Call to aid

Germany's largest peace research institute has called on the government in Berlin to stop letting national interests dominate foreign policy, not least in North Africa and the Middle East, at what it considers a crucial time for the region.

In the annual 400-page report from the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, the group called on Germany to provide more support for the growing protest movement in the Arab world, also known as the Arab Spring.

"The Arab Spring is a historic caesura, comparable with the fall of the Berlin Wall," the report concluded.

The institute's Margret Johannsen delivered a keynote speech at a Berlin press conference Tuesday, saying Europe was partly responsible for the stagnation and autocratic governance in the Arab world.

"EU states effectively made themselves into accomplices of repressive regimes by virtue of trade-offs; autocrats and dictators would deliver oil and gas or help intercept asylum seekers and in return they would receive cheap loans or weapons," said Johannsen.

Now the organization thinks the EU must stand by the side of emerging economies in the region, offering advice and physical aid. This, Johannsen said, would allow the countries to establish constitutions and to create democracies governed by the rule of law.

The report also said greater cooperation and more open agricultural markets would be one of the most effective ways to encourage job creation and prosperity.

Five research institutes from Hamburg, Frankfurt, Duisburg, Heidelberg and Bonn compiled this year's edition of the annual report.

Refugee policy lambasted

The researchers also blasted the EU's "inhuman policy of arrests" when it came to dealing with asylum seekers and economic migrants from the region.

The EU's border control agency Frontex, the report surmised, was operating in a legal gray area - covered neither by national law nor by universal human rights. The report described Europe's widespread fear and attempts at legislation to control a so-called refugee influx from North Africa as "completely irrational."

Bruno Schoch of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt said it was crucial to remember that, to date, only 34,000 people had arrived from the region, not the hundreds of thousands often predicted.

"I have the suspicion that these fears are the upshot of our now somehow diminished picture of Islam as an enemy, so to speak. Now we're projecting that onto the refugees instead," he said.

Divided on Libya

The report accepted that the situation in the Libyan conflict remained complicated. On the one hand, the researchers said the conflict threatened to escalate militarily, and that military intervention so far had shown how the goals of civilian protection and regime change were mutually exclusive.

However, they also noted that the decision to intervene was understandable. Schoch, for instance, said the West's hand was forced after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi referred to the rebels as rats and cockroaches and pledged to exterminate them.

Tobias Debiel from the Duisburg Institute for Development and Peace said the German decision not to join the military intervention was a mistake - that Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had isolated the country from its allies and gone against the German tradition of voting for European interests at the UN Security Council.

Support for Palestinian unity

The researchers also called on Berlin and Brussels to support the Palestinian unity deal between Hamas and Fatah. Margret Johannsen said that Germany, the EU and the US should all recognize a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority announces one in the autumn, as it has recently pledged to do.

"This will prove, in my view, possibly the last attempt to establish a Palestinian state in a certain autonomous way," said Johannsen. After 20 years of failed negotiations, she added, the Palestinians were trying to somehow make themselves independent of negotiations with Israel.

Johannsen said the tactic was unusual, but worth a try - and that the EU and US should therefore recognize a Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, she said, a new peace initiative should also be started, because the two parties would likely need outside help to achieve a lasting resolution.

Author: Bettina Marx / msh
Editor: Martin Kuebler