CHANCELLOR ANGELA Merkel for the first time yesterday attended the funeral of German soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
The three soldiers had been killed on a military mission which Berlin described for the first time yesterday as “war”.
After eight years and German 39 deaths in Afghanistan, yesterday’s ceremony, broadcast live on public television, marked the moment when Berlin came clean to a sceptical German public about the reality faced by their soldiers in that country.
After sending troops there in 2001 for peacekeeping work, Chancellor Merkel asked the German public to, if not support, then at least tolerate the increasingly bloody mission for another year or two. “Your deployment forces us politicians to look at things as they really are and call them by their name,” said Dr Merkel to soldiers at the funeral of their comrades Niels Bruns (38), Robert Hartert (25) and Martin Augustiniak (28).
The three were killed on Good Friday after being ambushed by Taliban fighters near the northern Afghan city of Kunduz.
“International law defines what is happening in most of Afghanistan as non-international armed conflict,” said Dr Merkel. “Most soldiers there call it civil war, or simply war. I understand that.”
In the last 18 months, German troops have come under increasing attack by Taliban insurgents. Berlin refused to redefine the mission as “war”, arguing that it did not involve conflict between two states, as per the definition in international law.
There was a practical reason too: sending German troops to a war zone would have voided many soldiers’ insurance policies.
Since February, though, Berlin has reclassified its military mission as a “non-international armed conflict”. Defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg was even more outspoken yesterday, breaking with Berlin’s semantic strategy entirely. “What we had to experience on Good Friday is described by most people as war, including myself,” he said.
He cast aside another post-second World War taboo yesterday by telling mourning relatives: “The country is mourning with you: not ashamed or hidden but, praise God, openly – as open as we have to be about the reality in Afghanistan.”
Some 11 years after its first foreign deployment – to Kosovo – since 1945, most Germans remain uncomfortable and suspicious of their country’s new military role in the world. After dozens of private funerals of soldiers, yesterday’s very public funeral had a political – and pedagogical – quality.
A government spokesperson described Dr Merkel’s attendance yesterday as a “heartfelt matter” that had nothing to do with pressure from Germany’s Bild tabloid.
After a ceremony punctuated by the music of Bach, a stony-faced Dr Merkel reminded mourners – and the TV audience – that Germany was in Afghanistan to defend itself from the threat of terrorism at home. These arguments were of little comfort to mourning relatives, admitted Dr Merkel and, for most ordinary Germans, “far from self-evident or comfortable”.
Nor, as she bowed before three coffins, to Dr Merkel.