INTERIOR MINISTER SHUTS HIS EYES TO NEO-NAZI TERRORISM
Four men were killed and one man badly maimed in two obviously racist bomb attacks in Austria in early February. Following a series of right-wing extremist letter-bomb attacks in late 1993, this new culmination of Nazi violence in Austria was highlighted by the world media. Little attention has, however, to date been paid to how the Austrian Interior Ministry and Police are dealing with what appears to be a well-organised campaign of terror against ethnic minorities and persons known as "foreigner friends".Instead of hunting the perpetrators, the Interior Ministry is often criminalising the victims.
In the early morning of 5 February, four Austrian Roma men were found dead, killed by a violent explosion, on an access road to their neighbourhood in the small town of Oberwart (Burgenland). A metal placard bearing the inscription "Roma back to India" was found near the bodies.
Only hours after the discovery, a special criminal investigation unit established that the explosion was caused by a bomb concealed inside a metal tube. Its detonator had been skilfully connected to the placard, so that anyone moving the placard would set off the bomb.
Inhabitants of the Roma neighbourhood said that their community had received several anonymous threats by phone in recent weeks. Late at night on 4 February, suspect car noises were heard in the neighbourhood and the four men left their homes in order to check the access road.
In spite of all this evidence pointing at a racist crime, for 24 hours, both the police and the spokesmen of the Interior Ministry systematically suggested that the four Roma might have caused their death themselves:
- Police began their investigation by searching the houses of the victims. Only a week after the attack, did the police finally proceed with house searches of well-known Nazi activists in the Burgenland region.
- A first hypothesis spread to the media by the police and the Interior Ministry was that the four men might have killed each other with a shot-gun, or - alternatively - might have killed themselves by accident while trying to blow up the placard.
Only on 6 February did the Interior Minister finally publicly confirm what the special investigating unit had established 24 hours before (!) - that the four Roma were the victims of a bomb attack.
The same day, another bomb exploded in Stinatz/Stinjaki (Burgenland). The Austrian-Croatian population is strong in this bilingual town. A municipal refuse worker was badly maimed in the blast. The bomb was hidden in a spray-can and lay on the ground near a refuse container next to a children's playground.
Interior Minister Franz Löschnak first cynically warned the population against refuse containers and "sprays left lying around". The same day a letter of confession was found at a bus stop in Burgenland calling for the return of the "Stoisits, Grandits, Sifkovits and Janisch"- i.e Austrian Croats, "to Dalmatia".
The threat appears to be directly aimed against Terezija Stoisits, MP and spokeswomen on minority issues of the Austrian Green Party.
Defaming the victims
The police and the Interior Minister's early statements had a disastrous effect on public opinion, in particular for the Roma. The tabloid press, and even more serious media quickly focused on alleged Roma criminality and internal clan violence. While formally condemning the attacks, officials of Jörg Haider's anti-foreigner party FPÖ talked about "leftist activists' co-responsibility" for having attempted to paint Haider's party as an extreme right-wing movement. By doing so, they had actually encouraged and provoked right-wing extremists, the FPÖ contended.
During the parliament's debate on the attack in Oberwart, FPÖ-leader Haider distinguished himself by calling the Nazi concentration camps for "penitentiary camps".
Only after the bomb attack in Stinatz did Interior Minister Löschnak get round to talking about a bomb attack, "probably with an ethnic background".
Inaction at the Interior Ministry
Many observers in Austria see some method behind the Interior Minister's reluctance to acknowledge the existence of organised Nazi terrorism and his initial inclination to blame the victims.
A first series of letter bombings took place in December 1993. The letters were sent to a series of persons known for their "pro-foreigner" stands. Nonetheless, for days, the Viennese tabloid, Die Kronenzeitung, referring to "well-informed sources" within the police, suggested that Turkish immigrants might be involved in the bombings.
In early summer 1994, a policeman trying to defuse a bomb found in front of a bilingual school teaching mostly children of the Slovenian minority in Klagenfurt (the capital of the land of Carinthia), had both his hands torn off. The Interior Minister obstinately denied any political background to the incident. Instead, he suggested a possible involvement of the local prostitution business in the crime. For several weeks, the authorities simply kept silent about the existence of a letter of confession addressed to the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Slovenia. The letter contained a "hit list" with the names of a number of Austrian Slovenes. The persons concerned were neither warned nor offered protection by the police. The Interior Ministry later explained this strange omission by claiming it was anxious to avoid causing panic or disturbing the criminal investigation.
House searches against neo-Nazis announced in advance
It took a week for house searches to be carried out against known right-wing extremist circles, and was only done only after the Interior Minister made a personal announcement of the fact on television . . .
Only months later, in a second series of letter bombs in autumn 1994, among others, a Klagenfurt publisher of Slovenian origin, Lojze Wieser, received a letter bomb (which failed to detonate) and several death threats. The Interior Ministry put about the notion that the publisher had staged the threats himself as a publicity stunt. For days, the Interior Ministry left the public and the recipients of the letters guessing whether the letters actually contained bombs or dummies. Just as with the first letter bomb series in 1993, rumours circulated in the press about a possible foreign background - Serbian this time - to the offences.
The German connection
This is all the more notable given the Austrian security authorities' slowness and reluctance to follow an obvious line of enquiry pointing towards a conspiracy between Austrian and German Nazi groups. In the meantime, the main suspect for the December 1993 bombings is an Austrian Nazi, Peter Binder.
In early December 1994, a member of a German neo-Nazi rock band, Bendix Wendt, was stopped by police in Berlin for a traffic offence. It transpired that Wendt had been shuttling intensively between Berlin and Vienna and there is evidence for Wendt's involvement in a arms trafficking deal with Binder. The Austrian police had already become interested in Wendt within days of the December 1993 letter bombs series, but for a whole year, the German BKA (Federal Office of Criminal Investigation) refrained from issuing an international arrest warrant, and to date, the BKA has not opened its own investigation against Wendt or against several other German neo-Nazis with contacts in Austria.
Observation rather than action?
The priority of both German and Austrian security authorities seems to lie with "observing", rather than uncovering, the Nazi terrorist network. In October 1994, Austria's highest-ranking security official, Dr. Michael Sika, declared with remarkable frankness: "The letter bombs series might never be cleared up. But this is actually not of such importance. What really counts, is to look behind the scenes".
Tacit consensus
From the very beginning, the Austrian authorities, in particular the Interior Minister, have tried to play down the significance of the terrorist attack. The criminal investigations were marked by professional blunders and pernicious attempt to spread rumours. Yet, for a long time, government critics kept an astonishingly low profile. On one hand, there was some sort of a tacit consensus, that by talking about right-wing extremism one might fuel it; on the other, there were strong public calls for all democrats, i.e. the government and the public to "close ranks".
Fight against Nazi crime: More powers for the police?
In recent weeks however, open criticism has begun to focus on the person of the Interior Minister and the country's security bodies. The Interior Ministry was forced to publicly admit connections between members of the police forces and extremist right-wing circles. Interior Minister Löschnak reacted by demanding extended powers for the police to search houses, carry out phone--tapping operations, and infiltrate undercover agents without authorisation by a court, all this for the sake of increased public security. At the same time, his Ministry is pursuing its restrictive and discriminatory policy goals in the fields of asylum and foreigner law, viewed by many observers as a form of tacit encouragement of racist violence.
Sources: Documentation of the Network for Intercultural Development, 9.2.95, University of Klagenfurt (MIR, Institut für Schulpädagogik, Universitätsstrasse 65-67, A-9020 Klagenfurt, Tel: +43/463 270000558; Fax: +43/463 2700562); Junge Welt, 23.12.94.