Why do you kill?
Jürgen Todenhöfer
Searching for the truth
A lack of respect for those in power, a childlike faith in justice, and a probably equally naïve need to always pursue the truth – even in conflict areas if necessary – these are all qualities that have determined the events of Jürgen Todenhöfer’s life.
As a 20-year-old student in 1960, he traveled in Algeria during its wartime occupation by France. He lodged with an Arab family in and saw with his own eyes the fear of the people every evening after nightfall, fear of the war, and of attacks by the French underground organization OAS, a militant group that used terrorist methods to prevent Algeria’s secession from France.
One year later, in late July 1961, Jürgen Todenhöfer was in the Tunisian town of Bizerta during the crisis of the same name. The town was serving as a French military base at the time, one that played a key role in the Algerian war. Tunisia had been demanding that the French evacuate the base since the country’s independence in 1956. But when Tunisian troops launched a blockade of Bizerta in 1961, the French air force unleashed a bombing raid on the town. Following heavy fighting, when French troops fired on unarmed Tunisian demonstrators, the entire civilian population of Bizerta was evacuated. Some 670 Tunisians were killed, and 1,500 injured.
Many years later, in 1980, Jürgen Todenhöfer marched together with Afghan freedom fighters on foot from Pakistan over the mountains of the Hindu Kush to Afghanistan, this time as a member of the German Bundestag. The country had been invaded by Soviet troops six months earlier. He wanted to form his own impressions of the plight of the people, and the Afghan resistance.
He returned to the oppressed country in 1984 and 1989. His reports on the suffering of the Afghan people helped him to collect, together with the “Verein für Afghanistan-Förderung” (Association for Afghanistan Assistance), some 10 million euros for Afghan refugees, primarily refugee children.
In 1989, he succeeded in initiating a meeting of Afghanistan’s exiled government in Urgun, a small village up the mountains on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush. Delegates had to reach the tiny village in jeeps, by donkey and on foot, traveling through craggy ravines and raging mountain creeks.
Two children are paying for the war. Marwa, a girl from a poor district of Baghdad, is 12 years old; Andy, a student from Tampa, is 18 when the Iraq war destroys their dreams. Just as in the book Who will bother to weep for Abdul and Tanaya? Jürgen Todenhöfer tells global stories from the victim’s viewpoint. It is a plea against war – committed, compassionate, moving.