Statement By Irmgard Möller Regarding The RAF Cease-FireTo Those Who Struggle Alongside Us

We’d like to briefly state the following: the decision made by our comrades on the outside is a correct one, one which identifies a political process which we prisoners are also a part of [2].

We have wanted – ever since ’89 – to make a break in the entire political spectrum, and such a step can only be taken by all of us together, not just in the area of prisoners.

We see this now much clearer than we did in the mid-80s, and the hunger-strike of ‘89 was the first time we made this a part of our political praxis.

The fact that the global and domestic social contradictions are so deep makes the simple pressing-forward of the politics and praxis of the 70s and 80s impossible.

Whoever sees the necessity of the revolutionary change of the existing global and domestic injustices and destructive relationships should also see the need for a change and re-orientation of political content and forms, also in relation to other leftist experiences and ways of living.

We prisoners see this as our task both for now and “after prison”.

Re-orientating within society and within international groupings and conditions requires an open learning process.

This must first be achieved for the 4 sick prisoners.

Bernd and Günter must be released immediately.

With their release, a rational moment can exist for discussions between the political prisoners and the state.

This means a thorough break for all involved.

A break with our 22-year history.

We aren’t trying to fool anyone when we say that we want to achieve freedom for all of us within a foreseeable period of time. We don’t expect this to happen right away or for all of us at once.

But we’d like to make it clear that, after 22 years of considering and criticizing the attempted destruction of the prisoners (with everything from special legislation to isolation) – against which we struggled as a collective, a struggle in which 9 imprisoned comrades died, although in the end we wrecked the state’s plans – after all these decades, there can be no talk of a normal “solution”.

That just isn’t realistic, and it’s a ridiculous thought to anyone who has become familiar with Germany’s justice system and state security apparatus over the last 25 years and who doesn’t want to disregard their own political history.

The state can’t own history; the state’s official version is not ours.

It’s just a matter of dealing politically with social contradictions.

We, the prisoners from the RAF and the resistance, and the RAF have made room for this.

This has nothing to do with “tactics”.

Irmgard Möller
on behalf of the prisoners from the RAF and the resistance
Lübeck, April 15th 1992

[1] Arrested in 1972 and charged with the bombing of the US Army Base ni Heidelberg (see http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/72_05_25.html) Irmgard Möller was the only prisoner to survive the murders of October 18th 1977 in Stammheim prison. After 22 years in custody, Möller was released from Lübeck prison on 1 December 1994.  [return to text]

[2] On April 10th 1992 the RAF released a document – To All Who Are Looking For Ways to Organize and to Push Through a Human Life in Dignity Here and Worldwide On Really Concrete Issues – in which they stated that they would no longer carry out attacks on representatives of the State or capital. This document can be read at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/92_04_10.html. [return to text]