Europe’s terrorising Amazons

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 16

Europe’s terrorising Amazons

By

PAUL HOFFMAN,

of the “New York Times,” through NZPA.

An Amazon complex is said to be running out of control in West Germany these days, as psychologists and experts in social sciences debate why so many young women have become terrorists.

A good half of the unflattering pictures on the latest wanted posters in office buildings are of women. The legend: “Anarchist perpetrators of violence. Attention — firearms.”

The posters already include a portrait of a gaunt Susanne Albrecht, the 26-

year-old daughter of a Hamburg lawyer. She is accused of having led the group that killed an influential ■ banker, Jurgen Ponto, in his home near Frankfurt on July 30.

In Italy, young women have been implicated in most of the terrorist conspiracies that are plaguing the country. Scores of women are in jail on suspicion of having committed political violence. Among Italian radicals, a cult has sprung up that reveres a dead woman extremist as a folk heroine. She is Margherita Cagol, known as Mara, slain in a shooting incident with the police when they discovered a hideout in Piedmont, where she and persons said, to be her accomplices were holding a kidnapped executive of a vermouth concern prisoner. Mara has become the

Italian counterpart of Ulrike Meinhof, the West German anarchist who, with Andreas Baader, led a terrorist gang. Mrs Meinhof was found hanged in her prison cell last year. Baader and other persons accused of having been in the gang are in jail, as is the husband of Mara Cagol, Renato Curcio. He is regarded as the founder of the Red Brigades, a group of extremists that operates clandestinely in northern Italy.

In Switzerland, a federal court has just ordered prison authorities to ease the conditions under which Petra Krause, a GermanItalian accused of plotting bombings, is being held. Italy has asked that she be extradited. In Sweden, the Netherlands, and other countries of Western Europe, young women are active in anarchism. A West German news agency searched for precedents in female extremist militancy last week, and asserted that it all started with Leila Khaled. The reference was to a young Arab who took part in an

airplane hijacking in the summer of 1970. Miss Khaled was detained for some time in London, and the Fleet Street press lionised her. But political violence by women did not start with her. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat to death in his bath during the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century, the involvement of women in anarchist bombing plots shocked Europe.

Yet the ratio of women activists in the present-day underground networks and urban guerrilla groups of Western Europe and Latin America is strikingly high. West German police officials speak of a women’s club that, they

say, is the hard core of the clandestine revolutionary movement. Several Italian and West German sociologists and news commentators, all of them men, have suggested over the last few weeks that the significant female membership in radical and terrorist groups is an unwelcome consequence of the Women’s Liberation movement.

“Women, unfortunately, can be particularly fanatical,” said Mrs Hildegards Hamm-Brucher, a Minister of State in the West German Foreign Ministry, who was interviewed by the daily “Die Welt,” of Hamburg.

On the other hand, the Federal Minister of Youth, Family Matters and Health (Mrs Antje Huber) asserted that women are no less capable of becoming enthusiastic for an idea than are men. The idea, Mrs Huber added, might be extremely negative, like the notion that the world can be im-

proved by terror and murder. A patron of the arts in Duesseldorf, Gabriele Henkel, suggested that young women were suffering from an Amazon complex that was running wild, and been deeply disturbed in their relationship with their parents.