Initiative peace and human rights

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Peace and Human Rights Initiative (IFM) was one of the citizens' movements in the GDR that had a major impact on the turnaround and peaceful revolution . It was officially founded on January 24, 1986, making it one of the oldest groups in the civil rights movement in the GDR.

Before the peaceful revolution

The association emerged from a human rights seminar in East Berlin in 1985. The founding members included Bärbel Bohley , Martin Böttger , Werner Fischer , Peter Grimm , Ralf Hirsch , Gerd Poppe , Ulrike Poppe , Wolfgang Templin and Reinhard Weißhuhn . The initiative had a loose organizational structure; In the beginning it consisted of around 25 members. Although it also made use of the ecclesiastical public, it saw itself from the beginning as independent of the church and thus had a special position within the human rights and democracy movement in the GDR. The main goals were the protection of human rights and peacekeeping. The initiative campaigned for disarmament and "demilitarization" and turned against any kind of authoritarian structure, against the glorification of violence and against the exclusion of minorities and foreigners. The positions were published in the illegal magazine Grenzfall , among others .

In February 1986 the social revolutionary wing around Thomas Klein and Reinhard Schult split off and founded the group Gegenstimmen .

In January 1988 several IFM members were arrested in connection with the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration in Berlin and then deported to the West. Ralf Hirsch was expatriated .

When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was invited to visit the GDR in November 1988 , civil rights activists organized a Romania evening in the Gethsemane Church to draw attention to the violation of fundamental rights and the catastrophic supply situation in Romania. Several members of the IFM were then placed under house arrest during the Ceaușescu visit.

These and other “ disintegration measures ” by the Stasi made the work of the IFM much more difficult in the period that followed. In March 1989 the IFM opened up to a GDR-wide opposition group.

During the peaceful revolution in 1989

On March 11, 1989, the Peace and Human Rights Initiative was the first opposition group to announce its GDR-wide expansion. During the peaceful revolution in 1989 , the Peace and Human Rights Initiative became fully active again. However, their membership was rather modest compared to the new opposition groups and parties .

On October 28, 1989, the first regular East Germany-wide meeting of the Peace and Human Rights Initiative (IFM) took place in East Berlin. Werner Fischer (Berlin), Gerd Poppe (Berlin) and Thomas Rudolph (Leipzig) were elected as the three GDR speakers for six months.

The IFM was involved in the round table with two members and from February 1990, Gerd Poppe, a minister without portfolio in the Modrow government .

For the first free Volkskammer election on March 18, 1990 , the IFM entered into an electoral alliance called Bündnis 90 with the New Forum and Democracy Now , which pursued very similar political goals . The Alliance 90 list won 2.9% of the votes on election day and won 12 seats in the People's Chamber. For the Peace and Human Rights Initiative, Marianne Birthler and Gerd Poppe were members of the Bündnis 90 / Greens parliamentary group , to which the members of Bündnis 90 joined forces with those of the Green Party in the GDR .

In the first all-German elections to the Bundestag on December 2, 1990 , the IFM joined the New Forum, Democracy Now, the Independent Women's Association (UFV) and the party “The Greens” in the list association Bündnis 90 / Greens - Citizens Movement (B90 / Gr ) on. It achieved eight mandates in the new federal states, among which Gerd Poppe was the only representative of the IFM.

Later development

In September 1991 the peace and human rights initiative was merged into the newly founded citizens' movement Bündnis 90, which until then had been the name for various electoral alliances and which now united the IFM, Democracy Now and parts of the New Forum. In May 1993, Bündnis 90 merged with the Greens to form the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen party .

literature

  • Thomas Rudolph , Oliver Kloss , Rainer Müller , Christoph Wonneberger (ed. On behalf of the IFM-Archivs eV): Way in the uprising. Chronicle of opposition and resistance in the GDR from August 1987 to December 1989. Leipzig, Araki, 2014, ISBN 978-3-941848-17-7 , ( preface as a reading sample).
  • Wolfgang Rüddenklau : Troublemaker. GDR opposition 1986–1989. Basis-Druck, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-86163-011-7 .
  • Wolfgang Templin : Comments on the political orientation in the peace movement. Presentation of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights on December 10, 1987 . Series of publications by the Robert Havemann Archive, Berlin, 2002, ISBN 3-9804920-6-0 .
  • Wolfgang Templin, Reinhard Weißhuhn : Initiative peace and human rights. The first independent GDR opposition group . In: From illegality to parliament. Career and concept of the new citizen movements . Edited by Helmut Müller-Enbers, Marianne Schulz and Jan Wielgohs, LinksDruck, Berlin 1991, pp. 148–165, ISBN 3-86153-017-1
  • Ralf Hirsch / Lew Kopelew (ed.): Initiative for peace and human rights: GRENZFALL. Complete reprint of all editions published in the GDR (1986/87). First independent periodical , foreword by Lew Kopelew, Berlin (West), self-published, 1988, 2nd edition 1989.
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (Hrsg.): Freedom and public. Political samizdat in the GDR 1985–1989 (series of the Robert Havemann Archive Volume 7), Berlin, 2002 (with the most important texts of the IFM).
  • Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Arno Polzin (ed.): Be brief! The opposition's cross-border telephone traffic in the 1980s and the Ministry of State Security. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014 (documents how the IFM was monitored).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ oral history interview with Ulrike Poppe. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group on Human Rights in the 20th Century, March 2014, accessed on December 16, 2016 .
  2. ↑ https://www.jugendopposition.de/lexikon/sachbegriffe/148450/initiative-frieden-und-menschenrechte and there linked articles about the individual persons
  3. ↑ Thomas Kunze: Nicolae Ceauşescu - Eine Biographie, p. 352 (Online at Google Books)