Pubdate: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Section: International Author: Steven Erlanger 'JUDGE MERCILESS' THINKS ALL GERMANY NEEDS HIM Hamburg Journal HAMBURG, Germany, Jan. 21 -- Ronald Schill, known in the press as "Judge Merciless," came into office in this elegant and seamy city state on a tide of disgust with crime and immigration, shaking political assumptions. Now he is thinking about going national. Mr. Schill, who is locally notorious for his harsh judgments in court, came out of nowhere to win nearly 20 percent of the vote in Hamburg's state elections last September, helping to turn the flaccid Social Democrats out of office here after 44 years in power. The showing was a record for a new party -- the Party for a Law and Order Offensive, known more commonly as the Schill party. Now Mr. Schill, 42, intends his party to run in state elections in April in Saxony Anhalt, in former East Germany, where he is getting around 20 percent in the opinion polls. He is even considering a run in the federal elections in September, which could make or break the conservative Edmund Stoiber's challenge to the Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroder. But only 85 days in office, Mr. Schill is already facing criticism that he is not delivering on his promises to push out Hamburg's drug addicts and dealers and flood its streets with 2,000 more policemen. A headline this week in Hamburger Morgenpost, a local tabloid, charged, "From Judge Merciless to Minister Planless." Mr. Schill confronts the problem of any right-wing leader in Germany: his rise stirs anxiety linked to Germany's past. His manner is modest as he curves his 6 feet 5 inches into an office chair, but his message is clear: other politicians have undermined the police, treated crime as the fault of the society and not the individual, and allowed "unhindered immigration into Germany, especially of black Africans, people from the former Yugoslavia, Turkey and other Muslim countries, which led to imported unemployment and imported crime." Hamburg, a cosmopolitan Hanseatic port and media hub, has long been "the crime capital of Germany," Mr. Schill says. Drug dealers infest the cavernous central railroad station and the city's parks. Muggings are about 10 times more common here than in Munich, the capital of Mr. Stoiber's low-crime state, Bavaria. In 2001, theft rose by more than 19 percent and drug trafficking by 17 percent, according to official figures. In Hamburg, too, one of the main cells of Al Qaeda terrorists who attacked New York and Washington last September planned and plotted, melting into the large immigrant Muslim community of the southern district of Harburg. "The terrorists chose the right place to plot their crimes," Mr. Schill said. It was fertile ground for Mr. Schill, whose election showing won him the post of state interior minister in a conservative-led coalition. The office legitimizes him and his politics, troubling the left and posing a distinct problem for the mainstream conservatives. Mr. Stoiber is already trying to keep his distance from the political novice with the uncomfortable opinions that rattle Germany's European partners. "I exclude partnership with such a party on the federal level," Mr. Stoiber said recently. "We don't need it." But in a close election, Mr. Stoiber might need Mr. Schill, who for now is merely relishing the attention and saying he will see how he fares in the Saxony election before deciding on a national run. Then he gives a sort of wink and says that a "high-ranking member" of Mr. Stoiber's party has encouraged the judge to run, to help the southern, Catholic Mr. Stoiber with the skeptical Protestants in the north. He already criticizes Mr. Stoiber for "diluting his position on the issue of immigration and moving toward the center." Germany's left, eager to see Mr. Schill out of politics just as swiftly as he entered it, is expressing the view that he has already broken his promises. "Schill's making propaganda that he's solving the problems of ordinary people," said Michael Neumann, a Social Democratic member of Hamburg's Parliament. "But people are already asking where are his programs and ideas." Mr. Schill counters that money is tight, that he has already put 280 new recruits into the police academy, increased training for police staff and brought in some Bavarian police officers on contract. There have been other contretemps. A dealer who had swallowed plastic packets of cocaine died when the police administered a drug intended to force him to vomit up the evidence. The police have now been required to have two doctors present. A Schill proposal to leave a prison on the grounds of a former Nazi concentration camp, Neuengamme, where 50,000 people died, created a big fuss. Mr. Schill argues that a new prison will cost $50 million, that the Social Democrats put the prison there originally after the war and that his own grandfather, a Communist, was killed in the camp in 1944. "The prison should never have been built there," Mr. Schill said. "And the Social Democrats should have removed it long ago." After protests from Jewish survivors of the camp, Mr. Schill agreed to dismantle the prison. Mr. Schill's effort to rid the railway station of drug dealers had a setback, too. He wanted to bus them to the port, but the customs authorities who run the port refused to play along. Still, the German train company, Deutsche Bahn, has had its own success. It set up big loudspeakers and started playing Vivaldi to improve the atmosphere. The constant repetition of "The Four Seasons," says the newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, "has been an effective street sweeper, guaranteed to drive the most stubborn junkie crazy." To avoid Vivaldi, the paper said, many junkies and dealers have left the station of their own accord. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom