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(回答先: ドイツ首相が不快感表明 アフガン駐留兵の写真問題で [CNN] 投稿者 white 日時 2006 年 10 月 26 日 16:41:15)
http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/10/26/world/26germany600.1.jpg
A newspaper report that German troops in Afghanistan played with a human skull shocked many at home.
記事本文はこちら ⇒
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/world/europe/26germany.html?ref=europe
In Germany, U.S. Official Addresses Rift With Allies
By MARK LANDLER
Published: October 26, 2006
BERLIN, Oct. 25 — Seeking to heal one of the deepest rifts between the United States and its European allies, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said here on Wednesday that the Bush administration had done a poor job of explaining its legal principles in its effort to prevent terrorism.
But he also faulted European countries, which have criticized the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He said they were reluctant to take back their own citizens when released and had been insufficiently helpful in negotiating with other countries for the safe return of prisoners facing mistreatment in their own lands.
“We have repeatedly asked our European allies to join in these efforts,” Mr. Gonzales said in a speech to a polite, skeptical invited audience. “But despite demands that Guantánamo be closed, the United States has received little help from our European allies regarding the fate of these detainees.”
The diplomatic initiative by Mr. Gonzales comes amid growing concern over the conduct of German soldiers, including photographs that surfaced on Wednesday that appeared to show German troops in Afghanistan posing with a human skull.
Mr. Gonzales declined to name the countries he said were being uncooperative with regard to returned prisoners — especially, he said, while standing on a podium “in this great country.”
His comment, delivered with a thin smile, seemed to suggest that Germany was among those the United States regarded as laggards.
Germany’s responsiveness has come under scrutiny in the case of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish-German man who was imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than four years, partly because of Germany’s reluctance to take him back. Last August, Mr. Kurnaz was finally returned home, eight months after a new chancellor, Angela Merkel, raised his case in a meeting with President Bush.
In general, however, Mr. Gonzales seemed intent on reaching out to Europeans rather than rebuking them.
“There has been a lot of friction” in the trans-Atlantic relationship, he said. “We are partly to blame for that. We didn’t do as good a job as we should have from the outset in explaining ourselves.”
Mr. Gonzales, the legal architect of some of the Bush administration’s toughest policies toward suspected terrorists, said he was deeply disappointed that many people overseas did not believe that the United States, or Mr. Bush himself, were committed to protecting the rule of law.
He defended American policies on the detention of “enemy combatants,” the rights afforded them by military commissions, and the role of the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of prisoners.
Mr. Gonzales’s European tour, which includes stops in Spain and the Netherlands, coincides with a growing concern here that Germany has compromised its own principles in helping the United States in its worldwide effort against terrorism. It also comes at a time when Germany published a proposed new defense policy that would pave the way for the country to play a bigger role in international peacekeeping missions.
There are no fewer than five formal investigations under way here relating to terrorism and the German military. The issues raised include accusations that the Central Intelligence Agency transferred prisoners to secret prisons in Eastern Europe, and questions about whether the German government was aware of such transfers, as well as whether German soldiers mistreated Mr. Kurnaz in Afghanistan, as he contends, before he was sent to Guantánamo.
The Defense Ministry denies that German soldiers abused Mr. Kurnaz. But the military has opened an investigation into his accusations.
“Our guys are supposed to be in Afghanistan to help stabilize things, not to kick around prisoners,” said Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “This embarrasses us and qualifies a bit our discussion about what American soldiers are doing in Abu Ghraib.”
The photos that appear to show the German troops posing with a human skull have added to the concerns. Some of the photos, published Wednesday in the mass-market newspaper Bild, depict the soldiers placing the skull on the hood of a jeep as a grisly emblem.
Bild did not say how it had obtained the photos. The paper said they were taken in 2003 near Kabul, and involved German troops serving as part of the international security force in Afghanistan.
The defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, has ordered an investigation. “Such activities are diametrically opposed to the values and behavior we teach our troops,” he said to Bild.
Reports of military abuse carry an obvious historical echo in Germany, Mr. Perthes said, and could generate opposition in Parliament to the country’s continuing involvement in Afghanistan.
In particular, there are questions about the deployment of soldiers belonging to an elite rapid-response unit of the German Army known as the KSK. The activities of these troops in Afghanistan are cloaked in mystery.
Parliament is also investigating whether the German government was aware of the possible C.I.A. activities in Europe. That has put Mrs. Merkel in an awkward position, since her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was a high-level adviser to her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder.
The previous government is also under scrutiny in the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted in Macedonia in 2003 and turned over to American agents, who flew him to Afghanistan, on the mistaken belief that he was involved in terrorism.
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