Activists jailed in RZ "terrorist" trial
01 March 2004
On 19 March, the second division of the Berlin Supreme Court ended a three year trial against former members and alleged members of the Revolutionary Cells, a network of left-wing militant activists who carried out attacks against institutions and people responsible for, amongst other things, repressive refugee politics in Germany in the 1980s. The convictions were based on evidence provided by only one witness, a former RZ member who himself was accused of leadership of a terrorist organisation and decided to act as a crown witness to provide the prosecution with names of his former comrades in order to lower his own sentence (see Statewatch vol 10 no 1). Despite crucial contradictions in the crown witness's statements on alleged members and actions of the RZ, they formed the sole basis for the court's charges and sentencing, ranging from 2 years and nine months to 4 years and 3 months imprisonment. Throughout the trial, criticism was levelled against the political character of article 129a of the German Criminal Code, the terrorist paragraph applied in the trial (see Statewatch Vol 11 no 5) and the court's conduct in uncritically repeating the prosecution's bill of indictment whilst ignoring factual contradictions. Civil liberties organisations and lawyers argue that the court's conduct violated legal democratic principles such as the independence of the judiciary and the latter's obligation to engage in objective fact finding.
The RZ declared itself responsible for around 180 attacks (40 of which were in Berlin) in the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s and was marked by a structure of autonomous cells rather than being a hierarchical organisation. The Berlin trial dealt with two shooting incidents against a judge and an official in 1986 and 1987 respectively (these are statute-barred crimes) as well as two explosives attacks on a Berlin monument and a social security office for asylum seekers. Both resulted in property damage. The main charges against the five accused were leadership or membership of a terrorist organisation.
Contrary to the RAF (Rote Armee Fraction) prosecutions, the authorities could never ascertain who was part of the RZ, which meant that most of their activities remained unsolved. In this case also, the prosecution stumbled over the crown witness and former RZ member Tarek Mousli by accident rather than investigation, when two youngsters robbed his cellar where he had stored explosives and subsequently contacted the police. After putting him under surveillance for some months, police arrested him first in April 1999 for one day, then in May for 7 weeks and again in November 1999. After months of interrogation, they offered him a crown witness deal. Mousli gave a wealth of detail which, with the help of the German crime police authority (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), were collated and presented as detailed insider knowledge of RZ's history in court. Some of the accusations were true. For instance, one of the accused had shot a leading judge in the legs: Günther Korbmacher had been the sitting judge in 1983 when the Federal Administrative Court ruled that torture was no reason to grant asylum if a state tortured without political motives (which led to the deportation of many Kurdish refugees from Germany). In 2002, Rudolf Schindler admitted to the court that he had been a member of the RZ and had shot the judge during the RZ's "refugee campaign". He also argued that the majority of Mousli's statements were untrue. Schindler commented that "although the purpose of most of [Mousli's] lies is obvious, it remains a mystery to me why he names some people who were never members as members, whilst leaving others out of the picture."
Indeed, Mousli's statements often contradicted the known facts. He accused Harald Glöde of having carried out an unsuccessful bomb attack against a social security office for asylum seekers in 1987, a time when he was in police custody. He also accused Sabine Eckle of havin