Category: People

{{Most of the victims were immigrants and their deaths at first failed to make headlines. Police were quick to blame the killings on foreign gangs with links to gambling and drugs.}}

But revelations that a string of unsolved killings may have been a cold-blooded neo-Nazi campaign against ethnic Turks have shaken the nation, forcing Germans to confront painful truths about racism and the broader treatment of immigrants in society.

The sole survivor of the group blamed for the killings — the self-styled National Socialist Underground — goes on trial Monday in Munich, along with four men alleged to have helped the killers in various ways.

Beate Zschaepe, 38, is charged with complicity in the murder of eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman.

She is also accused of involvement in at least two bombings and 15 bank robberies carried out by her accomplices Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boenhardt, who died in an apparent murder-suicide two years ago.

Zschaepe, who surrendered to police four days after Mundlos and Boenhardt were killed, denies the charges. If convicted she faces life imprisonment.

The case is being closely watched by Germany’s 3 million ethnic Turks, many of whom still feel marginalized by German society despite having lived in this country for decades or even having been born here.

“There have been only a handful of trials in recent German history that have had a similar importance,” said Gurcan Daimaguler, a Berlin lawyer of Turkish origin who represents some of the victims’ families.

He cited the post-war trial of Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg Tribunal; the court cases against members of the far-left Red Army Faction terror group starting in the 1970s; and the trials of East German border guards and senior officials who ordered the shooting of people trying to flee to West Germany during the Cold War division of the country.

“These were all trials that went beyond the courtroom,” Daimaguler told media. He noted that each of them prompted periods of soul searching that in some cases continue until today.

It was only when Mundlos and Boenhardt died following a botched bank robbery in November 2011 and weapons were found at the scene tying them to the killings that authorities acknowledged they had failed to stop what amounted to a far-right terror campaign lasting more than a decade.

Public debate has focused on how Germany’s well-funded security services could have been so catastrophically wrong with their long-held theory that the killings were the work of immigrant criminal gangs.

Several high-ranking security officials including the head of Germany’s domestic spy service have already resigned over blunders made during their watch.

These ranged from failing to act on intelligence about the trio’s whereabouts in 1998, shortly after they avoided arrest on lesser crimes; shredding evidence gathered by informants close to the group; and ignoring a racist motive in the crimes despite the fact that random killings without claims of responsibility fit the pattern recommended by racist supremacists — such as the notorious “Blood and Honor” network — for decades.

For years the media described the killings as “Doener Murders” — after the popular Turkish dish of spit-roast meat served in snack bars across Germany.

Yet only two of the nine men killed worked in doener restaurants, and many Turks say the phrase reflected the dismissive attitude mainstream society had toward the victims.

The police failures prompted Parliament to establish an independent panel investigating whether there was institutional reluctance to deal with far-right extremists.

Its chairman Sebastian Edathy has said that not only did Germany’s 36 security services fail to exchange information in the case, but that the potential for far-right violence was massively underestimated even as some officers instinctively blamed the victims.

An internal document drawn up in 2007 by police in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg asserted that the likely killer couldn’t have come from Western Europe because “in our culture the killing of human beings is a grave taboo” — a striking comment in a country that made genocide against Europe’s Jews a matter of state policy in the last century.

Zschaepe, Mundlos and Boehnhardt met as teenagers in the eastern city of Jena amid an ideological vacuum following the 1989 collapse of the Socialist dictatorship in East Germany.

The region suffered economically during the early 1990s, with anti-immigrant sentiments voiced openly even by mainstream politicians, providing a fertile recruiting ground for far-right groups.

Thomas Grund, a social worker in Jena who knew the trio when they first showed up at his youth club twenty years ago, said Zschaepe showed no hint of political extremism until she befriended the two young men who would later become her lovers and co-conspirators.

Grund, who is best known by his nickname, Kaktus, says social workers warned throughout the 1990s that extremist groups were setting up base in small towns and villages in the region but authorities did little.

Sometimes, he says, it appeared as if officials were protecting the far right.

Such claims have been made by people across the political spectrum, skeptical that a group such as the National Socialist Underground managed for more than a decade to slip through Germany’s sophisticated surveillance net for neo-Nazi activity.

At a memorial event last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel apologized to the victims and their families for the wrongful suspicions many had had to endure for years.

She also pledged to take all necessary steps to help those affected by the crimes, and prevent a repetition of the investigate failures in this case.

