Inter 1

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The Inter 1 at night

The Inter 1 was a student dormitory of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate for the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz , sponsored by the Studierendenwerk Mainz. It hit the headlines in April 1982 over an argument between Iranian students.

history

The beginnings

The student dormitory was one of the first of its kind, a high-rise building with a rhoboid floor plan, which was built in 1966 on the campus of the University of Mainz, which was newly built at the same time. The name stands for "International" because, according to the statutes of the Mainz Student Union, one third of the rooms are to be occupied by foreign students. The numbering served to distinguish it from Inter 2 , another student residence hall on campus that was built ten years later in 1976. These two dormitories were built by the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and left free of charge to the student union for administration. At the request of the state government at the time, which wanted to align its state university internationally with the construction of the international student dormitories, the building was relocated to the busy Saarstrasse for reasons of representation. The student residence "Inter 1" offered space for 196 students on 14 floors. H. 14 apartments per floor. The approximately 10 m² rooms were equipped with a washbasin. In the beginning there were also double rooms, when double rooms were no longer sold, there was even a sale to married “couples”. Each hallway had a common room, kitchen and shower. It has always been one of the cheapest student residences in the university. The single and family apartments with prices between 179 and 434 euros (2007) were very popular: you have to wait up to three semesters for a place. But the dormitory always had the reputation of having a high proportion of foreigners, of a proletarian demeanor, that its residents would be suicidal and that there were constant hall celebrations, interfests, film nights, pajama parties, birthdays, graduation parties, dinners and strikes, not to mention the evening meetings in the Inter-Bar, so that regular study should hardly have been possible. The name "Inter-Puff" was also known because there was usually no gender separation in the hallways.

The Pasdaran Raid on April 24, 1982

prehistory

In the Iranian consulates in Munich, Berlin and in the embassy in Bonn
Kazem Darabi in May 2018, was sentenced to eight months suspended prison sentence on December 12, 1982 for violating the peace
Hadi Ghaffari was seen by witnesses on April 24, 1982 on the opposite Saarstrasse

The disputes between opponents and supporters of the Islamic Revolution had spread to Germany in 1981. On February 11, 1981, around 100 Iranians demonstrated in front of the Consulate General on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, “Against the rule of the mullahs”. In July 1981, Iranian students stormed the country's embassy in Bonn and sprayed “Fascist Khomeini” and “An end to the political murder” on the walls, and beat up embassy staff and police officers. In the same month the Iranian consulate general in West Berlin was occupied, Ayatollah posters torn up and rooms demolished. In Frankfurt, on July 27, 1981, on the first anniversary of the death of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , masked people succeeded in occupying the office of Iran Air .

At the Iranian consulate in Hamburg

In October 1981 the incumbent charge of the Iranian consulate in Hamburg laid down consul Kamran Malek, as well as two deputies, Hossein Moschari and Mehdi Monschi, as well as the head of the financial department of the consulate general, Schiren Masdjasnaum, in protest about the executions and public mass murders in Iran and about the Conditions in the consulate resigned the offices and asked for political asylum in Germany. The reason given by the consul was that the Iranian secret service SAVAMA had quartered itself on the second floor of its consulate and denied the master of the house access. According to Malek, there lived “eight or ten or twelve surveillance specialists armed with knives, bicycle chains and brass knuckles”, about whose activities the consul could only give imprecise information: A computer would have been installed there with not just the names of all Iranians in northern Germany were recorded, but also their political activities. This was the only way to arrest a student who would have taken part in anti-Khomeini demonstrations in Hamburg on home leave at Tehran's airport. This would also create a close-knit network of informers. The passports submitted for renewal were collected there and only returned when the person indicated that they were willing to cooperate. But the relatives of the consulate were also monitored: When the mail came in the morning, it would be received by a Savama member and the opened letters would not be forwarded to the addressees until around noon. Compatriots would have been spied on during the time of the Shah, but “back then”, says Malek, “only people who were against the Shah were blacklisted, today everyone who is not for Khomeini can find out”. He also claimed that there were only two professional diplomats left in the Iranian embassy in Bonn, the rest being revolutionary cadres.

