Susanne Osthoff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Susanne Osthoff ( Susanne Kristina Osthoff ; born March 7, 1962 in Munich ) is a German archaeologist and health care consultant. She became known to a wider public when she was abducted in Iraq on November 25, 2005 and held hostage until December 18, 2005 .

Life

Osthoff grew up in Ebersberg ( Upper Bavaria ) with two brothers and a younger sister. After the 8th grade, she left the Grafing grammar school and attended the Frauenchiemsee monastery boarding school for two years . After the 10th grade, she entered the Wasserburg technical college. In 1980, during the 11th year of school, she switched to the Ernst Mach Gymnasium in Haar , where she did her Abitur. She then studied at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , including with Barthel Hrouda , the doyen of Near Eastern archeology, who selected her for numerous excavation campaigns in the Middle East . She completed her studies in the fields of Near Eastern archeology , Semitic and Osteo from -Archäologie. The title of her master's thesis was Der Spiegel im Vorderen Orient .

In the 1990s Osthoff converted to Sunni Islam and married the Jordanian Arabs Salem Bachan from the tribe of Shammar , whom she had met at an archaeological dig. The short marriage resulted in a daughter.

Osthoff has traveled to almost all Arab countries and worked in many of them. She speaks several Arabic dialects fluently.

Engagement in Iraq

Osthoff had already undertaken several study and excavation trips to Turkey , Syria , Jordan , Yemen and Iraq since 1984 . During the Gulf War in 1991, she stayed in Iraq, where, among other things, she delivered medicines and medical equipment for the population and carried out archaeological research.

Since 1998 she has worked as a consultant, organizer and trainer for the Munich management consultancy faktorM. in the area of ​​"intercultural management". As part of the Children's Aid Irak (formerly: Direkt-Hilfe Irak ) of the IPPNW, she looked after foreign patients in facilities of the Bavarian health care system, transported relief supplies and medicines to Iraq, and initiated, coordinates and advises projects to develop the health care system in Iraq.

On March 25, 2004, Osthoff received the Süddeutsche Zeitung's Tassilo Prize for Civil Courage for her commitment in Iraq in 2003 .

After the Iraq war , she documented the destruction of the excavation sites in Isin , where she worked on several scientific excavation campaigns until 1989. Many media reported it extensively, including the New York Times on its front page.

Osthoff also got involved in Mossul for the preservation of the Ottoman caravanserai Beit al Tütüncü from 1796. On May 18, 2005, she succeeded in getting a construction aid of 40,000 € from the Foreign Office, the first installment of which was already given to the Iraqi antiquity administration has been transferred. However, the payments were stopped by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so as not to give Osthoff any reason to return to Iraq.

Nevertheless, Susanne Osthoff traveled to Iraq for the first time on February 15, 2006 after her kidnapping.

kidnapping

Procrastination

The specific course of the kidnapping of Susanne Osthoff remains speculative and therefore unclear. What is certain is that Susanne Osthoff was caught early in the morning by a group called Saraja al-Salasil (earthquake stormtroopers) on the way to Erbil, around 350 kilometers from Baghdad, in northern Iraq, together with her driver Chalid Nadschi al Schimani was taken and abducted.

The kidnappers sent a video CD to the ARD office in Baghdad three days later . The ARD published information about the content and a still image. The two abductees sat on the floor in it, and three masked Westerners stood around them. Another kidnapper held a machine gun while the third read a message. The kidnappers are said to have threatened the murder of the hostages if the German government does not immediately break off cooperation with the current Iraqi government. This group was initially assigned to the Sunni underground movement of the Ischrin Brigades and assessed as Arab nationalists. These groups are named after the uprising of 1920 against the British colonial power and fight for an end to the occupation and independence from abroad on the basis of an Islamic Iraq.

First speculations

Meanwhile, speculation began in Germany about the motives of the perpetrators. Initially, it was assumed that the kidnapping was politically motivated, but later the crisis team didn't want to hear anything about it and emphasized the unprofessional nature of the kidnapping video. However, Federal Interior Minister Schäuble and the deputy head of the Institute for Terrorism Research in Essen, Kai Hirschmann, mentioned in a newspaper article the apparently politically targeted time of the kidnapping, namely the inauguration of the new German government. This fueled the speculation.

Reactions during the kidnapping

While large demonstrations in France and Italy showed solidarity with the respective kidnapping victims, a vigil took place in Glonn on December 2nd in her last German place of residence and a demonstration of around 100 foreigners, mostly Muslim, took place in Offenbach am Main on December 4th . Media comments interpreted this reluctance with a mixture of trust in the work of the Berlin crisis team and a fundamental reserve against Islam and the Iraqi civil war. On December 10th, further vigils showed solidarity at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, in Munich on Marienplatz and on December 11th in their former place of residence Ebersberg , but they found only weak support. In the third week of the kidnapping, the vigils increased, including again at the Brandenburg Gate and in Munich.