Merkel’s apology was well received by many Turks at the time. But some noted she didn’t spell out that most of the victims were targeted because they were different from mainstream society: Turkish, and Muslim.

“Here in Germany we are scared of using the word racism,” said Daimaguler, the lawyer. “As long as we don’t call it what it is we will never be able to solve the problem.”

The authorities’ reluctance to highlight the xenophobic motive also worries Barbara John, the official intermediary between the victims’ families and the government.
She is currently campaigning to ensure memorial plaques to honor the victims highlight the racist nature of the crimes.

John, a longtime campaigner on immigration issues, said this would go some way toward giving the victims’ families a sense that they are being taken seriously by the authorities.

“Germany society as such isn’t racist, but there is a deep-rooted lack of trust toward the immigrant community,” she said, noting that it was only recently the families started receiving financial compensation from the government.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle warned last month that the trial could shape the way his country is viewed abroad.

But the handling of the case and its outcome are likely to have a more immediate impact closer to home.

Murat, a Turkish immigrant working at a Berlin doener stall who didn’t want to give his last name for fear of being targeted, said he hoped for a fair trial but didn’t expect the full truth about the perpetrators and their helpers ever to emerge.

“I think they were ignored or maybe even tolerated by the authorities,” he said.

{{It was hailed as a giant step forward for racial integration in a country that has long been ill at ease with its growing immigrant classes. }}

But Cecile Kyenge’s appointment as Italy’s first black Cabinet minister has instead exposed the nation’s ugly race problem, a blight that flares regularly on the soccer pitch with racist taunts and in the diatribes of xenophobic politicians — but has now raised its head at the center of political life.

One politician from a party that not long ago ruled in a coalition derided what he called Italy’s new “bonga bonga government.” On Wednesday, amid increasing revulsion over the reaction, the government authorized an investigation into neo-fascist websites whose members called Kyenge “Congolese monkey” and other epithets.

Kyenge, 48, was born in Congo and moved to Italy three decades ago to study medicine. An eye surgeon, she lives in Modena with her Italian husband and two children. She was active in local center-left politics before winning a seat in the lower Chamber of Deputies in February elections.

Premier Enrico Letta tapped Kyenge to be minister of integration in his hybrid center-left and center-right government that won its second vote of confidence Tuesday.

In his introductory speech to Parliament, Letta touted Kyenge’s appointment as a “new concept about the confines of barriers giving way to hope, of unsurpassable limits giving way to a bridge between diverse communities.”

His praise and that of others has been almost drowned out by the racist slurs directed at Kyenge by politicians of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, an on-again, off-again ally of long-serving ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, and members of neo-fascist Internet groups.

In addition to his “bonga bonga” slur, Mario Borghezio, a European parliamentarian for the League, warned in an interview with Radio 24 that Kyenge would try to “impose tribal traditions” from her native Congo on Italy.

Kyenge on Tuesday responded to the insults, thanking those who had come to her defense and taking a veiled jab at the vulgarity of her critics. “I believe even criticism can inform if it’s done with respect,” she tweeted.

Unlike France, Germany or Britain, where second and third generations of immigrants have settled albeit uneasily, Italy is a relative newcomer to the phenomenon.

France has several high-ranking government ministers with immigrant roots, and few French had a problem with the appointments: Former President Nicolas Sarkozy named a justice minister and urban policy minister, both born in France to North African parents, to his cabinet, while his minister for human rights was born in Senegal.

Francois Hollande’s government spokeswoman was born in Morocco and raised in France, and his interior minister was born in Spain. He also has two black ministers from French overseas territories — one from Guyana and one from Guadeloupe.

Italy is another story. Once a country of emigration to North and South America at the turn of the last century, Italy saw the first waves of migrants from Eastern Europe and Africa coming to its shores only in the 1980s.

In the last decade or two, their numbers have increased exponentially, and with them anti-immigrant sentiment: Surveys show Italians blame immigrants for crime and overtaxing the already burdened public health system.

Foreigners made up about 2 percent of Italy’s population in 1990; currently the figure stands at 7.5%, according to official statistics bureau Istat.

Some of the most blatant manifestations of racism occur in the realm of Italy’s favorite sport, soccer — which for Italians and others has shown itself to be a perfect venue for displays of pent-up emotions. In the case of a handful of Italian teams, soccer is a way for right-wing fan clubs to vent.

