Kosovo has changed everything. Germany is suddenly front and center both in the fighting and diplomacy. While German Tornado jet fighters continued to play their part in the air war, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer launched a new peace proposal last week, including a controversial offer of a 24-hour ceasefire if Yugoslavia began pulling its troops out of Kosovo. But more important than any peace feelers was the determination with which Schroder’s coalition government, composed of his Social Democratic Party and the radical Greens, has backed NATO’s military action. The country has rallied behind its government. When NATO leaders gather in Washington this week to mark the alliance’s 50th anniversary, the Germans will arrive as full partners with a new attitude. “A year ago, I never would have believed that a red-green coalition would take such a stand,” concedes Karsten Voigt, a senior Foreign Ministry official dealing with relations with the United States. “But the new Germany cannot ask others to do something without participating itself.”
Why the political and psychological turnaround? Cynics could argue that it’s good domestic politics. Before the Kosovo war started, the Schroder government was pummeled by business leaders for failing to deliver on its promises to stimulate the economy with tax cuts and more deregulation. Unemployment was again more than 11 percent, and the SPD and the Greens were constantly squabbling among themselves over such issues as the closure of nuclear power plants. The government looked like a gang of bumbling amateurs; and Schroder, appearing on celebrity game shows and in photo shoots showing off Italian designer clothes, no more than a lightweight. Amazing what a war can do –Schroder-the-inept-clotheshorse has suddenly become Schroder-the-statesman.
In an interview with NEWSWEEK (following story), Schroder argued that his government felt a “moral obligation” to join its partners. For Germany, as the liberal weekly Die Zeit put it, this also meant “climbing down from its moral high ground.” Until recently, the country felt that its Nazi past prohibited direct participation in military conflicts. Kosovo offered a stark choice; and Schroder’s team insisted that the more important lesson of history was the need to stop atrocities such as those committed by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. The government has defended its policies with a kind of raw passion that has been missing from German politics since the huge peace marches of the early 1980s–the days when Schroder, Fischer and others on the left demonstrated against NATO’s deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe.
The ironies abound. “If we were in the government and the SPD in the opposition, there’d be huge demonstrations in Germany,” says Wolfgang Schuble, the leader of the opposition Christian Democratic Union. “The left wouldn’t support us.” In fact, the government may have had its hands tied. Under the headline the left is dead, the weekly Die Woche pointed out that the Schroder government could have hardly afforded to do anything less than it did on Kosovo. It would have been promptly accused of “betrayal of the alliance,” confirming all the worst fears of its allies that it was reverting to its leftist “isolationist” roots.
Whatever its motives, the new team has treated Kosovo as a must-win crusade, ruthlessly attacking dissenters. A Bundestag debate last week turned into an all-out assault on Gregor Gysi, the leader of the small Party of Democratic Socialism, successor to the East German communists. When Gysi reiterated his opposition to NATO bombing after visiting Milosevic in Belgrade, Schroder tartly warned him: “You should be careful that you do not become a fifth columnist for Belgrade instead of a fifth columnist for Moscow.” Fischer accused Gysi of “whitewashing a new politics of fascism.” At an SPD meeting earlier in the week, Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping countered the few dissenters within the party by warning: “If you don’t take the power out of this murderous machine, then Milosevic will someday offer us a ceasefire in the cemetery.”
Still, Fischer’s and Scharping’s rhetoric, which virtually equates Milosevic with Hitler, makes even supporters of the war uneasy. “I hate these comparisons because they minimize Hitler’s crimes and fascism in Germany,” says Culture Minister Michael Naumann. CDU leader Schuble fears that the former peace activists may be going overboard in trying to demonstrate that they can be tough. “Helmut Kohl wouldn’t have felt that he had to prove himself,” he notes.
Conservatives have other criticisms of the chancellor. They expressed misgivings about Schroder’s peremptory dismissal of Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov when he came to Bonn from Belgrade to relay Milosevic’s proposal for a truce. “It was right to say no to Primakov, but wrong to slap him publicly in the face,” says parliamentarian Friedbert Pfluger , a CDU foreign-policy specialist. “We have to bring in the Russians since they’re the only ones who can talk to the Serbs.” Within the SPD and the Greens, outright opponents of the current policy have been making similar arguments.
