t byfield on Thu, 23 Apr 1998 20:01:30 +0200 (MET DST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> RAF, "now history," disbands |
["free USA only": nytimes -> /yr/mo/day/news/world/german-red-army.html ] April 23, 1998 Red Army Faction Says It Has Disbanded By ALAN COWELL BONN, Germany -- Heroes unto themselves, but reviled and once feared by the bulk of Germans, the last remaining urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction announced this week that they had dissolved their organization because they and their cause were "now history." <...> But the statement, which German authorities have since said was authentic, raised many troubling issues ranging from a slew of unsolved killings to the question of whether tough anti-terror legislation drawn up in the 1970s and 1980s should now be struck from the law books. At the height of its notoriety in the 1970s, the Red Army Faction was seen as Europe's most deadly urban terror group, built on clandestine cells and fighting what it termed an armed struggle. It attacked not just Germany's rich and powerful, but also U.S. military installations that left-wing ideology termed emblems of American imperialism. <...> In the eight-page typewritten statement delivered to Reuters, which ended with the guerrillas' emblem of a five-pointed star, a stylized machine-pistol and the letters RAF, the authors said: "Today we are ending this project. The urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history." "We are stuck in a dead end," the statement said, acknowledging that the group had made strategic errors, but expressing no contrition or regret toward the more than 30 people who died as its victims. Officials at the federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden said the document had been certified as genuine in part because a watermark on one page was the same as that in earlier statements from the group. <...> --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl