IRISH TIMES
GERMAN BISHOP Margot Kässmann, the first woman to head the country’s Lutheran Church, has defended a sermon criticising the Afghanistan war as immoral and “unjustifiable”.
Her remarks have shaken political leaders in Berlin struggling to justify to an already cynical public Germany’s increasingly bloody military intervention in northern Afghanistan.
“There’s nothing good about Afghanistan, about strategies that, for a long time, hid the fact that soldiers are using weapons and that civilians are being killed,” she said.
“I’m not naive enough to think we can charm the Taliban the need for peace. But weapons clearly aren’t creating peace in Afghanistan. We need to use our imaginations more to find other ways of resolving conflict. That can often achieve more than all worldly-wise voices with their supposedly pragmatic calls to arms.”
Explaining her remarks later in a newspaper interview she said the Afghanistan mission “cannot be justified . . . by the Lutheran Church and must be ended as quickly as possible”.
Bishop Kässmann’s intervention has underlined the growing gap between the theory and the reality of how Germany explains its mission to Afghanistan.
Four months ago a German-ordered strike on two Taliban-hijacked petrol tankers left dozens of civilians dead.
The government has declined to discuss the details of the strikes, waiting instead to divulge the information at a parliamentary inquiry into the affair.
That attack came as German soldiers complained how for months they spent most of their time engaged in running battles with Afghan insurgents. In 2001 the decision to go into Afghanistan was sold to soldiers and a sceptical public as a largely humanitarian mission.
On a television talk show last night Bishop Kässmann said Germans were only now admitting that, “besides digging wells and building schools, weapons are being used too”.
The divorced mother of four was elected to serve as head of Germany’s Lutheran Church in October.
During a meeting yesterday Bishop Kässmann was invited by defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to accompany him on his next trip to Afghanistan.
The reaction to her remarks in Germany has been mixed: criticism from conservative commentators and applause for her candour from centre- and left-wing press.
“With her sermon, the bishop has broken the silence,” commented the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily.
“Neither the government parties nor even the Greens have asked: what is good about this deployment that, every day, becomes more like a war?”
Her remarks have shaken political leaders in Berlin struggling to justify to an already cynical public Germany’s increasingly bloody military intervention in northern Afghanistan.
“There’s nothing good about Afghanistan, about strategies that, for a long time, hid the fact that soldiers are using weapons and that civilians are being killed,” she said.
“I’m not naive enough to think we can charm the Taliban the need for peace. But weapons clearly aren’t creating peace in Afghanistan. We need to use our imaginations more to find other ways of resolving conflict. That can often achieve more than all worldly-wise voices with their supposedly pragmatic calls to arms.”
Explaining her remarks later in a newspaper interview she said the Afghanistan mission “cannot be justified . . . by the Lutheran Church and must be ended as quickly as possible”.
Bishop Kässmann’s intervention has underlined the growing gap between the theory and the reality of how Germany explains its mission to Afghanistan.
Four months ago a German-ordered strike on two Taliban-hijacked petrol tankers left dozens of civilians dead.
The government has declined to discuss the details of the strikes, waiting instead to divulge the information at a parliamentary inquiry into the affair.
That attack came as German soldiers complained how for months they spent most of their time engaged in running battles with Afghan insurgents. In 2001 the decision to go into Afghanistan was sold to soldiers and a sceptical public as a largely humanitarian mission.
On a television talk show last night Bishop Kässmann said Germans were only now admitting that, “besides digging wells and building schools, weapons are being used too”.
The divorced mother of four was elected to serve as head of Germany’s Lutheran Church in October.
During a meeting yesterday Bishop Kässmann was invited by defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to accompany him on his next trip to Afghanistan.
The reaction to her remarks in Germany has been mixed: criticism from conservative commentators and applause for her candour from centre- and left-wing press.
“With her sermon, the bishop has broken the silence,” commented the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily.
“Neither the government parties nor even the Greens have asked: what is good about this deployment that, every day, becomes more like a war?”
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