Translated material
In the footsteps of the Bremen Turk
The German coalition is in danger of splitting
A political scandal is breaking out around German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, threatening to split the coalition of the CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats. He is accused that, while serving as head of the Federal Chancellor's office under the government of Gerhard Schröder, he missed the opportunity to release the Turk Murad Kurnaz from imprisonment in the American Guantanamo camp, and also did not facilitate his return to Germany. The case goes back to early 2002, when Social Democrat Steinmeier was considered Schröder's right-hand man. In Germany, a government official in this position is also the coordinator of the activities of the intelligence services - the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the department for the protection of the constitution (counterintelligence).Murad Kurnaz never had German citizenship, but he was born and raised in the North German city of Bremen. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the 19-year-old Turk went to Pakistan to, as he recently told a Bundestag investigative committee, “learn more about the Islamic faith.” In November 2001, local police arrested him in Peshawar and handed him over to the Americans. They immediately transported the Turk to a prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay as a suspect in terrorist activities. There he was allegedly subjected to torture, sexual assault and beatings.
Kurnaz's case was taken up by Bremen lawyer Bernhard Docke, who argued that his arrest and detention in the camp were illegal. In the fall of 2002, representatives of the BND and the Constitutional Protection Agency flew to Guantanamo for the first time to personally meet with Kurnaz. They found no evidence of the Turk's terrorist aspirations. Officially, it was even proposed to return Kurnaz to Germany and use him as an informant in the Muslim community. Soon, then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer spoke with his American counterpart Colin Powell about this. The American reacted coolly to this story, pointing out that Guantanamo is entirely within the competence of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
At this point, German interest in the Bremen Turk faded away. Only in April 2004 did officials from Germany visit him again. They say that when Kurnaz asked when he could return home, one of them encouraged the prisoner with the words: “Relax, you’re in the Caribbean.”
On October 30, 2002, the German Foreign Ministry canceled Kurnaz's residence permit on the grounds that he had left Germany for more than six months. Kurnaz's odyssey ended on August 24, 2006, when the Americans brought the Turk to their air base in Ramstein, Germany, and released him on all four sides.
Since then, Murad Kurnaz has been the hero of endless hearings, commissions, committees and all kinds of proceedings. Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the interests of preserving the viability of the government coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives, tried to provide the head of the foreign policy department, Steinmeier, with all possible support. Currently, the parliamentary committee on the BND is examining the circumstances of the scandal. Social Democrats and representatives of the CDU/CSU demand that Steinmeier be interrogated. The minister himself, in an interview with the Hamburg Der Spiegel, said: “Today I would make exactly the same decision.”