Germans give cold welcome to Osama killing

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin May 5, 2011, 15:54 GMT

Berlin - Germany has marked itself as a nation apart this week, with an undertone of criticism towards the killing by elite US troops of terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Centre-right Christians have scolded Chancellor Angela Merkel for welcoming Osama's death. Many left-of-centre Germans have questioned from the start whether the US operation was legal or moral.

Two US observers in Berlin see the reaction in the media as one of a piece with Germany's recent refusal to join the fight against Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi.

The opposition Green Party joined the criticism Thursday of Merkel, who had said Monday, 'I am happy that it has been possible to kill bin Laden.' She later explained she had meant he would no longer be able to orchestrate terrorist attacks.

'I'm relieved too that this criminal is no longer making mischief. But happiness at the death of a human being is a bit weird,' said Omid Nouripour, the Green defence spokesman, on ZDF breakfast television.

He admonished the United States to stick to the principles of the rule of law.

'Otherwise we'll water down the rules of our civilization,' he said.

Even a junior foreign minister, Werner Hoyer, told a newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, 'happy' was the wrong category of emotion.

While some German news editors have been studiously neutral this week in commentary on the killing, neither approving nor disapproving, the Spiegel Online news site operated by Der Spiegel weekly magazine has questioned the US motives since day one.

'There is serious doubt that this conforms with international law or the rules of war,' said Spiegel writer Thomas Darnstaedt.

He said 'the majority of international jurists' believed waging war against al-Qaeda was only permissible on Afghan soil, and rebuked the killing as 'Justice, American-style.' He said Osama might even not have been legally a combatant if he had entered retirement.

An editor at Germany's ARD public television, Joerg Schoenenborn, said on air: 'What sort of country is that, to cheer an execution this way? Civilized nations have established international law. They have agreed criminals must be put before courts, not just killed.

While the Merkel government has welcomed the raid's success, media headlines have constantly returned to the issue of whether Osama was warned before he was shot and why the Navy Seals did not take him alive.

Charles Mallory, who heads the Aspen Institute in Berlin, devoted to improving US-German relations, agreed that this week's undertone of scepticism was characteristic of the German media.

Mallory said the German media might not feel a need to convey that Germans were just as endangered by terrorism as Americans were.

'It's also particularly interesting to me as a foreigner that people haven't picked up on the fact that there were, I think, nine failed attempts to carry out terrorist attacks in Germany,' he said.

Mallory suggested similar attitudes were behind Germans' refusal to join in military operations against Gaddafi.

'There is a free-rider effect going on in Germany, because basically people depart from an assumption that Germany's national security will be taken care of by the NATO alliance in some form and that the principal cost of doing so will be borne by others.

'As a result it's a very luxurious position to be in: one can sit on the sidelines and moralize, knowing that one is never going to have to ... bear the full price of responsibility,' he said.

Gary Smith, head of the American Academy in Berlin, said the German media's moralistic questioning this week takes little regard of the 'obvious' analogy between the war against Adolf Hitler and the war on al-Qaeda.

'I'm stunned that there is no reflection about Germany's own history, about the deeper meaning,' he said.

'The Germans lost the moral high ground, forever in a way, in the middle of the 20th century, so some of the emotionality of debates - about America and about Israel - has to do with their own moral discomfort,' he said.

Smith, who has lived in Germany since 1987, said, 'It is deeply divided over these issues, as you can see from the shame in many quarters at Germany's unwillingness to join other European countries in preventing the massacre of Libyans.'

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