Gunther Hilliges

Gunther Hilliges

Gunther Hilliges (born May 8, 1940 in Innsbruck ) is a former federal chairman of the Terre des Hommes children's aid organization , an activist for peace and cooperation with the countries of the southern hemisphere, Bremen Senate Council and until 2005 head of the Bremen State Office for Development Cooperation .

biography

Early years

Hilliges grew up in Innsbruck and came to Bremen with his mother and two sisters in a transport in June 1945 purely by chance after they were expelled by the Allies. The family lived on welfare in Bremen-Findorff until the father came back from captivity. From 1956 Hilliges was an orphan. He then grew up with foster families in Bremen and graduated from the Regensburger Strasse school . In the Bremen administration he then completed an apprenticeship in the middle service and was able to move up to the senior service with the Senator for Economics in 1959 due to his good performance. In addition to his administrative work, he worked as a part-time teacher at the Bremen Administrative School until 1973. At the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, together with friends, he set up a working group for “Terre des Hommes - Help for Children in Need” in Bremen. V. ”and joined the federal board of this children's aid organization just one year later.

First contact with the "Third World"

After the federal government had publicly welcomed the defoliation of the Vietnamese jungle with the plant toxin " Agent Orange ", the Bremen group from Terre des Hommes succeeded in bringing ten children injured by napalm from Vietnam to municipal hospitals in Bremen for healing. The financing succeeded u. a. through the sale of 30,000 oranges that the Bremen fruit trading company Scipio & Co had donated to the Bremen Group. Years later it was again Terre des Hommes in Bremen that initiated an exhibition with the Bremen Übersee-Museum on the health damage caused by “Agent Orange” and a “reconciliation tour” with victims and perpetrators through German cities with the magazine “Stern”. The hunger blockade of the Nigerian government that began in mid-1968 against the province of Biafra on the Niger Delta in West Africa, which was struggling for independence, prompted Terre des Hommes to organize an airlift to fly around 5,000 children at risk of starvation to Gabon . With the help of the Bremen Social Democrats and the then Foreign Minister Willy Brandt , Hilliges was successful in convincing the federal government to provide money to build houses for the rescued children in Gabon within a short time. In the mid-1970s, Gunther Hilliges devoted himself to Bremen's colonial past and took part in numerous campaigns against the South African apartheid regime. After the end of the Bremen building scandal around the SPD parliamentary group leader in the Bremen citizenship, Richard Boljahn , and the then building senator Wilhelm Blase, he became the personal advisor to the new building senator Hans Stefan Seifriz . In 1973, the SPD member assumed the position of head of the “Non-Technical Services” department in the building department and was temporarily representative of the building senator in the Senate and in parliament. He continued unabated in Bremen as “Mr. Terre des Hommes “well-known and well-connected Hilliges continues his commitment to this international children's aid organization. From 1975 - the end of the Vietnam War - he was responsible for building up work in India as part of his board work , because Hilliges saw the subcontinent as the country with the greatest poverty in the world. During several trips he got to know the biogas technology in Maharashtra , India , whose forests had been cut down by the population in order to obtain firewood that was essential for survival. In addition, the constant burning of cow dung severely damaged the health of the population, so that the project of the spread of biogas plants was born, which produced energy for cooking and valuable fertilizer for the fields in a “clean” way.

The development network

In 1976 Terre des Hommes cooperated with the State of Bremen and the Rexrodt Foundation, which financed a joint biogas test run in twenty villages in India. When further villages in India wanted to join them, Gunther Hilliges founded the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (BORDA) with representatives from the Bremen architecture industry and the Übersee-Museum in 1977 , which continued this project on a larger scale. Hilliges also succeeded in convincing the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation, Marie Schlei , of the need for support from her ministry.

