<nettime> RAF, "now history," disbands

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

["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.

<...>
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