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(s)Elections
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Title: Austria's Haider dies in accident
Source: BBC
URL Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7664846.stm
Published: Oct 11, 2008
Author: staff
Post Date: 2008-10-11 17:29:09 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 260
Comments: 9

Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a road accident, police say.

Mr Haider suffered severe head and chest injuries after his car came off the road in Carinthia, his political base.

Police investigating the crash said he had been driving alone.

The 58-year-old was leader of the Alliance for Austria's Future, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.

The Alliance was one of two right-wing parties which did better than expected in general elections last month, fuelling speculation of a possible role in a ruling coalition.

JOERG HAIDER: KEY DATES Joerg Haider 1950: Born in Upper Austria 1976: Joins Freedom Party 1986: Elected party's leader 1989: Elected governor of Carinthia 2000: Resigns as party leader 2005: Founds Alliance for Austria's Future

Obituary: Joerg Haider Death shocks friends and foes

He had reportedly been due to attend his mother's 90th birthday celebrations later in the day.

"For us this is the end of the world," the deputy leader of Mr Haider's Alliance for Austria's Future, Stefan Petzner, told Austrian news agency, APA.

Austria's President Heinz Fischer said Mr Haider's death was a "human tragedy", while Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer described him as someone who had shaped Austria's domestic and political landscape over decades, according to the Associated Press news agency.

EU sanctions

Mr Haider was a divisive figure, who gained notoriety after he became leader of the Freedom Party in 1986.

In 1991, his term as governor of the province of Carinthia was interrupted, after he made comments praising employment policies of Nazi Germany.

Mr Haider speaking about immigration in September

But he was re-elected in 1999 and 2003.

In 2000, the EU imposed sanctions against Austria in a protest over his party's role in government.

In 2005, Mr Haider left the Freedom Party and founded the Alliance for Austria's Future, which scored its best result so far in elections last month, gaining 11% of the vote.

This was, however, well below the 27% which the Freedom Party won under his leadership in 1999 - a high mark in Mr Haider's electoral career at national level.

"With his passing, Austria has lost a great political figure," said Heinz-Christian Strache, who had taken over as leader of the Freedom Party after Mr Haider left.

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#1. To: christine, angle, Lady X, Cynicom, Tauzero, aristeides, wbales, Ridinshotgun, DeaconBenjamin, Horse, Ada, Ferret Mike (#0)

Team Judah strikes again. A few days before he died, this was in an Israeli paper:

Austrian teens visit Auschwitz - then vote for Joerg Haider

Last update - 11:16 07/10/2008

By Michal Levertov, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Auschwitz, Israel news

An activist in an Austrian organization commemorating the Holocaust, who traveled last month with a group of 16-year-olds from his country to visit the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland, found to his horror that the youngsters were planning to vote for the extreme right wing political parties in the Austrian elections.

The activist, in his twenties, said that despite their far-right leaning, the teens expressed a genuine interest in learning about the Holocaust, and approached the tour with the appropriate seriousness.

The election, in which far-right parties doubled their representation at the end of last month, was the first election in which the young students were eligible to vote. The activist said he overheard the students saying they were planning to vote for Heinz-Christian Strache's Freedom Party or Joerg Haider's Alliance for the Future of Austria - "because of the foreigners."

It was in fact those who were most interested in learning about the Holocaust were the ones who led this trend, said the activist. In response, the group's counselors tried to stress in their discussions the relationship between the lessons of the past and judgments on the present - but were unsuccessful. "The youngsters were unable to make the connection," the activist reported with regret.

Though the unprecedented success of the far-right in the recent election has many Austrians worried, it did not come as a surprise. It is a product of the larger parties' failure to maintain a stable government, a growing hatred for foreigners in the face of immigration from Eastern Europe, and a long-standing legacy in Austria of denying responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

Massive efforts, some more genuine than others, to reverse this legacy have been undertaken in Austria over the last ten years, with some positive, but insufficient, results. For example, the question of the ownership of artwork displayed in a large exhibition at Vienna's Leopold Museum sparked an impassioned national debate. Austrian Culture Minister Claudia Schmied announced that legislation over the last decade regarding the return of artwork looted by Nazis to its rightful owners was not adequate, and allows museum patrons to circumvent the requirement to return the works. Her call to expand the legislation was met with strong opposition and with heated public and political discussions.

On the other hand, projects directly examining Austria's civilian responsibility for the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust have been flourishing recently. A large portion of these projects has been initiated locally by ordinary citizens, academic bodies, artists and NGOs. Thus, when residents of Vienna's Servitengasse Street began inquiring about the fate of the Jews that inhabited their homes before the Holocaust, the project turned into a large-scale research venture which included the name of every street resident and the contacting of their remaining relatives around the world. The project's findings were recorded in a book, a documentary film and an impressive memorial erected on the busy street.

Austria's denial of its role in the Holocaust can be attributed to an exonerating document that the allies signed in November 1943. The Moscow Declaration, signed by the foreign secretaries of the Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, maintained that Austria was the first free nation to be victimized by the Hitlerean aggression. However, though Austria comprised 11-12 percent of the population of the Third Reich, Austrians made up 30 percent of the Nazi killing machine.

The activist who let the group of students on a tour of Auschwitz summed up the experience, saying that the stance of Austria's far-right political movements does not only stem from an unwillingness to confront the past, but primarily from an inability to analyze the past in reference to the present. "The problem in Austria," he said, "is that though the education system teaches history, it has abandoned altogether the aspect of civics. In its absence, the students simply fail to comprehend the foundations of democracy and the direct link between preserving those foundations and the prevention of repeating historical tragedies."

bluegrass  posted on  2008-10-11   17:59:54 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

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