Trial Points Up Germany’s Unconventional Iran Ties

BERLIN — The scene in a Greek restaurant here looked like a mob hit straight out of the movies: Two masked gunmen burst into the back room, sprayed automatic-weapons fire over the tables of terrified diners, pumped several bullets at close range into one victim, then leaped into a blue BMW and sped away.

They left behind shattered dishes, spilled food, upended tables and four dead patrons--who happened to be Kurdish opponents of the Iranian regime.

That attack four years ago has given rise to a trial of extraordinary scope and duration, as well as a view of the tensions afflicting unified Germany as it seeks its own way in the post-Cold War world.

For even as Germany aggressively prosecutes the suspects in the killings--with the Supreme Court taking the unheard-of step of issuing an arrest warrant for the Iranian intelligence minister--it also vigorously pursues Iranian trade and investment.

It has been that way since 1992, when Germany--one of the United States’ closest allies--pushed for a European policy of “critical dialogue” with the Iranian regime, one of Washington’s staunchest foes. In this two-pronged relationship, European Union nations may continue trading with Iran but are supposed to pressure it to moderate its policies at the same time.

Germany’s leadership role in this policy is the only blemish in Bonn’s otherwise good relations with Washington. President Clinton banned all forms of trade with Iran in mid-1995.

“Iran is probably the single largest area of dispute, if you can use that word, in the relationship between the United States and Germany,” an American diplomat in Bonn said. “In fact, there’s no other area that even comes close.”

In the restaurant killings trial here, the courtroom evidence has been the stuff of classified diplomatic cables that might come from the mind of John le Carre: In closing arguments in November, federal prosecutors charged Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani himself with ordering the quadruple murder, along with Iran’s top spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“In no other country have we had such a trial as the one in Berlin,” said Karl Lamers, a member of Parliament and the foreign policy expert for Germany’s governing coalition. “We must wait and see whether, for the first time in a judicial context, a link between terrorism and the leadership of Iran will be proven.”

Incurring Iran’s Wrath

However delightful that prospect may be to U.S. officials--who are still weighing recent unconfirmed evidence that Iran was behind last summer’s fatal bombing of a U.S. military apartment building in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia--it does not play at all well in Tehran. The regime there denies any involvement in the murders at the Mykonos restaurant, as it does with all forms of international terrorism.

Tehran has threatened that if the German prosecution does not back off, it will try senior German leaders in absentia in an unspecified international court in connection with weapons sales to Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The day after the federal prosecutors in Berlin concluded their case, angry mobs trooped in front of the German Embassy in the Iranian capital, throwing eggs and chanting the sort of slogans Americans will remember from the days of their own government’s ill-fated presence there.

This time, the crowds called for a fatwa, a religious death sentence like the one targeting author Salman Rushdie, against the German prosecutors.

It took a two-page letter from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Rafsanjani to calm things down. Kohl explained that the German judiciary is independent and cannot be swayed by back-channel diplomatic overtures or toughs in the street.

The protesters went home--but all bets are off for what will happen when the three-judge panel in the Mykonos case delivers its verdict, expected in April.

“We won’t be able to keep anything under control on such a day,” warned Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, the Parliament speaker and presumed successor to Rafsanjani after Iran holds presidential elections in the spring. “Germans have to understand that this will cost them a lot.”

Courting Investment

Cut to Magdeburg, a beat-up industrial city west of Berlin in what used to be East Germany. If anybody’s thinking about Iran here these days, it’s not about religious fanatics or state-sponsored terrorism, but about economic salvation, no matter the source.

In December, a ministerial-level delegation of Iranian officials and businessmen appeared in Magdeburg, looking over the investment promise of a huge machine-building works long down on its luck and known by its acronym, SKET.

In East German times, SKET employed about 30,000 workers and was one of the nation’s largest combines. Now, after a series of failed privatization attempts and restructurings, the work force is down to 1,500.

The federal government recently said that if a turnaround is to succeed, SKET’s payroll will have to be further reduced, at a cost of 1,100 more jobs.

That’s a dismal prospect for the exhausted citizens of Magdeburg. So when the Iranian delegation appeared in town, the locals sprang to attention. Leading state politicians gave a dinner for the group, and the city’s newspaper, the Volksstimme, covered the doings.

“There was no other investor up till now that wanted the whole machine works--they just considered pieces of it,” Volksstimme reporter Klaus Hinkel said. “That’s why the Iranians have created such a stir.”

Hinkel’s boss, business editor Rainer Lampe, added: “If you had image problems, and you asked a public relations advisor what to do, you might get an answer like this: ‘Go to Magdeburg! You will be known as the savior of a factory that was important for a whole region.’ ”

Troubling Discoveries

Magdeburg’s excitement over its Iranian suitors notwithstanding, at the moment Germany’s “critical dialogue” does not appear to be doing much to persuade Tehran to end its suppression of its opponents in European exile, or its interference-by-proxy with the Middle East peace process. On the contrary, many Iran watchers say the slayings in Berlin represent just one link in a chain:

* According to Iranian dissident organizations, the number of assassinations of expatriates in Europe and Turkey swung up sharply in 1996, totaling 14 by early December, compared to seven in 1995. The most recent apparent victim was Faraj Sarkuhi, an outspoken Iranian journalist who disappeared while en route from Tehran to Frankfurt to visit his wife and children. Critics of the regime say they fear he is dead.

