Fighting terror in Germany
January 12, 2015
After last week's terror attacks in Paris, French security authorities are continuing with their highest level security plan, deploying 10,000 troops to protect sites such as Jewish schools and tourist attractions.
"The threat is still present," Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Monday.
In Germany, security measures aren't quite so intense. But German politicians, too, are reacting to the terrorism threat that's once again come into focus after 17 people were killed by Islamic extremists in France last week.
"The security situation in Germany hasn't fundamentally changed since the Paris attacks," Wolfgang Bosbach from Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) told DW.
"It's constantly serious."
New measures to protect the country
Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas from the Social Democrats (SPD) said he'd present new laws on fighting terrorism to the Cabinet as early as this month. The focus will be on two measures in particular: punishing those who provide financial support to terrorist organizations, and prosecuting Islamists who travel to the Mideast to join the jihad or "holy war."
The latter would include "those who train at terror camps in Syria," Maas said to German daily "Bild" on Monday.
Politicians in Germany have discussed how to stop the dangerous trend of Germans traveling to Syria or Iraq to fight with the jihadist group "Islamic State" (IS) for a while now.
"The returnees are the greatest danger to this country," Bosbach, head of the Bundestag Committee of the Interior, said, referring to Islamic fighters who have been trained to kill coming back to Germany.
After the attacks in Paris, Maas and other politicians are working, with an even greater sense of urgency than before, on their plans to prevent potential Islamists from even leaving the country by confiscating their passports and marking their IDs.
Germany - a target for terrorists not just since Paris
Rolf Tophoven, director of the Institute for Crisis Prevention (IFTUS), stresses that while there is no concrete proof for a planned terrorism attack in Germany, a heightened awareness is definitely called for - and not just after what happened in Paris.
"We are a target," the terrorism expert told DW. "We're supporting the Peshmerga militia in Iraq in their fight against the Islamic State by sending weapons. Because of these weapon deliveries, Germany is on the list of potential terrorism targets."
Gabi Weber of the SPD, however, warns against an excessive focus on security at the expense of other essentials.
"We have to ask ourselves whether we want to throw all our liberties overboard," Weber, the SPD's vice-spokesperson for security questions, told DW.
"We have to take into account our liberties and our civil possibilities and accept that there's no such thing as absolute security."
Contentious data retention
One measure that has come up again in the discussion on the fight against terror is long-term data retention, or "Vorratsdatenspeicherung," as the Germans call it.
This issue was a huge point of contention between the two coalition partners of the last German government. Maas, the current justice minister, has decided to not implement a law that would allow telecommunications data to be saved and stored for six months without a qualified suspicion. Members of the government coalition of CDU and SPD strongly disagree on whether the method should be implemented now.
The CDU's Bosbach believes data retention is helpful in the investigation of terror attacks. But Weber from the SPD denies its effectiveness.
"Data retention helped neither in France, nor in the US with the Boston Marathon bombing, so I don't think steps in that direction will be helpful now," she says.
Tophoven, on the other hand, believes it to be essential for Germany's security: "Of course long-term data retention is no panacea, but to be able to legally follow the conversations of potential perpetrators and save them, too, is a necessary instrument."
Arson attack on German newspaper
On Saturday night, the Hamburg newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost was attacked, though, thankfully, nobody was hurt. Unknown perpetrators threw rocks through basement windows of the paper, followed by an incendiary device.
The incident was linked by some to the gruesome attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were killed on Wednesday (07.01.2015). The Hamburger Morgenpost reprinted some of Charlie Hebdo's Prophet Muhammed caricatures in the wake of the shooting at the French magazine.
Terrorism expert Tophoven said it was essential to remain unfazed by the incident.
"It's important not to give in to any threats, otherwise we'd be playing the terrorists'game," he emphasized. "The attack [on Charlie Hebdo] was an attack on press freedom, and this freedom mustn't be destroyed now."
Bosbach echoed this sentiment: "We mustn't be intimidated and have to continue advocating for our free democratic basic order."