Author:
Publication: The Times of India
- Internet Edition
Date: December 13, 2001
Berlin: The German government cracked
down on Wednesday on an extreme Islamic organisation regarded as a "state
within a state", banning the so-called caliphate and mounting raids on
some 200 premises across the country.
Interior Minister Otto Schily announced
that he had banned the Cologne-based association, a related foundation
called "The Servants of Islam" and 19 member organisations.
The Hilafet Devleti association,
or caliphate, headed by the jailed so-called Caliph of Cologne, the Turkish
national Metin Kaplan, has a total of about 1,100 members in Germany, according
to the ministry.
The ban was accompanied by police
raids early Wednesday on 212 premises in the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia,
Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Berlin and Lower
Saxony, the ministry said.
Hundreds of police officers descended
on offices and a mosque associated with Kaplan in Cologne and the property
of the caliphate was seized, police said. Some 30 people in the buildings
were sent home after identity checks.
Raids took place in numerous other
German towns too, and there were at least two arrests, at Wiesbaden, according
to witnesses. Religious writings were also seized and in Ingolstadt a revolver
was found, police said.
The homes of 64 leading members
of the association were searched in the raids, the ministry said.
The aim of Kaplan's self-styled
caliphate - the reference is to a traditional medieval Moslem state - is
to overthrow the secular Turkish state and replace it with a fundamentalist
Islamic state.
"The so-called caliphate incites
its supporters against democracy, against those who think differently and
against the Republic of Turkey. Particularly repulsive are its anti-Semitic
and anti-Israeli tirades," Schily told a news conference in Berlin.
Kaplan, a Muslim theologian, was
given a four-year jail sentence in November 2000 for inciting the murder
of a rival Muslim leader, who was assassinated in Berlin by three masked
men in May 1997.
Federal German investigators say
that in 1996-97 Kaplan attempted to set up a joint caliphate with Osama
bin Laden and the latter's Al-Qaeda organisation. Negotiations with the
presumed mastermind behind the September 11 attacks in the United States
apparently failed, however.
The caliphate is the first organisation
to be affected by a change in German law on religious associations, brought
in as part of a package of anti-terrorist security measures in the wake
of September 11.
The law, which came into effect
December 8, abolishes privileges enjoyed by religious organisations.
Kaplan's organisation had been under
surveillance by the domestic German intelligence service since its foundation
in 1984 because of its "aggressive, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic agitation".
According to the Federal Office
for the Protection of the Constitution, the caliphate formed "a state within
a state" in which only Koranic law was regarded as valid.
Turkey has been demanding Kaplan's
extradition since his arrest in Cologne in March 1999, but Germany has
so far refused on the basis that there is no guarantee he would not be
executed.
Schily said on Wednesday that he
would like to expel Kaplan but that the Turkish government would have to
give a guarantee that it would not carry out a death sentence on him. The
German government will hold talks with the authorities in Ankara about
this, he said. (AFP)
