by J. Smith
We see things differently than these comrades. We are of the opinion that the hateful assembly-lines and piecework in the factories have gotten so bad that hardly anyone has any illusions any more about the fact that corporate profits require irreparable damage to the health of the workers. The masses already know that in the Federal Republic they must work themselves to death because that is the source of their employers’ profits, that the factory workers already know who they’re working for—soon it will be for themselves.
We are of the opinion that the problem these comrades see as lying elsewhere is their own subjective problem, that they project onto the masses their own lack of clarity. They want to identify their own inability—an inability to express solidarity with the masses because of their own privileged class position—as lying with the masses, to present it as an objective problem based in the masses’ need to develop a higher level of consciousness.
If, as occurred recently in Frankfurt, some women comrades say, for example, that they want to take to the streets if another one of us is murdered, then that indicates it would be easy to spontaneously intervene. Which is to say: the problem of agency is, as Springer journalists put it in a headline, one of marketing and competition. Political content as the commodity, the masses as the market. So they are ready to moan about imperialist crimes, but not to prevent them with clubs and bombs. For the imperialists, the assembly lines are still not going fast enough and the time required must be further reduced. They will consume as much as they can extract.
There is no reason for further delay in addressing the problem of armed struggle and resistance. Reduced hours, lay-offs, strikes, two million foreign workers, “Bild fights for you!”, “the extortionist of the week” in Stern, Citizens Initiatives, squatted houses—there is hardly any area in which the system can maintain its facade. The people’s desires must be unified and transformed into an organized leap forward.
This greed-driven system is ravaging the cities. Teachers must learn to muzzle themselves or they are fired. The mass media has been purged of decent critical journalists. Riot police are mobilized against strike centrals. Rulings of the Federal Labor Court prepare the way to criminalize future strikes. The BKA hopes to eliminate the remaining press freedoms. They are not waiting for the legal left to take up the armed struggle before proceeding with this. It’s happening now; it has begun. Is this the point when you will start to resist—or are you still waiting for something?
Comrades, stop hiding behind the masses! Stop shifting the question of resistance to the masses! Stop rationalizing your fear of the system’s excessive violence as a problem of agency! Stop presenting your confusion as erudition and your helplessness as a broad perspective!
The system is now producing contradictions at such a rate that they can no longer be integrated, and the masses no longer believe talk of reforms. It is equally true that the guerilla can only be anchored in the people to the degree that we carry out appropriate actions and you make effective propaganda. For this to happen, the revolutionary process and revolutionary consciousness must be developed further; the consciousness that action is justified—and possible!
When we build the revolutionary guerilla, we are creating an instrument that is beyond the reach of the system’s repression, that does not depend on the system’s tolerance for its capacity to act, that does not have its room to maneuver determined by the Verfassungsshutz. If you are domesticated like Müller’s1 demonstrators in Frankfurt on May 18, you can continue to demonstrate for some time to come, and you can celebrate it along with the KSV as the most powerful and most insular demonstration in a long time. Under the watchful eye of the police and funneled between two water cannons and rows of batons, you can go on celebrating successes long into the future. But the price to be paid is the distance people took from Tuesday’s demonstration, the denunciation of the comrades who broke free from the Hauptwache;2 the price in the end was betrayal of the goals in exchange for permission to walk in the streets.
Today, everyone understands our actions against the extermination strategy in Vietnam. Everybody should be able to understand our actions to defend the lives and health of the prisoners and of the RAF comrades still at large. That the media no longer publishes our communiqués about our bomb attacks, but publishes false statements of fascist origin, that they downplay attacks on U.S. imperialism and play up fascist provocations such as that against the citizens of Stuttgart, demonstrates how things really are, demonstrates what they are afraid of and how far they’ll go to hide the truth from the masses, to prop up their facade.
Dare to struggle; dare to win! Attack and smash the power of imperialism! It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution! We call on all militants in the Federal Republic to make all American establishments targets of their attacks in their struggle against U.S. imperialism!
Long live the RAF!
Ulrike Meinhof
for the RAF
May 31, 1972
6
Black September: A Statement from Behind Bars
IN THE FALL of 1972, operationally devastated, the RAF issued its first document from behind bars: The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle. Written by one or several of the captured combatants, the text was first made public in West Berlin at Mahler’s second RAF trial, during which he faced charges of conspiracy and establishing a terrorist organization. The former lawyer worked it into the court record by using it as the basis for questions to Ulrike Meinhof, whom he had called as a witness. By November, it was being distributed by outside supporters in magazine format as the RAF’s third major publication.
In this paper, the RAF re-examined the geopolitics of anti-imperialism and the class base for revolution in the First World while responding angrily to Frankfurt School intellectual Oskar Negt, who had recently emerged as a vocal critic of armed struggle in the FRG. What caught people’s attention most was the RAF’s expression of warm solidarity with the Palestinian group Black September, which had carried out a daring, and ultimately tragic, hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics just months earlier.
