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Subject: <nettime> RAF, "now history," disbands
From: t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>
Date: 23 Apr 1998 20:11:50 +0200

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["free USA only": nytimes -> /yr/mo/day/news/world/german-red-army.html ]

April 23, 1998

Red Army Faction Says It Has Disbanded

By ALAN COWELL

BONN, Germany -- Heroes unto themselves, but reviled
and once feared by the bulk of Germans, the last
remaining urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction
announced this week that they had dissolved their
organization because they and their cause were "now
history."

<...>

But the statement, which German authorities have since
said was authentic, raised many troubling issues ranging
from a slew of unsolved killings to the question of
whether tough anti-terror legislation drawn up in the
1970s and 1980s should now be struck from the law books.

At the height of its notoriety in the 1970s, the Red
Army Faction was seen as Europe's most deadly urban
terror group, built on clandestine cells and fighting
what it termed an armed struggle. It attacked not just
Germany's rich and powerful, but also U.S. military
installations that left-wing ideology termed emblems of
American imperialism.

<...>

In the eight-page typewritten statement delivered to
Reuters, which ended with the guerrillas' emblem of a
five-pointed star, a stylized machine-pistol and the
letters RAF, the authors said: "Today we are ending this
project. The urban guerrilla group in the form of the
RAF is now history."

"We are stuck in a dead end," the statement said,
acknowledging that the group had made strategic errors,
but expressing no contrition or regret toward the more
than 30 people who died as its victims. Officials at the
federal Criminal Office in Wiesbaden said the document
had been certified as genuine in part because a
watermark on one page was the same as that in earlier
statements from the group.

<...>
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