* Last March, Belgian customs inspectors discovered a high-caliber mortar hidden under a load of vegetables aboard an Iranian freighter in the port of Antwerp en route to an Iranian living in Munich. Police remain unsure of how the mortar was intended to be used, but its shells are designed to spray shrapnel over a wide area.

* In November, German authorities broke up what appears to have been an arm of the Iranian Defense Ministry that was quietly buying weapons components out of a small office in Duesseldorf in defiance of German weapons-export laws. The authorities seized a trove of documents in their raid, but by the time they arrived, the Iranian weapons buyers themselves were gone.

In the Mykonos case, the dead were three leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan--an important group opposing the Tehran government--and their translator, in town for a convention of the Socialist International. They were planning anti-Tehran strategy over dinner when the gunmen struck.

It took the police just weeks to arrest five men in connection with the shootings. One was already a familiar face: Kazem Darabi, an Iranian linked to his country’s intelligence service, Vevak, had been arrested on previous charges in Germany but was never convicted.

The other four defendants were Lebanese. Two, like Darabi, were said to have ties to the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

Federal police took over the case, and indictments followed in May 1993.

Then, last March, with the trial proceeding apace, the Supreme Court issued its arrest warrant for Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, citing a “strong suspicion” that his ministry had “directed” the hit.

Early last fall, the prosecution called as its star witness former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, an architect of the Islamic revolution who was ousted in 1981. In a heavily guarded courtroom, the former president implicated his successor, Rafsanjani, and Khamenei.

“Without their agreement, carrying out the attack was just as unlikely as it would have been without massive support from the state--for example, through passports, plane tickets, money and special telephone numbers,” the prosecution said in a court submission based on Bani-Sadr’s testimony.

An anonymous “Witness C,” believed to be a co-founder of Vevak, reportedly backed up Bani-Sadr in closed-door testimony. The Iranian Embassy in Bonn says Witness C is an impostor.

Germany’s Interests

The courtroom evidence neatly dovetails with the U.S. State Department’s assessment of Iranian activity since the Islamic revolution of 1979 toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. It says that Tehran’s hit squads have carried out 56 assassinations in Europe and the Middle East since 1989--aside from the various suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism that Washington attributes to Tehran-backed groups.

None of this has moved Germany to downgrade its relations with Tehran.

“Those who do nothing more than speak out in moralizing and didactic tones with a raised forefinger will not, as a rule, achieve anything,” Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said. “Only those who keep a dialogue going will be able to put in a word for persons in need of intercession. That is the rationale behind our . . . dialogue.”

Critics say these ringing words are window dressing for an unprincipled German quest for money and markets.

Germany bought $1 billion worth of imports from Iran in 1995 and sold more than $1.8 billion. (U.S. figures are complete only through September 1995.)

But Germany has more on its mind than just trade.

“It’s easy to reduce Germany’s behavior just to economic interest, but it’s more complicated,” an American diplomat in Bonn said. “It’s a way for Germany to establish its place in the world.”

Since Germany unified in 1990, and since the departure in 1994 of the foreign armies that had occupied it since the end of World War II, Bonn has spent considerable energy establishing itself as a major, positive presence on the international stage. This is something of a feat, considering the animosity and suspicion that still linger in the minds of many of Germany’s former enemies and victims, from Moscow to Tel Aviv.

Good Intentions

With an array of activities ranging from a peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the personal cultivation by Chancellor Kohl of ties with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Germany is trying to demonstrate that it means nothing but good for the world.

The grand prize, if it succeeds, will be a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, something members of the Kohl government have been calling for since Germany’s unification.

Iran is part of this image-building strategy. Bonn knows that Germany has a cleaner reputation there than any other industrialized country in the West because it was never a colonial power in the region.

This gives Germany the moral authority to cut deals and apply pressure that no one else can.

Consider Germany’s behind-the-scenes brokerage of a large-scale exchange of prisoners and bodies between Israel and Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Shiite guerrillas in July 1996.

That achievement, witnessed on TV screens around the world, won Germany one of its most-coveted laurels: kind words from Israel. Normally, Israel is one of the sharpest critics of the German-Iranian relationship.

Now German intelligence chief Bernd Schmidbauer is reportedly at work on a similar resolution to the disappearance of Israeli airman Ron Arad, who was shot down over Lebanon in 1986.

Schmidbauer recently said on German television that he has reason to believe Arad is alive.

“Our relations with Iran will continue, and they will always be complicated,” said Karsten Voigt, the Bundestag’s foreign policy expert for the opposition Social Democratic Party.

“But if you don’t have the chance to overthrow a regime, and we obviously don’t, then what is left is to try to change attitudes,” Voigt said.