In a goodwill gesture to the incoming Obama administration, the German government is considering taking in a number of the detainees held at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:
Germany is considering taking some detainees and will have
“intensive discussions” about what to do with prisoners
considered innocent who cannot return to their home countries,
German government spokesman Thomas Steg said today.
The announcement by Germany, coming two weeks after Portugal
said it “will be available” to take some Guantanamo detainees,
may make it easier for Obama to fulfill his campaign pledge to
shut the prison, which has been the object of international
condemnation and allegations of prisoner abuse.
“There will be prisoners who will neither want to remain in
the U.S. nor will be able to return home,” Steg told reporters
in Berlin. He said the considerations were humanitarian, as a way
to ease the closure of the six-year-old prison should the issue
of repatriation become a legal barrier.
Portugal’s Dec. 10 offer came in a letter from Portuguese
Foreign Minister Luis Amado that urged members of the European
Union to help resettle Guantanamo detainees who cannot be
returned to their homelands.
This move, if approved, would be a good gesture by Germany and could signal a new beginning for transatlantic relations. Guantanamo is an abomination and a symbol forthe lawlessness of the Bush era. President-elect Obama has vowed to shut the facility as one of his first actions as president, so it is imperative that he follow through on this. This support by Germany will help him to close one of the darkest chapters of recent American history. But the move can also be seen as an atonement for Germany's complicity in the prisoner abuse at the camp. From 2002 until 2006 the Turkish-German Murat Kurnaz was held in Guantanamo. Early on, US intelligence officials realized Kurnaz's innocence, but the German authorities refused his repatriation. In fact, as Kurnaz points out in his book, Five Years of My Life, the German government sent over special interrogaters who beat him, instead of securiing his release.
Leading the initiative to take in the Guantanamo detaines is German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. There is a certain logic to this, since it was Steinmeier who blocked Kurtnaz's early release back to his German homeland. As Bernhard Docke, the German attorney for Murat Kurnaz, told Der Spiegel today:"Aber der Himmel freut sich über einen reuigen Sünder mehr als über 99 Gerechte." (Heavan rejoices more for one repentent sinner than for 99 righteous ones.)
