Word: wings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Confronted by events and opprobrium, Bonn finally lurched into action -- prodded as well by the realization that right-wing violence was spilling beyond the asylum seekers' hostels, the traditional confines of xenophobic attacks. Not only were the 14th, 15th and 16th fatalities of this year's violence Turks -- members of an influential, 1.7 million-strong community whose labors helped make Germany an economic powerhouse -- but word came of two more murders, both of Germans, committed by rightist thugs. In Berlin a leftist was stabbed; in Wuppertal a man was stomped and burned by assailants who apparently -- and mistakenly -- thought...
That demand came in a blitz of initiatives. Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters banned the Nationalist Front, a 130-member radical group with no apparent connection to Molln but a bent for terror, and set his sights on other right- wing extremists. Police raided 51 houses across the country in one day, uncovering caches of weapons and propaganda. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's denunciation of the murders, unlike many of his earlier comments on violence, ^ bore a note of genuine concern: "What has appeared here is an act of brutality that for every humane sensibility is incomprehensible...
...Office for the Protection of the Constitution, announced an expansion of his agency's surveillance of the far right into "a department that has never before existed in such a dimension." Chief federal prosecutor Alexander von Stahl took charge of the Molln case -- his first involving right-wing terror, despite some 3,400 acts of violence by radicals in the past two years -- and within days officials rounded up two suspects from a loosely knit far-right group in the Molln area...
...crimes either belong to groups that barely deserve to be called extremist or are lone operators. Officials admit that a ban also forces the more organized groups underground, making it tougher to track them. Nonetheless, political scientist Gerd Mielke maintains that the ban "is a blow against right-wing extremists in making their activities illegal. Much more important is its function as symbolic politics, as drawing a line for the public." Not enough of that defining, of what is acceptable and what is not, has been done thus far, he says, adding that the bans will backfire if nothing...
That sentiment finds wide agreement among experts on right-wing extremism, who see a crackdown as only part of the solution. "Xenophobia in the public is still relatively strong, and it is being separated ((from the criminal acts)). There is nothing in this ((program)) to overcome it," says Wilhelm Heitmayer, a social scientist at the University of Bielefeld. He argues that the crackdown has the misleading effect of "reinterpreting" the attacks as being those of a few criminals on the periphery. Among the statistics experts use to illustrate the depth of the problem is a poll this month...