Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Online
Authors: J Smith
Furthermore, the prohibition of collective defence constitutes a serious impediment for an effective representation of the defendants. An attorney who has represented one member of an alleged criminal group is not permitted to represent another alleged member of the same group in a subsequent trial; although prosecutors are permitted to gain a growing expertise by prosecuting an unlimited number of accused persons.
Certain accused persons, alleged to be members of a terrorist organization, are subject to imposition of total isolation and sensory deprivation, which results in serious physical and psychological damage. We call your attention to the evaluation of such a treatment, from a report by Amnesty International, dating from 1973:
“Every investigative procedure which has as purpose or consequence to cause a deterioration or malfunction of the mental processes of a human being is just as heavy an attack on the inherent dignity of the person as the more traditional physical techniques of torture.”
Accused persons who are treated in this manner, and therefore are not fit to stand trial, find that the proceedings continue in their absence. This is based on the rationalization that defendants themselves are responsible for the (detention) conditions they are subjected to. This practice is a violation of the defendant's right to legal hearing.
Conclusions
In any free democracy the rights of individuals or groups of citizens are threatened by the existence of a domestic secret service. In the FGR this threat is substantial because of the installation by its domestic secret service, the
Verfassungsschutz,
of a vast network of information gathering, storage and dissemination.
Far from protecting the Constitution, the
Verfassungsschutz
today is the crucial component of a vast machine which, by a system of secret collection and distribution of information (and misinformation)âof which the individual has no knowledge and to which the individual has no accessâhas destroyed the livelihoods and reputations of innocent German citizens (and sometimes has caused them to be imprisoned) and threatens to exercise this power over the lives of countless others. In many cases the victims are those with no explicit political views, and in others, the people affected have done no more than exercise their democratic right to express individual political opinions.
The growth and practices of the
Verfassungsschutz
are totally out of proportion to any actual threat to the state. The
Verfassungsschutz
has its own momentum which not only is not controlled by Parliament but which actually defines the security needs of the state without adequate and efficient Parliamentary control. Indeed, the
Verfassungsschutz
itself constitutes the largest threat to a free democracy because it can become a kind of “secret” government.
Some Salient Facts
At the conclusion of the public session members of the Tribunal voted by secret ballot on the following eight questions, concerning the subject matter of the second session. Votes cast are shown below each question. The council of German members of the Tribunal (Beirat) did not vote.
Censorship
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: nil
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: nil
Yes: 7 No: 5 Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: nil
Rights of the defence
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: Nil
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: Nil
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: Nil
Yes: 12 No: Nil Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: Nil
Verfassungsschutz (Domestic Intelligence Service)
Yes: 1 No: 11 Abstentions: 1 Insufficient evidence: nil
_____________
Excerpt from Russell Tribunal III,
Censorship, Legal Defense and the Domestic Intelligence Service in West Germany
(Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace foundation, 1979), 1-7.
At the time this statement was issued, Peter-Jürgen Boock had never been more popular with the liberal intelligentsia. In 1985 former SDS leader Peter Schneider coauthored a book with him examining the armed experience; the next year, following a legal appeal backed by many progressives, his sentence was reduced to a single life term. During this period Boock continued to protest his innocence of the various charges for which he had been convicted, while still not testifying against his former comrades. (His first testimony in this regard would come in the early 1990s.) Boock's celebrity took a somewhat excruciating twist in 1988 when he accepted 20,000 DM as a donation to his legal appeal from the brothers of liberal diplomat Gerold von Braunmühl, whom the RAF had assassinated in 1986. In 1992 he would finally admit thatâcontrary to what he had always insisted to his supportersâhe had in fact been an active participant in the RAF's actions in 1977. He would only be released in 1998. (M. & S.)
We weren't going to say anything about Boock. The main point we want to make here is that he knowingly betrayed the group for months, wasting a significant amount of its energy andâafter his lies were out in the openâpreventing a reasonable resolution of the issues. It was always more important for us to clarify the conditions within the groupâthe subjective and political contentâthan to deal with Boock and the contributions he has been making to the anti-RAF smear campaign since 1981, and this allowed him to play his game for quite some time.
We are now going to present a few basic facts, as there is a serious lack of concrete informationâinformation that we now realize could contribute to a more useful discussion. (A more complete report will be issued if necessary.)
Early on, Boock told the groupâhe told several individualsâa story about being examined by a doctor before he went underground and learning that he had intestinal cancer. As a result he only had a certain amount of time left to live.
Later, Boock would complain of, and was visibly in, extreme physical pain. The painkillers that he wanted at first were relatively easy to acquire. His pain got steadily worse. He doubled over from the cramps and screamedâat first every few days, then daily. Now it was a question of specific painkillers, which were hard to come by, especially for people in an underground organization. It was dangerous. A comrade found herself on her own, taken prisoner as a result, because she had to use an uncool prescription to try to get more dope for Boock.
1
He pressured people. He wanted larger and larger quantities to deal with “unbearable bouts of pain,” which inevitably made acquiring the drugs more risky.
We quickly considered the obvious options. We needed to organize a decent and safe hospice. By decent we mean a place that would allow Boock to remain in contact with the group and with doctors who understood the situation. And this obviously meant a place where the imperialist apparatus had no power. He didn't want to be examined, because, he said, he only had a few months left to live and wanted to spend them with the people he had struggled alongside, and because even doctors who were comrades were bourgeois and objectified the ill.
At one point doctors came to the house, but were unable to examine him, though he did accept the painkillers they gave him. His greatest fear was to be examined, because then it would have been clear that he was healthy.
The situation got increasingly serious, and we were arrangingâ over Boock's objectionsâfor a hospice that met the necessary criteria. Nobody thought that his story was simply an invention; it was convincing, and it made sense. Eventually, everything was ready. Boock didn't want his lies to fall apart, so he had to make the trip. In transit through Yugoslavia, the four were arrested.
2
So now there were arrests the comrades had to deal withâthey struggled desperately to convince the authorities that Boock was seriously ill and needed immediate medical attention. Now, there was no way left for him to avoid an examination, and it showed that Boock was completely healthy.