Bremen's State Office for Development Cooperation

BORDA-Hydraulic Ram in Vietnam 2005

A little later, following the encouragement of Bremen's mayor Hans Koschnick and a resolution by the Bremen citizenship, from February 1, 1979, he set up his own Bremen “State Office for Development Cooperation” (LafEz). Hilliges was a prominent critic of government development aid from above, whose “trickle-down” effects in the competition of the Cold War and economic interests hardly reached the needy population. He became the protagonist of the “bubble-up”, development cooperation from below or “development aid backwards”, which is geared towards local needs as a means of helping people to help themselves. This created the opportunity for the first time to set up a different type of development cooperation, contrary to federal policy at the state level. In 1978/79 in Bremen he and Amnesty International were one of the initiators of the “Bremen Center for Human Rights” (BIZ), which was located in the Übersee-Museum and was supposed to promote educational work on the “Third World”. In addition to his work as head of department at LafEz, Gunther Hilliges acted on a voluntary basis from 1976 to 1978 as deputy chairman and from 1978 to 1984 as national chairman of Terre des Hommes. At the same time, going beyond the India projects of Terre des Hommes and BORDA, he suggested a partnership with Pune , the metropolis in central India. With the beginning of the work of the BIZ, the “Städttesolidarität Bremen - Pune e. V. ”held annual seminars in India from 1980 onwards and the Bremen universities, hospitals, and the Bremen Chamber of Commerce established active bilateral contacts with Pune. No official town twinning was explicitly considered, but in this case too, direct contacts were established from below for 35 years. As a thank you for 30 years of twinning, the Indian ambassador presented a marble bust of Mahatma Gandhi , which has found its place in the tapestry room of the Bremen town hall. Hillige's “baby”, the state office, survived a deep crisis just four years after it was founded, when the Bremer Großwerft AG “Weser” went bankrupt and the Bremen Senate decided on an extensive austerity program.

Development policy as a municipal task worldwide

After the Council of Europe had decided in 1983 to carry out an international campaign under the heading of “Interdependence and Solidarity” with its 53 parliaments, governments and thousands of cities and non-governmental organizations, Hilliges proposed a first local north-east in Bremen in 1988 and in Bremerhaven in 1989. South Forum in front. He regularly took part in the following federal conferences of over 100 German North-South forums, until they were absorbed into the “Service Agency for Communities in One World” in 2001. In 1986 Hilliges played a leading role in the worldwide founding of "Towns and Development" in order to involve municipalities more closely in the global development of the world. The United Nations praised this commitment: in 1990, Bremen was honored alongside Helsinki for its special development cooperation approach. The head of LafEz has been promoting aid for the Sahauris in Western Sahara since 1980 , as well as the European alliance against apartheid and the special partnership between Bremen and Namibia. Gunther Hilliges played a major role in the Bremen Solidarity Prize, which is awarded every two years .

The award was first given to the Mandela couple in 1988 . Here the member of the "International Commission at the SPD Party Executive" again showed the flag; because the resistance in part of the Bremen merchants and the opposition parties against this kind of "promotion of communist terrorism" was unmistakable. Hilliges was therefore very pleased with the rededication of the former imperial colonial memorial, the elephant, into an anti-colonial memorial. Despite constant budget cuts, the smallest federal state of Bremen continues to make its contribution to the countries of the southern hemisphere in the department of Bremen's plenipotentiary for the federal government, Europe and development cooperation. Even after Hilliges left the public service, he remained true to his mission. As part of his Restcent initiative, around 5000 public employees in Bremen donate a tiny part of their monthly salary for development projects. For over thirty years, Gunther Hilliges was Bremen's outward face. He is still very much in demand as a consultant.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Terre des Hommes, Biogas in Maharashtra, Bremen 1978
2. ↑ Hartmut Roder (Ed.): 40 years of BORDA. Helping people help themselves. Bramsche 2018
3. ↑ Partnership is seen as a role model, in: Weser-Kurier from March 28, 1996; Foreign policy Made in Bremen, in: Weser-Kurier of December 27, 2010
4. ^ Gunther Hilliges, contents and results of the previous federal conferences, lecture at the 9th Federal Conference of Municipalities and Initiatives in Magdeburg 2004; Short-winded policy towards the south, in: Weser-Kurier of February 27, 1996
5. ^ Gunther Hilliges, From Florence via Mainz, Cologne, Berlin to Bonn, in: Municipal development policy 1996–2016: 20 years of nationwide service in Bonn, p. 9 ff., Bonn 2016
6. ↑ Cities decide the future of the world. - Germanwatch e. V.
7. ^ World University Service (ed.): Bremen in the world - Die Welt in Bremen, Wiesbaden 2007; see. Bremen Development Cooperation 1979–2004. Experiences - Perspektiven, Bremen 2003; www.der-elefant-bremen.de