in my wee world, that this was even a remote possibility...]
##