The debate was opened by SPD faction chairman Rudolf Scharping, who emphasized his party’s support for the troop deployment, but who also pointed to the great risks involved in the operation. He said that it certainly wasn’t easy for the Social Democrats to make a decision of such great import, but he also noted that a request from the international community could not simply be ignored from the outset. It is by no means an insult to one’s honor, Scharping said, to have difficulty reaching a decision when it means sending thousands of soldiers to a war zone where hundreds of thousands have already lost their lives. He underscored that this contribution serves peace and dismissed Bundeswehr inspector general Klaus Naumann’s assertion that the deployment is tantamount to a “combat mission” as “careless at the very least.”
CDU faction chairman Wolfgang Schäuble defended Naumann’s statement by saying that the soldiers could easily wind up in a situation where they had to fight to secure peace. It is a dangerous mission, he said, in which “risks can quickly arise,” even if we hope they won’t.
Schäuble was speaking to Joschka Fischer when he said that it would be desirable in the future if members of parliament refrained from participating in events where soldiers were referred to as “murderers.” Fischer rebuffed the critique sharply and accused the CDU of inviting a former court judge of the Wehrmacht to serve as an expert at a hearing on deserters in the last world war. He referred to the Hitler generals [Wilhelm] Keitel and [Alfred] Jodl and the ex-dictator of Chile [Augusto] Pinochet, and said that there are and have been soldiers who could be referred to as murderers. This of course, he added, does not apply to soldiers in a democratic state under the rule of law.
Fischer criticized the Dayton Peace Accords as “bitter and dangerous” because “there’s a danger that the instigators of ethnic cleansing will assert themselves”; he also said that a multiethnic Bosnia is a thing of the past. “But the alternative is war. That’s the reason why we’ll vote our conscience as individual members of parliament – most of us will be doing that for the first time – and not follow a majority decision by our party. For us, that’s not something that can be taken for granted. We’ll have to approve this Dayton peace, including its military aspects, because it can’t be implemented any other way. [ . . . ]” Fischer said he was aware that the conflict over Bundeswehr participation threatened to divide his party, but he saw himself faced with the “accursed dilemma” that people in certain situations can only survive if the military is sent in.
Speaking on behalf of the PDS, Gregor Gysi, among others, justified his rejection of the deployment by stating that the inability of the community of states to find a peaceful end to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia does not authorize them to resort to a military solution. It unsettled him that suddenly no one was talking about Blue Helmets [i.e. peacekeeping forces] anymore but of combat units “with emphatically green helmets.” The issue here is not the ordinary soldiers, he said, but rather his lack of trust in the political and military leadership of the Bundeswehr, which, as he noted, only recently renamed barracks that had been named after Nazi generals. According to Gysi, it is also important that we “break free from the 2,000-year-old military spiral.” Wolfgang Schäuble, Gysi said, should be happy that so many young people in Germany are interested not in military things, “but rather the opposite.”
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