The Schroder team may be getting the message. Fischer’s proposal for a 24-hour ceasefire proposal won cautious praise from the Russians and caught the Americans off-guard. After talking to Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that there would be no halt to the NATO airstrikes until the alliance’s demands “are met in full.” And Schroder hastily reiterated that his government’s proposal was conditioned on Yugoslavia’s starting to withdraw its troops. “This, and only in this order, would make it possible to suspend NATO’s military measures and open the way to a political solution,” he explained in the Bundestag. But he added that he was eager to meet Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s newly appointed envoy for the Yugoslav conflict.
In all likelihood, the intended audience for Fischer’s proposal was at home. His aim, it seems, was to convince skeptics within the Greens and the SPD that Germany is taking its peacemaking role as seriously as its military obligations. “In terms of domestic politics, this was a very shrewd move,” says Angelika Volle, the editor of the German foreign-policy quarterly Internationale Politik. “That raises the German and European diplomatic profile, which is badly needed.”
Schroder knows he has a lot on the line. According to the latest poll, 60 percent of Germans support the air war and there have only been small, scattered anti-NATO demonstrations. But if the conflict drags on messily, public opinion could turn against the government. At its party meeting last week, the SPD formally voted Schroder in as party chairman, replacing leftist Oskar Lafontaine, who abruptly resigned last month. But Schroder received only 76 percent of the votes; he still does not have an automatic loyalty from the party. A vocal minority continues to attack Germany’s participation in the war. “The NATO attacks against Yugoslavia are a relapse into the centuries’ old false doctrine of just war,” charged Hamburg’s ex-mayor Henning Voscherau. “In the past, this doctrine always led to disaster.” Among the Greens, the unease with the current policy is even greater. For now, radicals are desperately hoping that the search for a diplomatic solution will be successful since they don’t want to contemplate the alternative. “If we left the coalition, the policy wouldn’t change and we’d have no influence whatsoever on government policies,” says Greens’ leader Antje Radcke. “But there are limits to what you can accept in any coalition.”
Then, too, there’s the more basic question: what happens when the war ends? “Kosovo brought [Schroder ] a problem but also the possibility to show how he can handle it,” says Wolfgang Gerhardt, the leader of the small opposition Free Democratic Party. “But once Kosovo is over, there’ll be all the other questions which he hasn’t answered.” In other words, Schroder will still have to make good on his promise to be a domestic-policy chancellor–at a time when the German economy still looks sickly. His challenge will be to prove that he can tackle his problems at home as decisively as he has led his country at war.
title: “Spoiling For A Fight” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Steven Harris”
Chen wasn’t always a professional patient advocate. But when doctors foist fake remedies on vulnerable patients to pad medical bills, she takes it personally. Chen once practiced traditional Chinese medicine in her hometown of Shanghai. She made plenty of money–but in the late 1990s, Chen, now 53, discovered that her employer, a state hospital, was injecting patients with a worthless serum. After undergoing the treatment herself, she exposed the fraud. Forced out of her job, she’s now a full-time whistleblower, aided financially by her family and supportive government agencies. “Before, I wasn’t interested in politics or any of that stuff because [my husband and I] were living comfortably,” she says. “I would have liked to have continued that peaceful and happy life, but things were a mess in the hospital, and I couldn’t ignore that.”
For more than two decades, the Chinese–especially the educated middle class–have lived with a great compromise. They’ve applauded the sweeping capitalist-style economic reforms implemented by the Communist Party, but turned a blind eye to ongoing political and social oppression. Many in China’s richest cities seem content with the party’s rule. Some have studied abroad and returned to earn twice as much as their peers. Others have managed to escape from the countryside to attend college. Many are simply businesspeople and professionals who, for the first time in their lives, can afford to buy cars, take vacations and buy homes. Ask many what it would take to get them to man the barricades, and they’re hard pressed to come up with an answer.
But this political apathy is not a permanent condition. Increasing numbers of more privileged Chinese are bumping up against their country’s authoritarian political system, especially as the government of President Hu Jintao attempts to tighten controls on the press, religion, civil society and the Internet. Many are learning, suddenly, that there’s another side to the story of their nation’s transformation. And they’re learning something else, about themselves: some political goals are worth fighting for. Rebecca MacKinnon, cofounder of the international bloggers’ network Global Voices Online, says she’s seen more of these middle-class activists speaking out on her forum and others. Her network often helps bring the people behind these stories together and helps them publicize their causes. “This kind of experience really brings out the reserved strength in people,” says MacKinnon.
