Stasi row derails German Left party leader

[emad]

Luke Harding in Berlin
Thursday October 20, 2005
The Guardian


The leader of Germany's Left party was at the centre of a damaging row last night over allegations that he worked as an informer for East Germany's secret police.

Lothar Bisky, the head of the Left party, suffered a humiliating rebuff on Monday when MPs meeting for the first time since last month's general election refused to back him for a key parliamentary post. MPs from both Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats and Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats joined forces to block Bisky's appointment as the new vice-chairman of parliament - shooting down his candidacy in three separate votes.


The move follows claims that Bisky, 64, worked as an informal collaborator for East Germany's secret police, the Stasi. According to yesterday's Berliner Zeitung, Bisky's name crops up twice in the "Rosenholz" files rescued from the Stasi archives by a CIA agent after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bisky denies the claims.
He admitted writing reports on his West German trips but says he has no idea what happened to them. Last month Marianne Birthler, the head of the Stasi archive, said several MPs in the Left party had collaborated with the Stasi. Yesterday Left party officials accused Germany's mainstream parties of a conspiracy, and said the claims against Bisky were fabricated. "We are not going to allow others to dictate who our candidate should be," said Hendrik Thalheim, the party's press spokesman.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1596161,00.html

[xchrom]

1. interesting.

in slow increments the Left party has gaing ground -- and i've heard they going to officially oppose this guy on these grounds.

the social democrats would rather make nice with the christian democrats and take a back seat than go back and make alliances with greens and the left party.

[Generarth]

2. In the interests of fairness

why don't they open up the West German archives so we can see which politicians have been cooperating with them.

[enigma000]

3. West Germans caught working for the Stasi?

Any West German politician caught working for the Stasi would no doubt have his political career ended. I mean spying on your fellow citizens is one thing, spying for a foreign and unfriendly country is a step further.

[Freddie Stubbs]

5. Because they were the good guys

After WWII the former Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes, but no one went after the Allies.

[SOS]

4. And what

are Schroeder and Merkel saying about Putin being a top KGB man in Dresden during the Cold War? Seems that a person's past is only of interest to them when his party takes 9% of their votes.

[Freddie Stubbs]

6. I suppose they would block him too if

he ran for a position in the German parliament.

[David__77]

7. So what if he did give info to the GDR security services?

So what? The FRG security services have coddled and harbored "ex"-Nazis ever since the war ended. The GDR never did that. They're trying to criminalize former GDR citizens who happened to be patriotic. The GDR cannot be compared with the criminal Third Reich--it was not a Western-style democracy, but it was not a fascist state.