Word: bonnes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...West German security measures, sensible as they were, provided no real deterrence. Nor will a special antiterrorist police unit that Bonn plans to organize. There are just too many potential terrorists. West Germany has an Arab population of more than 55,000 (including at least 6,000 Palestinians). Authorities know of the existence of six secret political organizations and perhaps 100 subsidiary groups...
West Germany's attempts last week to guard against terrorists served to illustrate the problem. Airport authorities scrutinized every arriving Arab and turned dozens of them back. Bonn's Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, called a meeting of state ministers, who agreed on a plan to require visas of all arriving Arabs, to run security checks on those already in the country, to investigate all militant organizations, and to strengthen security at airports, embassies and office buildings...
Official Arab reaction to the events in Munich was diverse. Jordan's King Hussein appeared on Amman television to offer condolences in Arabic and English to bereaved Israeli families. The murders, the King declared, were "an abhorrent crime" conceived by "sick minds." Egypt, on the other hand, blamed Bonn for everything. "The commandos and the Israeli hostages were killed in a German ambush, by German bullets and in a U.S. base in Germany," said a government spokesman, ignoring the fact that Fürstenfeldbruck is a German airbase and that the hostages, according to all evidence, died from fire...
...recriminations that followed the Munich massacre suggest, the answers are far from clear. While Israel's Premier Golda Meir was thanking Bonn for its desperate efforts, other Israelis were vehemently agreeing with the Tel Aviv daily Hatzofeh that the whole tragedy might have been avoided had West Germany not "surrendered" in the past to the demands of terrorists; last February, Bonn delivered a cool $5,000,000 cash ransom to Palestinian hijackers who had taken over an Athens-bound Lufthansa 747 with 186 passengers and crew members and diverted the plane to Aden. For their part, German officials complained...
...through heavy overlays of politics, emotion and history, different countries have found different answers. None have been notably successful. Not counting last week, when it found itself squeezed between Israeli determination and the weight of its own Nazi past, West Germany has seemed most comfortable with the acquiescent approach. Bonn has not forgotten the 1970 kidnaping of its ambassador to Guatemala, Count Karl von Spreti; he was summarily executed when a one-month-old Guatemalan government that was determined to strike a tough law-and-order posture refused to release 22 jailed Guatemalan terrorists and to allow Germany...