Germany uses Nazi-era language to defend NATO By Robert Mahoney BONN, April 1 (Reuters) - Germany, having deployed forces in combat for the first time since World War II, is comparing Serbia's treatment of its Kosovo Albanians with Germany's destruction of [[Serbs and]] Jews during World War II. Ministers in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's center-left government have gone on a media offensive as the first stirrings of anti-war sentiment came from coalition partners the Greens. Foreign Minister and Greens leader Joschka Fischer has appealed for public support for NATO air raids on Yugoslavia by describing the plight of ethnic Albanians in terms recalling Nazi atrocities in eastern Europe. Fischer said there was clear evidence that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was systematically ``exterminating or deporting'' Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. ``Germans cannot look away from this,'' Fischer said. Opinion polls show more than 60 percent of Germans back Bonn's participation in the NATO air strikes although 76 percent oppose the use of ground troops in Kosovo. The government, however, is determined not to let this support slip. Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping painted a chilling picture of how Serbian forces were ``ethnically cleansing'' Kosovo by surrounding villages, killing the men and deporting the women. He said the victims were ``selected,'' consciously using a word in German that conjures the image of an SS officer picking Jews from a crowd for summary execution or transportation to a death camp. ``This is systematic extermination, a terrifying reminder of what was done in the name of Germany at the start of World War II, and throughout the whole of the war in the case of Poland,'' Scharping said. He raised the spectre of camps in Kosovo, a theme taken up by Germany's leading tabloid Bild which splashed a picture of Albanian refugees on its front page with the headline: ``They are driving them into a concentration camp.'' The flip side of this linguistic coin is an official avoidance of all warlike language to describe NATO's raids. The Western alliance is conducting a ``campaign'' not a war against Yugoslavia, said psychiatrist and peace campaigner Horst-Eberhard Richter. ``Terms like campaign and air strike play down the reality and have overtones of justified punishment,'' he said Thursday. ``But under international law we Germans find ourselves in a war.'' This has not been lost on the left wing of the Greens, a party that battled NATO's Cold War deployment of nuclear missiles in western Europe throughout the 1980s. More than 500 party members have signed a petition against the NATO operation and four regional groups have called for a special party conference to debate the issue. Some have renamed the party the ``Olive Greens.'' ``This is a very, very difficult issue for the Greens,'' said Greens member of parliament Hans-Christian Stroebele. ``On the one hand you have human rights abuses and on the other the breach of international law and the Green principle that no problem can be solved by war.'' He said Fischer should explain himself at the special conference. Fischer, a former left-wing firebrand, said he had begun asking himself if he had done everything to avoid the conflict after being branded a ``warmonger'' by some Greens: ``I can only answer that with a clear 'yes.'''