In cities across China, for example, well-to-do Chinese have staged protests against corrupt property development. More than 70 percent of Beijingers now own homes, up from nearly zero in the early 1990s. Among the new crop of high-profile homeowner advocates is former college professor Shu Kexin, who turned his success fighting real-estate developers into a bid for election to the National People’s Congress. (He lost.) Another advocate, Zou Tao, a golf-equipment dealer in Shenzhen, launched a campaign in April against rising housing costs, urging the public to “stop buying houses” and paying exorbitant prices set by developers in cahoots with local officials. Zou has received more than 100,000 letters of support from around the country. Thirty-three-year-old Yu Linggang is a successful government-relations manager for Lenovo Computer Corp. in Beijing. But he’s been lobbying officials for a parcel of land on which to construct affordable housing for those less fortunate than he is. He’s hoping that during next year’s National People’s Congress he will see some results. “My life is very good now … I travel, I go to the gym. But this isn’t enough,” Yu says. “I think I should do something for society.”
Some Chinese, such as Zeng Jingyan, learn at a young age that their dreams of comfort and stability might not materialize. Short and wispy with a surprisingly firm and direct way of speaking, Zeng, 22, graduated last year from People’s University in Beijing with a degree in economics. As a volunteer for an AIDS organization, she met and fell in love with one of China’s best-known AIDS activists, Hu Jia. The couple married soon after they met.
But even before the wedding, the relationship forced Zeng to confront her country’s rigid political system. In April 2004, Beijing authorities detained Hu, now 32, upon his return from an AIDS conference in Shanghai. Zeng decided to fight, rather than hope quietly for the best. Despite stone-walling and intimidation by the police, she immediately sent word of Hu’s detention to the hundreds of people on her e-mail list, which included AIDS activists, foreign press and international human-rights organizations. After 100 days, the authorities released Hu without charging him. The experience transformed Zeng, and she became a full-time rabble-rouser. “I have this idea to set up a team that will provide services for those whose loved ones are missing or detained,” she says. Zeng and Hu continue to be hounded by authorities, and Zeng keeps an online journal about their experiences.
Indeed, courage such as Zeng’s is already changing China. These well-educated activists are methodical, well organized and knowledgeable about their legal rights. They use the government’s own rhetoric about creating a fair and lawful society against it when those rights are threatened. And they are claiming victories.
Take the recent case of chen Guangchen, a rights activist convicted in August in what supporters around the world maintained was a blatantly unfair trial. In a move almost unheard of in China, a higher court overturned the conviction earlier this month (though Chen must face a retrial). Rights activists say this proves that Beijing is listening. “This is the most important phenomenon, people taking the defense of their rights into their own hands,” says Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch. “This is raising the cost of arbitrariness and unlawfulness by the government and law enforcement. These people … just don’t back down.”
Last February a young woman named Nina Wu sought Zeng’s counsel about her brother’s detention, even though the two women had never met. In her own words, Wu, 36, had spent most of her adult life as a “comfortable little Shanghai capitalist.” She put in long hours as an analyst at an investment bank, but was well compensated. She had a loving husband and a bright young daughter. She saw her country the way many Westerners see China–through the lens of the nation’s glitziest and most prosperous city. Like many educated urban Chinese, she benefited from the decades of economic reforms.
But her views changed on Feb. 22 of this year, when her brother, documentary filmmaker Wu Hao, 34, was grabbed by security agents and detained. Without a word to his family, his friends or even his lawyer about where he was or why he had been arrested, the agents held him for five months. Some people thought Hao had angered authorities by filming illegal Christian church services. Others, including his lawyer, heard he was being investigated for spying.
The case turned Nina the ignorant yuppie into Nina the human-rights activist. She confronted the realities she had ignored for so long: the lack of rule of law, the party’s obsession with secrecy, the government’s restrictions on free speech. Though speaking out publicly against the Communist Party is still taboo, she published a detailed blog about her ordeal, describing her frustration with Chinese authorities, who dodged her questions and appeals for help.
Nina’s blog was her best weapon. It attracted worldwide media attention for Hao, who was released in July. Neither he nor his sister has spoken publicly since then. And it’s still unclear what Hao’s alleged offense was. But Nina Wu’s view of her country has changed. In one blog entry, she wrote that she worried about the nation’s future. And she tried to warn her happy-go-lucky peers enjoying the good life: “You won’t know the existence of the underlying rules of the game until you get in trouble with them.” For many Chinese, the hard lessons are yet to come.