Mario Balotelli, the AC Milan striker born in Palermo to Ghanaian immigrants and raised by an Italian adoptive family, knows all about it. Perhaps Italy’s best player today, he has long been the subject of racist taunts on and off the field: Rival fans once hung a banner during a match saying “Black Italians don’t exist” while the vice-president of his own club once called him the household’s “little black boy.”

Balotelli called Kyenge’s nomination “another great step forward for an Italian society that is more civil, responsible and understanding of the need for better, definitive integration.”

The race situation is almost schizophrenic in Italy. In the same week Kyenge was made a government minister and Balotelli was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, AC Milan’s rival Juventus was fined 30,000 euro for fans’ racist taunts during a game against Milan in which Balotelli wasn’t even playing.

“There was no racism 40 years ago because there were no non-white Italians,” said James Walston, a political science professor at American University of Rome. “You need the other in order to hate the other.”

“It will take a long time — probably there will never be a completely racism-free society — but it will take a long time for Italy to reach the sort of acceptance, multi-cultural acceptance that the rest of Europe has and North America has,” he said in an interview.

Kyenge got off to a rocky start with the Northern League when, on the day she was named minister, she said one of her top priorities would be to make it easier for children of immigrants born in Italy to obtain Italian citizenship. Currently, such children can only apply once they turn 18.

The issue has vexed Italy for years and previous center-left governments have failed to change the law even though most Italians — 72 % according to a 2012 Istat-aided study — favor it.

It’s not just a matter of a passport but has real impact on the ability of an immigrant family to integrate into Italian society: Children of non-EU immigrants born in Italy, for example, can’t take advantage of the EU citizen discounts at the Colosseum and other cultural treasures, having to pay full admission prices to get in to learn the heritage of the nation where they were born. If they were Italian citizens, they’d get in free until they were 18.

But raising an issue that so riles the Northern League — during an already tense political transition — was enough to set off Roberto Maroni, the interior minister in Berlusconi’s last center-right government and a top League official.

Maroni immediately demanded that his successor as interior minister make clear his position on the law.

Other members of Maroni’s party were more blunt: Italian newspapers quoted the head of the League in Italy’s northern Lombardy region Matteo Salvini as saying that Kyenge was a “symbol of a hypocritical and do-gooding left that wants to cancel out the crime of illegal immigration and thinks only about immigrants’ rights and not their duties.”

La Repubblica newspaper on Tuesday, meanwhile, cited the vile insults directed at her on fascist Internet groups such as www.ilduce.net . Repubblica said the antagonism was born from the League’s basic opposition to a minister who tends to favor immigrant rights. “But the racist origins had to explode.

And here they are. True, they’re consigned to the stupid transience of the Web, but they’re a sign of the widespread climate of hatred” in the country, the paper wrote.

Coming to Kyenge’s defense was Laura Boldrini, the president of parliament’s lower chamber, who for years was the chief spokeswoman in Italy for the U.N. refugee agency.

In that role she frequently defended the rights of immigrants — and squared off with Northern League leaders after they pushed through a controversial 2009 policy to send back would-be Libyan migrants without screening them first for asylum.

“It is indecent that in a civil society there can be a series of insults — on websites but not only there — that are being hurled against the neo-minister Cecile Kyenge,” Boldrini said. “Like many people, watching her take her oath of office I felt that Italy was taking an important step forward, and not just for ‘new Italians.’”

Also defending Kyenge was the other foreign-born minister in Letta’s government, Josefa Idem, a German-born Italian who won five Olympic kayaking medals before retiring after the London Games.

Idem is Italy’s new equal opportunities minister — one of seven women in Letta’s government — and in that role authorized an investigation by Italy’s national anti-discrimination office into the racist online slurs directed against Kyenge.

Italian news reports quoted Idem as saying she was doing so in her capacity as minister “but also as a woman.”

Sociologist Michele Sorice at Rome’s Luiss University said Italians have long harbored racist attitudes, stemming from the nation’s colonial past in north Africa, but that they stayed hidden until the Northern League “legitimized” xenophobic political rhetoric after entering the government in the 1990s.

The League denies it’s xenophobic and says it is merely protecting the interests of Italians.

Italy has since become more sensitized to the issue, Sorice said, but it still lags behind its European and North American partners.

Changing the law on citizenship, as Kyenge wants, “wouldn’t do anything more than to bring Italy into line with the great European traditions,” he said.

But he was doubtful that this particular government, made up of longtime political rivals, could pull it off when even previous center-left governments had failed to do so.

“It remains to be seen how this can be done on a practical level with a coalition government,” he said.