“The guerillas took part in a courageous action,” Mahler explained, “in which they were ready to sacrifice themselves. The only fault the Black September guerillas can be reproached for is that they did not take Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a hostage.”1
At this point, the courtroom full of left-wing supporters erupted into cheers, prompting the judge to order it cleared.
There is no indication that the RAF played any part in the Black September operation; it was effectively out of action at the time, gutted by the arrests it had suffered following the May Offensive. Even so, given the group’s public statement of solidarity, it may be best to revisit the events at the Munich Olympics that year. (For more about the relationship between the West Germany and Israel, and how this affected the New Left, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-53.)
Black September had its origin in the aftermath of the civil war between Palestinian forces and the Jordanian state in September 1970. Formed by militants within Arafat’s Al Fatah, its first action had been the assassination, on November 28, 1971, of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tel.2 Not one month later, the group had attempted its second assassination, wounding Zaid el Rifai, Jordan’s ambassador to England, as he drove through the streets of London.3 By September of 1972, Black September had carried out a number of operations in Europe, including skyjacking a Sabena Belgian World Airlines plane en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. The plane was flown to Lod airport, where Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan sent in a squad of paratroopers disguised as maintenance workers, who carried out a successful assault. Two of the hijackers were killed and two others captured.4
Meanwhile, opening on August 26, the 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to be a symbolic graduation ceremony for the FRG. The last time the Olympics were held on German soil had been the 1936 Berlin games, which
became a propaganda vehicle for the Hitler regime. Commentators were not shy to admit that the 1972 Munich Olympics were meant to signal a moving on, a testament to how well West Germany had gotten over its fascist past.
As an unrecognized portent of things to come, that June, the International Olympic Committee refused requests to allow a Palestinian team to participate in the games.5
Early on September 5, midway through the games, an eight-man Black September commando entered the “Olympic Village” housing athletes from around the world. The commando made directly for the Israeli dorms, which they secured, in the process killing two sportsmen who tried to resist. They seized nine other Israeli athletes as hostages and issued their demands: the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs from Israeli prisons, the release of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the FRG, and safe passage to Egypt for all concerned.6
Black September named this its “Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im.”7
Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, informed the West German authorities that Israel would not release any of the prisoners. At that point, the West Germans developed a plan to pretend to arrange for the safe passage of the commando and the hostages out of the FRG, while in fact preparing an ambush.
At 10:20 PM, the guerillas and their captives were flown to the military airfield at Fürstenfeldbruck, halfway between Munich and Augsburg. A Lufthansa Boeing 727 waited on the tarmac, ostensibly to fly the group to Tunis. But the area was crawling with cops, and five snipers had been positioned with orders to take the “terrorists” out as soon as the signal was given.
Two members of the commando checked out the Boeing to make sure that all was as had been promised. They then started back to the helicopters where the hostages and the other commando members had remained. At this point, the police sharpshooters opened fire: they missed, and there ensued intermittent volleys of bullets lasting over an hour. Finally, unable to subdue the Palestinians with gunfire, just after midnight police in armored vehicles moved in to try and storm the helicopters.
Seeing this, the commando executed the nine hostages.
By the time the cops were in control, five members of the Palestinian commando and a police officer also lay dead. The entire hostage-taking had lasted barely twenty hours.
It was later revealed that the Bavarian police had seriously bungled their ambush. A team that had been designated to overpower the commando inside the Boeing had voted (!) to desert their posts just twenty minutes before the helicopters landed at Fürstenfeldbruck—they considered the proposed ambush “suicidal.”1 This put all the pressure on the marksmen, and yet there were only five deployed, they were not equipped with the recommended rifles for such an operation, nor had they received infrared sights, bulletproof vests, or walkie talkies.2 They were not even informed of each other’s positions, which led to one police sniper shooting another, whom he mistook for a member of the commando!3
The authorities had obviously underestimated the Palestinian guerilla. “At the moment we fired there were not enough terrorists exposed,” explained Bruno Merck, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior. “We had expected, nevertheless, that those who had not been shot would surrender in the shock of the gun battle. That didn’t happen… All we could do was hope for a mistake. But these people are not amateurs.”4
The distinction between “amateurs” and “professionals” is an odd one. Two of the commando members were teenagers, and the others mostly in their early twenties; obviously, none had participated in other actions of this sort. Their determination most likely came from their own personal experiences. They had all grown up in refugee camps, their families forced to endure extreme poverty, hunger, and the constant threat of Israeli violence, while most of the world happily ignored their existence.5 In the words of Abu Daoud, who claims to have organized the operation, “They were people who had left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then. They were people whose houses were now the homes of Polish, French and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to.”6
