Kohl takes foreign policy helm

Kohl takes foreign policy helm

By Leon Mangasarian

BONN (DPA): German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who began a trip to Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan last Saturday, is being accompanied by three of his ministers but markedly not by Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel.

The reason for Kinkel's absence is not just the fact that Kohl's Asia trip -- his 11th visit to the region since becoming chancellor -- is mainly aimed at boosting trade.

Under Kinkel's tenure the foreign ministry is increasingly being ignored in Bonn while Chancellor Kohl and a coterie of other top ministers expand their control over most of the ministry's key policy areas.

"German foreign policy is increasingly being made in Kohl's chancellery while the foreign ministry is standing outside the door," commented the Bild daily, which has close links to Kohl.

It has been a downhill slide for Kinkel ever since he replaced the wily Hans-Dietrich Genscher as German foreign minister in 1992.

In an unprecedented humiliation the hapless Kinkel was last year forced by the government dominated parliament to cancel an invitation to his Iranian counterpart for a Bonn conference on Islam.

Earlier this year he suffered the indignity of having his planned visit to China canceled by Beijing due to a row over Tibet. Amid accusations in the German media of a kowtow, Kinkel finally made his trip to China last week.

The weakness of his Free Democratic Party (FDP), which serves as junior coalition partner in Kohl's center-right government, has also undermined Kinkel's authority.

After a series of regional FDP election disasters Kinkel resigned as party leader in 1995.

Kinkel's low reputation is increasingly being noticed abroad.

As The Times in London recently commented: "At best he is a kind of Tonto to Herr Kohl's Lone Ranger; at worst he is an irrelevance."

With the eclipse of Kinkel, Chancellor Kohl - who has been in office for 14 years - and key members of his inner circle are now responsible for the major aspects of German foreign policy.

The Chancellor has made all elements of the European Union - the single currency, expansion and institutional reform - into his personal domain.

Kohl is aided by his influential foreign affairs advisor, Joachim Bitterlich, who has been dubbed "Germany's secret foreign minister".

Kohl further dominates foreign policy by maintaining close personal ties with most major world leaders via regular telephone calls.

Meanwhile, Kohl's globe-trotting intelligence services coordinator, Bernd Schmidbauer, has been able to maintain far better ties with countries like Iran than has Kinkel.

It was Schmidbauer - not the German Foreign Ministry - who earlier this year went to Teheran and arranged an exchange of Hezbollah prisoners held in Israel for the bodies of missing Israeli soldiers.

Outside the chancellery Defense Minister Volker Ruehe, a member of Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU), has expanded his influence over defense and security policy and is the key backer in Bonn of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Ruehe does not hesitate to contradict Kinkel. Last year he publicly upbraided the foreign minister for making remarks about a German contribution to peacekeeping forces to former Yugoslavia.

When it comes to long-range thinking about where German foreign policy is headed the foreign ministry also appears absent from high-level debate.

Karl Lamers, a CDU foreign policy expert, produces regular think papers which play a far bigger role in directing the discussion than anything emerging from Kinkel's office.

The decline of Kinkel should in no way imply the German Foreign Ministry is poorly staffed.

Although deeply frustrated, some of Bonn's best and brightest can be found in the foreign ministry complex perched above the Rhine River.

The news weekly Der Spiegel explained the situation this way: "Kinkel has excellent advisors - he just doesn't listen to them."