Judicial enquiry in Germany turned down
Awni al Kalemji, the spokesman of the Iraqi Patriotic Alliance (IPA), will hold a public meeting in support of the Iraqi resistance in Vienna on May 19. He has been invited by the Iraq Community with whom the Anti-imperialist Camp has been closely co-operating since the aggression on Iraq in 1991. The trip of Kalemji follows the presence of Abduljabbar al Kubaysi, the secretary general of the IPA, in Vienna in March of this year. In co-operation with the Iraqi Community two meeting in support of the Iraqi resistance could be held with some 500 people participating. The success of the campaign is indicating that the solidarity movement for the Iraqi liberation struggle against the occupation could gain some terrain.
The visit of Kalemji also confirms that the Iraqi resistance supporters cannot be intimidated and silenced. Kalemji’s tour through Germany, which was scheduled for March, was impeded by the German police. While in Berlin some 100 policemen were surrounding the hall where Kalemji was supposed to speak, he later was even arrested in Hamburg. The authority’s move shows that all the talk of democracy is void and Germany is no state of law. The police constructed an judicial enquiry on the ground that by politically supporting the armed resistance Kalemji would have called for an act liable to prosecution. From a legal point of view this construction is a clear violation of the constitutional right to free speech. The prosecutor as predictable very soon closed the enquiry in the same way as he had done with Kalemji in an earlier case. Actually in the correspondence with Kalemji’s lawyer the police department admitted indirectly that they chose this way as otherwise there had been no legal possibility to bar Kalemji from speaking.
The Free Iraq Committee, on which invitation Kalemji came to Germany, is investigating possibilities to make the abortive tour possible.
Anti-imperialist Camp