The three survivors from the commando—Sammar ‘Adnan ‘abd al-Ghani al-Jishshi,7 ‘Abd al-Qadir ad-Dinnawi, and Samer Muhammad ‘Abdallah8—were taken into West German custody. Less than two months later, on October 29, a second Black September commando skyjacked a Lufthansa jet en route from Beirut to Ankara, threatening to blow up the plane if the three were not released. Still licking its wounds from the Fürstenfeldbruck fiasco, the West German government agreed: the Munich survivors were granted safe passage to Libya.9
Operation Iqrith and Kafr Bir’im sent shockwaves around the world. To Israel and its supporters, Black September had massacred innocents, and the Germans had been criminally incompetent. In the words of one Israeli diplomat, “The human mind fails to grasp the barbaric depravity of the cruel murderers of the Israeli athletes.”10
The response was not long in coming and took the form of collective punishment:
[On September 8] Israeli Skyhawk planes attacked villages and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria… killing a total of 59 people and wounding 40 others, all of whom were civilians. Among the victims were 19 children.11
Eight days later, a second exercise in collective punishment was carried out:
The Israeli army, supported by tanks, armored cars and jet aircraft, crossed into Lebanese territory, and for 36 hours attacked a number of Lebanese villages within an area of some 250 square kilometers, killing people at random and destroying houses and blowing up bridges…
The refugee camp at Nabatiya was attacked from the air by napalm bombs, wounding eight of its inmates… By the time the Israelis withdrew, they left behind a trail of death and destruction. About 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed or wounded, and over 200 houses destroyed or damaged. In addition, 18 Lebanese soldiers died in defense of their homeland.1
The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution condemning these massacres, and in doing so put Israel’s policy of carrying out reprisals against Palestinian civilians on a firm international footing for decades to come.2
Not only did the Munich operation provoke attacks against Palestinian civilians, it also spelled the beginning of the end of Black September as an organization. On the one hand, Israeli secret services embarked on a bloody campaign of retribution, letter bombs and targeted assassinations, which would eventually claim dozens of lives.3 At the same time, various Arab regimes which supported the PLO began to worry that the Palestinians’ struggle might endanger their relationship with the imperialist west. The final turning point for these regimes occurred just six months later when a Black September commando took over the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires4—one Belgian and two American diplomats were executed before the commando surrendered.5 The pressure from conservative Arab states increased, and the PLO and Fatah withdrew their support for hijackings and hostage-takings, which caused Black September operations to rapidly taper off.6 Within a few years, the organization was no more.
As for the West German reaction to the events at the Munich Olympics, the whole mess was seen as a great embarrassment. One result was the decision to establish a crack special operations unit, the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (literally, “Border Protection Group 9” but shortened to GSG-9), announced within weeks of the Fürstenfeldbruck blunder. Led by Ulrich Wegener, Genscher’s liaison officer with the BGS, who had been present on the scene at the airfield, it would receive its initial training from Britain’s SAS and Israel’s Sayeret Mat’kal. As its name implies, the GSG-9 fell under the umbrella of the Border Police, not the armed forces, legally enabling it to attempt long-term “deep cover” infiltration of the radical scene. The GSG-9 would eventually win international recognition as one of the most fearsome “counterterrorism” units in the world, some of its operatives receiving additional training in NATO’s International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) Sc
hool.7
Of more immediate consequence was the crackdown against the FRG’s small Arab population.
Earlier that year, Black September had already carried out less dramatic attacks in West Germany. On February 6, the group had assassinated five Jordanians, believed to be intelligence officers who had been active in the civil war, near Cologne.8 Then, on February 8, a bomb had gone off in a factory belonging to the Strüver Corporation near Hamburg. The factory produced electrical generators for Israeli aircraft. 9 On February 22, the Esso Oil pipeline near Hamburg had been similarly damaged.10
Now, with the Munich attack passing under the glare of the Olympic spotlight, the state moved into action; raids were carried out, and the FRG’s 4,000 Arab students and 37,000 Arab “guest workers” came under intense scrutiny. In short order, approximately one hundred Palestinian activists were expelled, and two Fatah front groups—the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Workers—found themselves banned.1
At the same time, within the radical left, some saw the events of September 5 quite differently. To anti-imperialists and others who sympathized with Black September, the operation had been a legitimate one, even if it had ended in tragedy. Some would even argue that the operation had been a success, for although no prisoners had been freed and so many people had died, the world could no longer pretend it did not know about the plight of the Palestinians.2 Furthermore, it was argued that blame for the Israeli athletes’ death lay squarely with the West German police, who had attempted a double-cross which simply blew up in their faces.
Sympathetic observers pointed out that the Palestinians had certainly not wanted to kill their hostages. They hoped rather to free their own comrades. This argument was more difficult to dismiss in 1972 than it would be today, as skyjackings and exchanging hostages for prisoners had not yet exhausted their utility for guerillas at that time, and often did meet with success (as the October 29 skyjacking would demonstrate).3