Summary

It can therefore be assumed that the dispute in 1982 was a reaction to the behavior of Iranian dissidents in Germany, or a part of Iran's cultural revolution , which now also extended to German universities: for example, the Ayatollah practiced on April 18, 1980 During the Friday sermon, Khomeini harshly criticized the Iranian universities, which, in his opinion, followed the Western model and endangered the Islamic revolution:

“We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of are Western-oriented universities that want to manipulate our youth with false values ​​for their own Western interests! "

- Ruhollah Khomeini

But also the liberal manners in Inter 1, the coexistence of the sexes, could have been a thorn in the side for devout Muslims. All these reasons are likely to have led to the fact that Inter 1 was selected as the target for the attack.

Start of the argument in Inter 1

As early as March 21, 1982 two Khomeini supporters, the so-called “Pasdaran”, supporters of UISA from Inter 1 kicked a dissident of the regime. The attacked ran into Inter 1 and called friends on the ninth floor for help. The Pasdaran and other like-minded people barricaded themselves in a room in Inter 1. When the police were called in, the dissidents stated that those trapped were "agents of the Iranian embassy" in Bonn who were supposed to track down opponents of the regime here and elsewhere. Because electrical cables and other striking tools were found in this room, everyone involved was taken away for a staff check. These two pasdaran: "Daniel Rousha-Nafas" and "Muhammed Ali Kavian-Talouri", themselves residents of Inter 1, were also actors in the subsequent act. Her Iranian fellow students in the dormitory suspect that they both alerted the embassy and gave details of the rooms in which the dissidents live.

The attack on Inter 1

On Saturday evening, April 24, 1982, the second anniversary of the failed Operation Eagle Claw , around 200 armed Iranian Pasdaran attacked roughly 100 compatriots who were critical of the government and who lived there. The chemistry student Marion Hamm, tenant on the seventh floor of the high-rise, remembers the Pasdaran's military operations.

"Eighty to one hundred people came in step and in single file, heavily armed with sticks, knives, cables and chains and shouted in chorus: Allahu akbar "

- Marion Hamm

Eleven rooms on the seventh, eighth and ninth floors were deliberately attacked and completely destroyed. 28 students, all of them dissidents, were injured, some seriously; some of their Iranian passports were stolen by the Pasdaran. A German student from Worms died the next day as a result of the attack. The Rhineland-Palatinate police, who arrived at the crime scene at 6:55 p.m., reinforced by colleagues from neighboring Hesse, provided 48 cable strands and 22 wooden slats with nails, three nunchucks , three metal pipes, a carpenter's hatchet, nine spray cans with CS Gas , five knives and sacks full of stones for sure. Some of the attackers had come from Aachen, Hanover, Hamburg, Kassel, Darmstadt, Dortmund and Cologne and took not only weapons but also bandages as a precaution. 86 of them, 83 Iranians, plus two Turks and one Afghan, were taken to remand custody in Rhineland-Palatinate on the following day because they are said to have come together as Khomeini supporters with a large number of like-minded people "in Mainz - university area -" for political reasons To physically attack dissenting Iranians ”, according to the arrest warrant. When it came to personal information, everyone gave the name: "Mohammed Musliman" in unison. The police are said to have mistreated and pulled their testicles in order to get their names out, at least according to the Iranian ambassador in an interview. They immediately asked for their release and immediately went on an indefinite hunger strike in order to enforce their demands.

The investigation and the legal, political and regulatory evaluation of the case

The Mainz chief public prosecutor Werner Hempler wanted to send a clear signal. But after detailed consultation between Bernhard Vogel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher , all suspects were supposed to have been deported from Germany; which meant that the 86 detainees now on the investigation - in the detention changed. Under this, in a leading position, was Kazem Darabi . Witnesses also saw the Hodschatoleslam Hadi Ghaffari in western clothing with a radio on the other side of Saarstrasse. However, this could not be brought into a causal connection with the crime, which meant that it was not possible to investigate him. Moreover, due to his membership in the Iranian parliament and his diplomatic passport, he was immune to German criminal prosecution measures. However, it is a proven fact that he had been in the Federal Republic of Germany since February 1982 to inspect the Iranian embassy in Bonn and the consulate general in Hamburg and that he had received a residence visa for this without any problems. For the then Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Minister Kurt Böckmann , the action was “very clearly controlled” and for Justice Minister Waldemar Schreckenberger it “looked as if the embassy had something to do with it.” The unaccredited Iranian ambassador Mohamad-Mehdi Navab -Motlagh (1979–1983) denied any involvement with the crime. However, he was not only the “managing” ambassador - the accredited ambassador had fled with the Shah - but also, in the real sense, a representative of Iran's interests in his country's capital investments and, from the early 1980s to 2005, also a member of the supervisory board of Friedrich Krupp AG . In the mid-1970s, Iran acquired a 25 percent stake in the group for 1.3 billion marks. Navab-Motlagh therefore had no great political or diplomatic weight, but it did have an economic one and this is probably also the reason why Tehran did not want to appoint a new ambassador even in the third year of the revolution and the qualified engineer he did after the escape of the ambassador now took, left.

“I deny any involvement of the embassy. This is a false report from the Mainz police. My conscience is pure. "

- Mohamad-Mehdi Navab-Motlagh
Vogel and Schleyer in June 1982: They wanted deportation

The Higher Administrative Court of Rhineland-Palatinate in Koblenz rejected all complaints against the deportation decisions. However, the government in Tehran refused to withdraw the perpetrators and demanded pro forma criminal proceedings against each individual. In fact, Kriminalrat Karlheinz Haur from the Mainz police was hardly able to reconstruct with any degree of certainty who of the 86 arrested actors at the crime scene, who was a sympathetic spectator and who was merely a participant in the later demonstration. Wolfgang Gobbert , lawyer of trust of the Iranian interim ambassador Mohamad-Mehdi Navab-Motlagh, stated that the main culprits here were revolutionary guards who had flown in from Tehran, secret service people or other rowdies who tore telephone cables from the wall, collected passports and swung clubs and “yes had long been at the airport at 8 pm and had flown off ”. An Iranian computer science student, who was probably a passive sympathizer in the attack, presented a different version of the events of April 21: that Iranian students at West German universities were harassed and threatened by enemies of Khomeini. In the Shiite seminar in Frankfurt one had heard of the “terror of opinion” in Mainz: Two Iranians had received a quasi-house ban in Inter 1 because of their pro-Khomeini attitude. Then one would have set out to fight for access to the room for fellow students. The Rhineland-Palatinate State Secretary Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer spent two hours looking for a compromise with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran Achmed Asisi on behalf of Prime Minister Bernhard Vogels Issuing passports to detainees for exit. Subsequently, seven hardship cases would be decided with forbearance: suspected Iranian students in their exams should be released for the time being and later face criminal proceedings "for breach of the peace, etc.". But Ahmed Asisi's attitude remained unchanged. So the Foreign Office finally gave in and it was agreed that most of the violent criminals would be formally released to Iran without criminal proceedings, which, however, gave them the opportunity to stay or come back to Germany as soon as possible. On December 12, 1982, Kazem Darabi was sentenced to eight months imprisonment for violating the peace , but was suspended on probation. Most of the brutal thugs were released from detention in October 1982. The Mainz immigration authorities immediately granted a twelve-month tolerance; according to the regulations at the time, it should only have been six months. Most of them moved to West Berlin , which did not come under the jurisdiction of the Federal Republic , before their residence permit expired , and continued their studies or work there. In the Darabis case, the objection proceedings against the deportation order were not processed in a timely manner, which meant that the deportation order remained legally ineffective. After moving to Berlin, the Iranian Consul General went to the Berlin Senate and obtained a tolerance until February 1984. Even the Foreign Office in Bonn, at the Iranian request, contacted the Berlin Senator for the Interior on several occasions. In Darabi's Berlin file for foreigners there is the sentence:

"The authorities in Mainz deliberately delayed the appeal proceedings against the deportation order."

Perpetrators and victims and consequences

The case of Kazem Darabi shows how fatal it was not to punish or expel the violent perpetrators . They remained largely unmolested in the country, moved freely and continued to be available to the regime in Tehran as sleepers. In October 1989 Darabi withdrew his objection to the deportation order from Mainz, which then became legally binding. At the same time, the ban on issuing a new residence permit, which he then applied for, was no longer applicable. The result was that in January 1990 he was given another one-year residence permit. When the Mykonos attack took place in Berlin on September 17, 1992, over ten years after the brawl in Mainz, the parallels were unmistakable. According to the investigators, senior employees of the Iranian consulate general in Berlin had used Darabi similarly to members of the Iranian intelligence service in the Bonn embassy, ​​which was just as decidedly denied diplomatically:

"I vouch for the fact that neither official nor secret service agencies in Iran have anything to do with the Mykonos murder."

- Seyed Hossein Mousavian , Ambassador of Iran

The victims were not only physically beaten but also intimidated and traumatized for life, such as the former Mainz student Mehdi Jafari Gorzini , who now works for the Integration Ministry in Rhineland-Palatinate. In 2000 he returned briefly to his home country as part of the Iran conference. He has not seen it since then that the fear of being arrested is too great.

The end of Inter 1

When the last contracts expired on March 31, 2015, the student high-rise was cleared and intensively examined for structural defects. During the vacant years, the dormitory was repeatedly the target of vandalism and graffiti . It was originally planned that the student high-rise should become part of a new media building. But the concrete from the 1960s turned out to be in poor condition. Therefore, it was decided to demolish it. On the other hand, there were strong protests by student groups - including an occupation of the dormitory - but essentially without any results.

Former residents

literature

Web links

Commons : Inter 1  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b FAZ from January 15, 2007
  2. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung of March 27, 2018
  3. ↑ Campus Report Dr. Matthias Dietz-Lenssen already appeared in a slightly different form in the MAINZ quarterly magazine in the 2013/3 edition.
  4. ↑ a b c Findings about D. In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1993, p. 130 ( online - May 17, 1993 ).
  5. ↑ a b c d e f deep darkness . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1982, pp. 28-31 ( Online - May 3, 1982 ).
  6. ↑ Münchner Chronik 1981, accessed on September 29, 2010
  7. ↑ Familiar faces . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1981, pp. 79 ( Online - Aug. 10, 1981 ).
  8. ↑ On the chain . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1981, pp. 97-99 ( Online - Oct. 26, 1981 ).
  9. ↑ a term for the self-proclaimed Iranian revolutionary guard and not to be confused with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard , which has also given itself such a name
  10. ^ Campus Report
  11. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung of January 4, 2018
  12. ↑ a b Out and in . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1982, pp. 30th f . ( online - May 17, 1982 ).
  13. ↑ Hadi Ghaffari . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1982, pp. 234 ( online - March 1, 1982 ).
  14. ↑ In the name of Allah . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1988, pp. 92 f . ( Online - Jan. 25, 1988 ).
  15. ^ The TAZ of December 13, 2004
  16. ↑ Handelsblatt dated December 8, 2004
  17. ↑ Manager magazine from January 21, 2005
  18. ↑ “My conscience is pure”. SPIEGEL interview with Iran Ambassador Mohamad-Mehdi Navab-Motlagh about the Mainz fight . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1982, pp. 30 ( Online - May 3, 1982 ).
  19. ↑ After prayer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1982, pp. 102 ( Online - Aug. 30, 1982 ).
  20. ^ Wilhelm Dietl: Schattenarmeen: The secret services of the Islamic world, p. 82
  21. ↑ Brutal reputation . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1993, pp. 88 f . ( Online - June 14, 1993 ).
  22. ↑ Allgemeine Zeitung January 4, 2018
  23. ^ General newspaper of May 2, 2019
  24. ↑ sensormagazin accessed September 26, 2019
  25. ↑ Protests accessed on September 26, 2019

Coordinates: 49 ° 59 ′ 36.4 "  N , 8 ° 14 ′ 3.7"  E