As Germany mourns another terror attack, it’s clear that Chancellor Angela Merkel has failed and is no Margaret Thatcher, says Professor Anthony Glees
The German leader has often said she is no Margaret Thatcher, but after the attack in Berlin, perhaps it's time she needs to be
ONE of the very few core duties of government is the delivery of security to citizens.
On Monday night, once again, the government of Germany failed in its duty.
The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often said she is no Margaret Thatcher and, most definitely, not an Iron Lady. But if Germany ever needed one, it’s now.
Merkel said yesterday it would be “very difficult for us to learn that a human being committed this deed who came to Germany to ask for refuge and asylum”.
Yet Merkel was warned by her own spy agencies, and those of her European allies, that some of the million-plus that have flooded, totally unscreened, into the Federal Republic might be Islamist fighters.
She seemed blissfully unaware that many of these people were neither desperate folk fleeing the horrors of the conflict in Syria and Iraq, nor indeed were they refugees.
A few were highly-dangerous Islamist fighters. Others fell easy prey to groomers intent on radicalising people once they reached the safety of Germany.
Frau Merkel had let her heart rule her head and thrown Germany’s and Europe’s security to the winds.
It’s currently unclear who was driving this suicide lorry. But ISIS has already claimed responsibility for two attacks in Germany this year.
And just a few weeks ago, US intelligence warned a number of European governments that IS fighters would attack in the run-up to Christmas. Germany, along with the UK and France, was on the list.
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Christmas markets presented a very obvious security risk. They’re a trophy target for Islamists, sustaining the ideological point that their own perverted form of Islam is at war with Christianity.
On Monday, the killer’s weapon of choice was a 19-ton hijacked Polish lorry whose driver was also murdered. This should have surprised no one.
A lorry was used by the Bastille Day Islamist killer in Nice in July. The murderers of Lee Rigby initially tried to run him over before slaying him with a kitchen knife.
If the German Chancellor acted rashly over migrants and border security — as she herself now accepts, even apologising, implicitly — why did she do nothing to try to correct her grave errors?
There are many reasons. First and foremost the best possible way of keeping everyone safe from Islamist killers is through the use of intelligence-led security.
Crudely put this means spying on possible targets intrusively and intercepting their communications.
Doubtless two things dominate her thinking on interception and surveillance: Germany’s Nazi and Stasi past.
Indeed she herself grew up in Communist East Germany where mass surveillance kept an odious regime in power for 40 years.
But without a massive intelligence-led effort to make Germany safe again, what happened in Berlin will happen again, with consequences for Europe, for Germany — and with elections approaching next year — for Frau Merkel herself.
- PROF Glees is director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham.
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