{AP}

{{A court in Colombia has sentenced a peasant who looked after the baby son of a Farc hostage to 33 years in jail.}}

Jose Crisanto Gomez was found guilty of kidnapping and extortion.

In 2005, Farc rebels handed him the baby of Clara Rojas, a woman they were holding hostage and who had given birth in captivity.

Mr Gomez looked after the child for seven months before handing him over to a state orphanage, where he stayed until DNA tests revealed his identity.

A court in the central city of Villavicencio overturned an earlier decision to absolve Mr Gomez of the charges.

Mr Gomez was not present at the sentencing, which can still be appealed against. Prosecutors are searching for him.

Jungle ordeal

Mr Gomez was living in a rural part of southern Guaviare province with his family when members of Colombia’s largest rebel group, the Farc, handed him an eight-month old boy in January 2005 and ordered the family to look after him.

Mr Gomez says the Farc gave him the boy because his father-in-law was a healer, and the baby was ill.

The boy had a fractured arm, an injury he had sustained during his delivery by Caesarean section in the make-shift jungle camp where he was born, and suffered from malaria and leishmaniasis.

Mr Gomez and his family looked after the baby in their rural home before fleeing from the armed conflict to the provincial capital, San Jose del Guaviare.

There he took the boy to hospital, telling nurses the baby’s name was Juan David Gomez and he was a relative of his.

Noting the baby’s broken and untreated arm, the nurses suspected Mr Gomez of having abused the boy.

They carried out a DNA test, which revealed Mr Gomez and the baby were not related.

Unable to care for the boy and facing growing questions by medical staff, Mr Gomez agreed to hand the baby over to the state authorities.

Desperate search

However, the boy’s identity was not revealed until January 2008.

A policeman who had been held hostage along with Clara Rojas, and who had managed to escape from the Farc, told Ms Rojas’s mother about the child, whom Ms Rojas had named Emmanuel.

The authorities at first assumed Emmanuel was still in the hands of the rebels, but when the Farc delayed the planned release of mother and child, they began to suspect Emmanuel may no longer be with them.

According to Mr Gomez, it was at this time that he first found out about the true identity of the child he had looked after for seven months, and informed the authorities.

Ms Rojas’s mother then began to search orphanages throughout the country for a trace of her grandson.

A child matching his description was finally found in a foster home in the capital, Bogota. A DNA comparison between the boy and Ms Rojas’s mother showed the two were related.

Ms Rojas was released by the Farc in January 2008 and re-united with her son shortly afterwards, after three years of separation.

Mr Gomez was arrested in 2008 and charged with kidnapping, extortion, rebellion and giving false testimony.

He has always maintained that he was never a member of the Farc and did not know that the baby had been taken from his captive mother.

In interviews given to local media after his release in 2012, he said he and his family had been threatened by the rebels, who blamed him for handing over their “prize possession” to the state authorities.

A film about his story, Operation E, was recently released but has been criticised by Ms Rojas for “violating the privacy of Emmanuel”.

Mr Gomez was absolved of the earlier charges in April of last year, but prosecutors appealed against the decision, leading to Wednesday’s sentence.

The court in Villavicenio said Mr Gomez could appeal against the decision.

BBC

{{They were feasts of sublime asparagus — laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. }}

Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler’s food taster.

Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent two and a half years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his “Wolf’s Lair,” the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II.

“He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,” Woelk said of the Nazi leader. “And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that’s why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself.”

With many Germans contending with food shortages and a bland diet as the war dragged on, sampling Hitler’s food had its advantages.

“The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine. And always with a side of rice or pasta,” she recalled. “But this constant fear — we knew of all those poisoning rumors and could never enjoy the food. Every day we feared it was going to be our last meal.”

The petite widow’s story is a tale of the horror, pain and dislocation endured by people of all sides who survived World War II.

Only now in the sunset of her life has she been willing to relate her experiences, which she had buried because of shame and the fear of prosecution for having worked with the Nazis, although she insists she was never a party member.

She told her story as she flipped through a photo album with pictures of her as a young woman, in the same Berlin apartment where she was born in 1917.

Woelk first revealed her secret to a local Berlin reporter a few months ago. Since then interest in her life story has been overwhelming. School teachers wrote and asked her for photos and autographs to bring history alive for their students.

Several researchers from a museum visited to ask for details about her life as Hitler’s taster.

Woelk says her association with Hitler began after she fled Berlin to escape Allied air attacks. With her husband gone and serving in the German army, she moved in with relatives about 435 miles (700 kilometers) to the east in Rastenburg, then part of Germany; now it is Ketrzyn, in what became Poland after the war.

