German ministers criticize idea of sending troops to Sudan

By German news magazine Der Spiegel

BERLIN, Jan 12, 2004 –The proposal by Greens politician Kerstin Mueller, state minister in the Foreign Ministry, to send Bundeswehr soldiers to a UN peacekeeping force in Sudan has been harshly rejected in Berlin.

“This is completely out of the question,” the Defence Ministry said last week, after Minister Peter Struck (Social Democratic Party of Germany) had had an angry telephone conversation with Mueller’s boss Joschka Fischer (Greens).

There is no official UN request to deploy German forces in the civil war country in eastern Africa, “and certainly not a request for troops”. Mueller’s party colleague Fischer made just one internal terse comment on Mueller’s idea: “She’s crazy.”

BBC Monitoring European