Guantanamo

German federal government proposals that would see Germany accept detainees from the United States military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have met with growing resistance from individual German states.

"We will not take any former prisoners," Saxony Premier Stanislaw Tillich of the Christian Democrats (CDU) said on Saturday in an interview with daily Berliner Zeitung.

"We don't see ourselves as having any obligation. After all, we did not take them prisoner," he added.

Tillich's comments follow an announcement from German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, also CDU, that Germany is considering accepting the Guantanamo inmates.

Joachim Herrmann, the Bavarian interior minister, has also made his opposition to the proposals clear. "I'm not having anyone coming into Bavaria," he said.

Alexander Dobrindt, General Secretary of the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Merkel's CDU, was similarly resolute. "No one could be so naive as to take in potential al Qaeda supporters," he told weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

Opposition in favor of accepting Guantanamo inmates

Greens leader Renate Kuenast of the opposition dismissed as "pure populism" suggestions that former Guantanamo prisoners could have links to al Qaeda.

"We Germans must be prepared to make a thorough examination of the possibility of accepting former prisoners," she told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

The deputy leader of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), Olaf Scholz, has called the decision to accept former Guantanamo inmates a question of credibility and solidarity.

"Anyone who wants Guantanamo to be closed has to be prepared, after thorough security checks, to actually take in prisoners," he said.

Berlin in talks with Washington

So far only Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, has come out in support of taking Guantanamo detainees provided strict conditions were met. These would include rigorous background checks to ensure that any prisoners taken in would present no security threat.

Germany's Interior Ministry confirmed last Saturday that it had resumed talks with Washington over the possibility of taking in selected inmates to be released from the Guantanamo Bay facility.

Any take-up of former Guantanamo prisoners would depend on whether they had a connection to Germany as well as their potential risk, a government spokesman in Berlin said.

US President Barack Obama's administration has been reluctant to return some Guantanamo detainees to their home countries for fear that they may suffer reprisals after being kept in US custody.

skt/dpa/AFP/AP
Editor: Andreas Illmer