There she was drafted into civilian service and assigned for the next two and a half years as a food taster and kitchen bookkeeper at the Wolf’s Lair complex, located a few miles (kilometers) outside the town.

Hitler was secretive, even in the relative safety of his headquarters, that she never saw him in person — only his German shepherd Blondie and his SS guards, who chatted with the women.

Hitler’s security fears were not unfounded. On July 20, 1944, a trusted colonel detonated a bomb in the Wolf’s Lair in an attempt to kill Hitler.

He survived, but nearly 5,000 people were executed following the assassination attempt, including the bomber.

“We were sitting on wooden benches when we heard and felt an incredible big bang,” she said of the 1944 bombing.

“We fell off the benches, and I heard someone shouting ‘Hitler is dead!’ But he wasn’t. ”

Following the blast, tension rose around the headquarters. Woelk said the Nazis ordered her to leave her relatives’ home and move into an abandoned school closer to the compound.

With the Soviet army on the offensive and the war going badly for Germany, one of her SS friends advised her to leave the Wolf’s Lair.

She said she returned by train to Berlin and went into hiding.

Woelk said the other women on the food tasting team decided to remain in Rastenburg since their families were all there and it was their home.

“Later, I found out that the Russians shot all of the 14 other girls,” she said. It was after Soviet troops overran the headquarters in January 1945.

When she returned to Berlin, she found a city facing complete destruction. Round-the-clock bombing by U.S. and British planes was grinding the city center to rubble.

On April 20, 1945, Soviet artillery began shelling the outskirts of Berlin and ground forces pushed through toward the heart of the capital against strong resistance by die-hard SS and Hitler Youth fighters.

After about two weeks of heavy fighting, the city surrendered on May 2 — after Hitler, who had abandoned the Wolf’s Lair about five months before, had committed suicide.

His successor surrendered a week later, ending the war in Europe.

For many Berlin civilians — their homes destroyed, family members missing or dead and food almost gone — the horror did not end with capitulation.

“The Russians then came to Berlin and got me, too,” Woelk said. “They took me to a doctor’s apartment and raped me for 14 consecutive days.

That’s why I could never have children. They destroyed everything.”

Like millions of Germans and other Europeans, Woelk began rebuilding her life and trying to forget as best she could her bitter memories and the shame of her association with a criminal regime that had destroyed much of Europe.

She worked in a variety of jobs, mostly as a secretary or administrative assistant. Her husband returned from the war but died 23 years ago, she said.

With the frailty of advanced age and the lack of an elevator in her building, she has not left her apartment for the past eight years.

Nurses visit several times a day, and a niece stops by frequently, she said.

Now at the end of her life, she feels the need to purge the memories by talking about her story.

“For decades, I tried to shake off those memories,” she said. “But they always came back to haunt me at night.”

{AP}

{{Members of the Argentine human rights group “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo” asked Pope Francis on Wednesday for help finding still-missing children taken from political prisoners during the country’s 1976-83 military dictatorship — and said the pontiff told them they could count on him.}}

Estela de Carlotto, president of the group, met briefly with the Argentine pope after Francis’ general audience in St. Peter’s Square.

She handed him a written request that he authorize the opening of archives from the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Argentina in hopes of finding clues about the whereabouts of the children.

The organization estimates that around 500 babies were taken from their mothers while they were detained by the military.

“Every detail can help to identify those who were taken from our families,” the letter read.

“We ask that they help us, open the archive and investigate who was responsible in the church for the abduction of our grandchildren,” de Carlotto told a news conference. She told reporters that Francis had told her: “‘You can count on me. You can count on us.’”

The former Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the young head of the Jesuit order in Argentina during the initial years of the dictatorship.

In 1998, he was named archbishop of Buenos Aires and the country’s top churchman — a position he held until he was named pope last month.

Under Bergoglio’s leadership, Argentina’s bishops issued a collective apology in October 2012 for the church’s failures to protect its flock.

But the statement blamed the era’s violence in roughly equal measure on both the junta and its enemies.

The babies — some were abducted along with their parents, others were born in captivity — were mainly given to army families or supporters of the military regime, according to a government report titled “Never Again.” In many cases, the infants’ names were changed.

The “Grandmothers” group has been marching every Thursday since 1977 in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in front of Argentina’s Government House, to demand answers about the whereabouts of the missing.

{AP}