German ambassador dismissed
The German ambassador to Haiti has been replaced after deputy Winfried Wolf exposed his racist and sexist views in an article published by the left press in Bonn, Berlin and Paris. But the mass media and government have ignored Wolf's major exposure:
Germany's threat to cut development aid unless Haiti intensifies its privatisation programme.
Haiti:
In November 1995, Wolf, a member of parliament for the PDS (Party Democratic Socialism), visited the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico as part of a delegation of the German Parliament's Committee for Economic Cooperation. On his return he wrote a report exposing US and German blackmail of Haiti: the world's richest countries are threatening to cut development aid to the world's poorest country, unless it privatises the telephone company and the Port-auPrince power station. As Wolf explains, these are the Haitian government's only (and largely insufficient) resources for financing its own priorities: health care, literacy, and agrarian reform.
The article also exposed the intolerable arrogance of Germany's Ambassador to Haiti, Guenther Dahlhoff, an outright lobbyist for privatisation. Dahlhoff told the German parliamentary delegation that Haiti's. poverty is the result of its "overpopulation". This overpopulation, according to Dahlhoff, has 'cultural' roots: "The Haitian woman is always willing and the Haitian man always can...", he said.
There was little reaction when the article was published in early January 1996, in a range of low-circulation socialist and radical publications, including Germany's Junge Welt, Socialistiche Zeitung and Konkret, and the French weekly Rouge. Nor did the Ministry of Foreign Affairs react when the PDS group in Parliament raised the incident on 19 January. But the big press began to cover the case.!
Things really started to move when fellow delegation-member Gabriele Fograscher confirmed Wolf's report, and added that Ambassador Dahlhoff had even compared the style of one of Haitian President Aristide's speeches with that of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.2
Now, Germany's Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel, was forced to act. Dahlhoff was summoned to Bonn. He did not deny the facts, and was removed from his post for "sexist and racist statements" According to Wolf, "this is an unprecedented, but welcome step" in the history of German diplomacy.
The big press almost exclusively concentrated on Dahlhoff's sexist statements. These made a stir in polite society, and satisfied a certain voyeurism on the political and media scene. The political background, to the comments, the desperate situation in Haiti, and the responsibility of Germany and the US for the maintenance and even aggravation of the dreadful conditions in the country were not on the agenda of the debate. German and US linkage of development aid to quick privatisation was in the big media.
Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel was congratulated for his 'decisive' action towards the offending diplomat. He was equally 'decisive' in his January 30th letter to Winfried Wolf, in which he criticised the deputy's "indiscretion'. Wolf should have turned to 'his' Foreign Minister, Kinkel wrote. The next day Kinkel violently attacked Winfried Wolf in a meeting of the Bundestag Committee for Economic Co-operation: Wolf's behaviour had "damaged German interests", the minister thundered. Kinkel, former head Germany's BND intelligence service, threatened the radical deputy: "from now on, I will observe you scrupulously. Something could happen in your life!" 3
Kinkel said that Wolf should have "avoided alarming the public". If he had raised the matter in private, the Minister continued, it would have been possible to Ambassador in Port-au-Prince, but not remove him from his post.
Sympathy for Winfried Wolf's action is not restricted to the Haitians or to the socialist and radical milieus in Germany and abroad. The priest Albrecht Bausch, president of the Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) Peace Prize 4 defended Winfried Wolf's right to inform the public. The pastor characterised ex-ambassador Dahlhoff as a "slanderer, full of contempt for the Haitian people and their government, whose declarations and priorities in the struggle against misery are absolutely reasonable". Bausch rejected all parliamentary claims that Wolf should have raised his concerns in private.
Peter Hesse, a member of Germany's ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, and president of the "Solidarity in Partnership for the One World" foundation, wrote thanking Winfried Wolf for his outspoken article. "Even a German with a liberal-conservative outlook must side with the oppressed in a country like Haiti," he
This is certainly an extremely marginal position in the conservative camp. But it shows the possibilities of launching a debate on the real character and effects of foreign policy and "aid". * Notes 1. Badische Zeitung (daily), 12 January 1995. 2. The mass circulation illustrated weekly Stern covered this story in its 25 January issue, with details leaked to the big daily papers two or three days earlier. 3. See Winfried Wolf's report of this strange conversation in the 5 February 1996 issue of the daily Junge Welt. 4. In 1993 the Aachen Peace Prize was awarded to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Source: compiled by Jean Dupont using information supplied by Winfried Wolf parliamentary office. For more information contact: Winfried Wolf's Office, Parliament (Bundeshaus), D53113 Bonn, Germany. Tel.: 49-228-1681791. Fax: 49-2281686068
International Viewpoint n° 275 3