By IPS Correspondents
BERLIN, Dec 28 1998 (IPS)

With great fanfare Germany’s new Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer baptised his new humanitarian foreign policy with a two-hour meeting in Bonn earlier this month with the exiled Chinese dissident Wei Jinsheng.

“We will also receive persecuted democrats as welcome guests,” Fischer said prior to the mid-December Euro summit in Vienna, where he joined France and Britain in pushing for more emphasis on human rights in EU foreign policy.

At the same time Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told the German parliament — in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights — that Germany would make human rights a priority when it takes over the presidency of the EU next month.

“We won’t let human rights abuses stop us from seeking to talk to their victims and from encouraging and supporting these people in their commitment to human rights,” Schroeder said.

After his meeting with Wei, Fischer responded to Beijing’s routine protests with a curt response that there was freedom of speech in Germany.

Anyone could talk to whomsoever they chose. And China’s warning that such meetings could damage ties between Bonn and China seemed lame just weeks after China had insisted the expulsion of German journalist Juergen Kremb from Beijing should not affect sino- German relations.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s press spokesman said it was “patently obvious” that the German government would talk to dissidents, and used the opportunity to announce a possible visit by Schroder to Beijing in May.

The new German coalition which emerged after this September’s elections appears set to put foreign policy on a new course.

Dapper Green party politician Fischer — from the generation of student radicals who battled police in the streets of Frankfurt in 1968 — is now the most popular German politician.

He has even overtaken Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in the opinion polls, as a result of his new approach to foreign affairs. He has so far shown that he will not mince words, while appearing willing to negotiate with charm and aplomb.

Contrary to popular belief this is not the first time a German foreign minister has met with Wei. Former foreign minister in Helmut Kohl’s government, Klaus Kinkel, also met the dissident. But that meeting was not publicised for fear of antagonising Beijing.

Under the former conservative chancellor the promotion of German business was paramount. Valuable arms sales, particularly of submarines to Taiwan, were shelved to preserve good relations with Beijing. Human rights was paid only lip service.

Fischer just two months in the job has already signalled an end to ‘cheque-book diplomacy’ and has human rights must be given pride of place in foreign policy by allocating a separate state secretary for human rights Gerd Poppe, a Green party politician.

Under Kinkel human rights was part of the huge Asia, Africa and Latin America brief. Similarly a human rights sub-committee in the German parliament the Bundestag has been elevated to full committee status, a change that Amnesty International had been calling for for many years.

But foreign office reports on the human rights situation in specific countries are still highly confidential, partly because they could be used by asylum-seekers to support their case at a time when Germany wants to stem the tide of refugees crossing its borders.

Together with British foreign minister Robin Cook, Fischer has floated the idea of annual European Union human rights reports on its main trade partners that in Fischer’s own words will act as “a very concrete means of pressure on trade partners”.

This is not good news for Beijing. Unlike the United Nations Human Rights Commission where China has actively lobbied to dilute the impact of Human Rights reports, Beijing will have little way of influencing an EU report from the inside.

Already Fischer’s meeting with Wei is seen in some quarters as a prelude to the report on China. Wei’s words published in an Amnesty International newsletter in Feburary are likely to be taken seriously.

“Improvements in my prison conditions always occurred when pressure from Human rights organisations the media and governments were particularly strong. When the pressure was off and western politicians resorted to quiet diplomacy with the communists party there was immediately a deterioration in the treatment of political prisoners,” Wei said.

But Fischer has clear backing from other European foreign ministers which could strengthen his hand against attempts by China to play one EU country off against another, particularly in the race for business contracts.

At the European Summit earlier this month Fischer found support among other European foreign ministers for a more moral foreign policy.

Socialist Lionel Jospin has also insisted on a more humanitarian foreign policy and one of the main planks of British foreign minister Robin Cook’s foreign policy has been a new emphasis on human rights, although Cook stumbled in the beginning over an embarrassing row over British sales of arms to Indonesia.

Now Joschka Fischer has to deal with a similar litmus test — how to deal with the revelation in the Indonesian daily ‘Suara Pembaruan’, which has good contacts to the Indonesian military, that Germany has offered to train Indonesia’s armed forces.

German General Dietrich Genschel met with President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, who spent his university years in Germany, and foreign minister General Wiranto last month to discuss how Germany could help with the reorganisation of the Indonesian military.

Also in Novemeber, a high ranking police officer from the State of Bavaria was in Jakarta holding a seminar on how German police dealt with street demonstrations.

Under the previous German government German special crack troops GSG-9, roughly equivalent to Britain’s SAS trained Indonesian soldiers including General Probowo, a son in law of ex-dictator Suharto who left the army in disgrace this August under charges of murder and detention of hundreds of civilians.

So far the debate has been nipped in the bud with the German foreign office successfuly putting the defence ministry on the defensive over the contacts. A defence ministry spokesman said there were unlikely to be new proposals put to the Indonesian regime.

Meanwhile the Green party has also floated the idea that weapons exports outside the NATO area should also be linked to a country’s human rights record. Germany is the world’s sixth largest arms exporter.

However this would exclude Turkey, a NATO member. Germany is the second biggest exporter of arms to Turkey which is engaged in a conflict with its Kurdish minority population.

As analysts here point out, Fischer will not only need to display statemanship on the world stage if his new foreign policy is to be successful but within the German cabinet and within NATO as well.

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