The price of freedom
Edward Marston
West Berlin Last August a young waiter from East Berlin hijacked an airliner on a flight from Poland to East Berlin, and directed it to Tempelhof airport in the American sector of West Berlin. There he was welcomed with some warmth by an American colonel to 'free West Berlin'. Then he was interned for two months, without charge or counsel, while the American authorities tried to decide what in the name of God, Freedom and Democracy to do with him. Whose responsibility was Herr Tiede? Under what law and jurisdiction should he be tried? The consternation of the West German government, at the prospect of his being tried in their courts, was considerable. They had just signed the European 'Agreement on Combating Terrorism', with its explicit commitment to the prompt prosecution of hijackers irrespective of their political motives. Yet to Herr Tiede's motive — the passionate desire to escape from East to West Germany —they could hardly be indifferent. And the nation would hardly be likely to grasp the fine distinction between condemning the crime and condemning the motive. Great, therefore, was their relief when the Americans agreed to bring the case before the 'United States Court for Berlin'.
The result has been a unique courtroom drama. The proceedings have gravely embarrassed the American authorities Who instituted them. The American government both requested and required an unequivocal conviction: not least for the credibility of its own strong stance against international terrorism. They had more than a sporting chance of. securing that result; not only would they appear as the prosecution in the case, but they also hired, and had the power to fire, the judge. The judge was, in the eighteenth-century sense, their creature. He would not have that final independence without which a judge is not a judge. The trouble was that the gentleman they chose to appoint, the brilliant and pugnacious Herbert J. Stern, a Federal District judge from New Jersey, did not agree. He came to Berlin. He saw the problem. He listened to counsel for the defence, Mr Judah Best, pleading that the American sector of the city is 'nothing else than a geographical concordisation of the Statue of Liberty'. And he heard Judah's cry. Translating Mr Best's submission into his own more felicitous prose, he found that, 34 years after the end of the war, the United States may not continue to exercise the arbitrary and unlimited power of occupation; that the American Constitution should apply to the conduct of American officials abroad; and that those in their power should enjoy the basic rights which the Constitution guarantees. Among the most basic of those rights is the right to a jury trial. Herr Tiede was offered such a trial, and he accepted the offer.
Therewith the stage was set. The plot of the play is not easy to explain. It is not a simple matter for a jury of twelve citizens of West Berlin to sit in judgment on an excitizen of East Germany accused of hijacking a Polish airliner, the case to be decided under West German law but in an United States court with American court procedure, the whole laced with immensely subtle legal argument mixed up in simultaneous translation. One must remember that the nearest the jurors can have come to such a proceeding is the kind of Perry Mason courtroom thriller which was popular on West German television in the Fifties. Indeed one often felt one was watching such a programme. 'You have taken the words out of my mouth,' Mr Best reproached the judge at one point. 'I would love to put them back,' retorted Judge Stern, good-humouredly.
Not since 1963 can Berliners have heard the unabashed rhetoric of Freedom which flowed so easily from the red-faced and roistering defence attorney, Mr Bernard Hellring — a kind of all-American Falstaff. Unoriginally, he remarked that he, too, was a Berliner. With pathos he revealed that Herr Tiede's son was called John after John F. Kennedy — such was his client's love of Freedom. Describing the emotions of Detlev Tiede's female accomplice, Frau Ingrid Ruske, and her 12 year-old daughter, Sabine, who escaped with them, he struck his breast to indicate how their hearts beat with panic. Inadvertently he struck his throat microphone and the jury leapt as an earsplitting thump, thump, thump, came through their earphones. Ingrid Ruske was in the audience at this moment. I saw her cast a half-amused, half-reassuring glance at Sabine. 'Poor old Falstaff,' she seemed to be saying, 'we know it wasn't like that really. But he's doing his best for Uncle Detlev.' 'Freedom!' cried Mr Hellring, whose narrative now reached the hijackers' first steps onto the tarmac at Tempelhof. 'They saw freedom. They tasted it. They touched it. They heard it ' — pathos turned to bathos in the delay imposed by simultaneous translation. The elder members of the jury looked bewildered. They hadn't heard anyone talk about freedom like this before. The younger members suppressed a titter. All looked expectantly at the translators' box. 'They smelled freedom', Hellring triumphantly roared. In all this the defendant himself seemed sometimes forgotten. At one point he almost disappeared between two courtroom cupboards, making himself small for the crush of lawyers around his chair. One felt he might ask to be excused: indeed, the lawyers were only in part talking about him. There were other and larger issues at stake: the credibility of American foreign policy, the substance of the United States's presence in Berlin, the separation of powers and the ethics of the defence of freedom.
Yet Detlev Tiede's story is worth telling for itself. He is now 33 years old: that is, he was 15 when the Wall was built. The warrant for his arrest gives his 'permanent place of residence and fixed address', with sublime bureaucratic absurdity, as East Berlin — Prenzlauer Berg, an old working-class quarter. There he worked as a waiter. There he married a Polish girl who already had a young son. They had a son: John. GraduallY the marriage broke up. One day in 1976 Tiede came home to find his wife, son and stepson gone: they had moved to the West (Polish citizens have incomparably greater freedom of movement than East Germans). Faced with the prospect of not seeing his son for 35 years (until, at the age of 65, ins useful working life at an end, he would be free to travel to the West), his life fell apart. He drank too much. For weeks he did lacst work. After several rather bungled attempts to escape, he was threatened last August, while making a further attempt In Poland, with imminent arrest on his return to East Berlin.
Finally in desperation he bought a star' ting pistol which the 12 year-old Sabine Ruske found in a flea market in the Polish, town of Sopot. Sabine carried the 'pistol ,aboard the plane at Danzig. Polish customs officials smiled at her toy gun.This was the 'weapon' which he pointed at the stewardess. To his surprise the absurd hi-jack was successful, and six other citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GD11,) decided on the spur of the moment to jolt the hijackers in 'free West Berlin', as the welcoming American colonel described it It was then that the United States govern' ment charged Herr Tiede with 'depriving persons of their liberty.' He must have been slightly shocked. He imagined, and the good colonel seems to have imagined, that he was doing just the opposite. In fact, four of those GDR citizens came into court t° express their gratitude to Herr Tiede for doing something which, as one of them 10,1 it, 'they had not had the courage to do . Perhaps Mr Hellring's rhetoric was not s° wide of the mark. Detlev Tiede certain looked like a man who had the scent 01 Freedom in his nostrils. Now he is actually a free man. But it Os not the jury of Berliners, swayed by St/. Hellring's rhetoric, or motivated by disgils` at the division of their city, who set him free' They scrupulously weighed the evideneet presented to them and found the defendant, guilty on one count: of taking hostages.1was Judge Stern who used his discretion t°
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