Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

RED ARMY FACTION • 575Flight 139 Entebbe hijacking on 27 June 1976 and the LufthansaFlight 181 Mogadishu hijacking on 13 October 1977, in which theRAF played a supporting role.Bombing targets have included a U.S. Officers’ Club in Frankfurt(11 May 1972); an attempted bombing-assassination of North AtlanticTreaty Organization (NATO) Commander General Alexander Haig(25 June 1979); U.S. Air Force headquarters in Ramstein (31 August1981); and the Rhein-Main Air Force Base car-bombing attack carriedout jointly with Direct Action (8 August 1985). Assassinationshave included the killing of German Supreme Court President Güntervon Drenkmann (9 November 1974); German Federal ProsecutorSiegfried Buback (7 April 1977); Deutsche Bank Chairman AlfredHerrhausen (30 November 1989); an attempt on Interior MinistryState Secretary Hans Neusel (27 July 1990); and Detlev Rohwedder,a West German businessman involved in the liquidation and sale offormer East German state enterprises (1 April 1991).The RAF was the oldest of the anarchistic leftist terrorist groupsthat sought to destroy the capitalist state but without any strategy tohelp build a successor socialist state. The collapse of the Soviet Unionand the repeated failures of the RAF to build effective alliances withsimilar groups outside Germany led to what Dennis Pluchinsky describedas “strategic confusion” and “ideological burn-out.” The PersianGulf War briefly breathed zeal back into the remaining militants,who, on 13 February 1991, assaulted the U.S. embassy in Bonn with250 rounds of small-arms fire in protest against the U.S.-led invasion.There remained little reason for them to carry on the armed struggleexcept, perhaps, to free their remaining imprisoned comrades. Butthe initiative of Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel to release those RAFprisoners, who by now were either nearing the ends of their sentencesor else simply too old or too debilitated to engage in terrorism, effectivelyremoved this motive for continued struggle for the RAFmembers remaining at large.A long communiqué dated 10 April 1992 was issued by the “Commando”of the RAF, the first half consisting of a self-criticism of thestrategy of the group and the second half containing a conditionalunilateral cease-fire. Follow-up communiqués of 29 June 1992 and a58-page document issued in August 1992 reiterated the cease-fire andoutlined reasons why the group decided it would no longer engage inantistate terror. Yet on 27 March 1993 RAF members bombed and