Osthoff's sister Anja and her mother Ingrid Hala appealed to the kidnappers for sympathy in two video messages, and on December 7, 2005, the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder also appealed to the hostage-takers at the request of his mother. The messages were broadcast by the Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera and, according to Foreign Minister Steinmeier, met with a great response in Iraq. The three former Federal Presidents Johannes Rau , Roman Herzog and Richard von Weizsäcker made a written appeal to the kidnappers, as did 15 international archaeological, cultural and humanitarian organizations.

Various political and spiritual representatives of Islam and the Iraqi state campaigned for the release of Osthoff and al-Schimani. Among the most prominent advocates were the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani , the Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr during a Friday prayer in Najaf and in Germany the then chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD), Nadeem Elyas , who even wanted an exchange offered against the hostages. In addition to its informants, the crisis team also claimed the help of Kurdish mediators, including the Kurdish leader Massud Barsani , the Sunni cleric Abd al-Muneim al Badari and Osthoff's divorced husband, Salem Bachan, whose family is also considered to be influential in northern Iraq. The Arab ambassadors in Berlin issued a joint statement on December 11, condemning the Osthoff kidnapping.

release

Osthoff was released on December 18, 2005 and was then in the care of the German embassy in Baghdad. According to Federal Foreign Minister Steinmeier , the archaeologist was in good physical shape. Nothing was officially announced about the conditions of the kidnappers' release. Nothing is known either that Susanne Osthoff was allegedly sold to another group during the kidnapping.

The date of the driver's release is unknown. Some media reported that he was released on December 19, while others reported days later that he was still missing.

More speculation

After the release, speculation increased considerably. Since the German government remained silent, even small things that leaked were staged by the media.

For example, it was speculated

  • that Susanne Osthoff's driver had something to do with the kidnapping. This led to preliminary convictions in many media, which were not corrected after the investigations had not confirmed the evidence against the driver;
  • that Osthoff had worked with the BND after she occasionally stayed in the apartment of a BND official;
  • that Osthoff himself had something to do with the kidnapping, since after her release, money was found on her that, when checked, should have been identical to the ransom allegedly paid. This message turned out to be wrong.

A translation error also led to a debate about Susanne Osthoff. An interview she gave on Al Jazeera English television was partially translated incorrectly. So the news got around that she would want to return to Iraq immediately. As a result, Osthoff's reputation in Germany declined, and some politicians demanded consequences in the form of an entry ban or the suspension of aid for Susanne Osthoff's projects.

A television interview in the heute-journal with Marietta Slomka , in which Osthoff, who was connected from a studio in Qatar , appeared fully veiled except for a crack in her eyes, caused further irritation, but also to media-critical considerations. When presenter Wieland Backes wanted to show an excerpt from the interview in the talk show Nachtcafé eight years later , Osthoff fled the studio and caused a scandal.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office has been investigating an Iraqi tribal leader named Jamal al Duleimi since March 2006. During the kidnapping, the sheikh was initially one of the middlemen with whose help the Germans tried to contact the hostage-takers, but he went into hiding when Susanne Osthoff was released on December 18, 2005 against payment of a large ransom.

In May 2006 the Times reported that Germany, like France and Italy, had ransomed hostages worth millions from the violence of Iraqi gangs in the previous 21 months.

Web links

 Wikinews: Susanne Osthoff  - in the news
Interviews

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Josef Hufelschulte, Thomas Röll, Göran Schattauer and Christian Sturm: PSYCHODRAMA. The tangled history of O. . In: Focus , January 2, 2006, page 24. Retrieved August 12, 2010.
  2. ↑ Employee profile of Susanne Osthoff at faktor M. ( Memento from October 12, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (with seven reports by and about Osthoff from Baghdad from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 2003 to March 2004)
  3. ^ Message from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Ebersberg edition), 5./6. April 2003
  4. ^ The New York Times : Aftereffects: Anarchy; Iraqi Looters Tearing Up Archaeological Sites . May 23, 2003
  5. ↑ Mother Jones : Day of the Vulture . September / October 2003
  6. ↑ Further articles can be found in the archives of The Iraq War & Archeology Project
  7. ^ The Iraq War & Archeology Project: An Appeal for the Release of Susanne Osthoff . 4th / 8th December 2005
  8. ↑ Al Jazeera English : "My kidnappers were not criminals" ( Memento from December 28, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). November 26, 2005
  9. ^ ZDF : "... I was not a free person" ( Memento from January 10, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). December 28, 2005
  10. ↑ the daily newspaper : hooded and confused . December 30, 2005
  11. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Susanne Osthoff: Edited . December 30, 2005
  12. ↑ Telepolis : “Do you understand?” January 3, 2006
  13. ↑ Osthoff causes a scandal . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , March 14, 2014
  14. ↑ stern.de : How close was the relationship with the BND? January 2, 2007
  15. ↑ stern.de : BND misused Osthoff as a decoy . January 4, 2007
  16. ^ The Times : How $ 45m secretly bought freedom of foreign hostages . May 22, 2006
personal data
SURNAME Osthoff, Susanne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Osthoff, Susanne Kristina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German archaeologist and health advisor
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich