Kohl memoirs hit out at successors

Kohl says successors plotted his downfall

BERLIN, Germany -- Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose reputation for uniting his country was stained by a party funding scandal, has hit back at critics in a new book.

Kohl portrays himself as more sinned against than sinner in excerpts of his memoirs "Helmut Kohl, My Diary, 1998-2000" which were published in a German newspaper on Sunday.

The man who succeeded him as CDU leader, Wolfgang Schaeuble, and Angela Merkel who later took over as party leader, come in for criticism, although the book reveals little new.

The former chancellor has admitted accepting more than $1million (DM1 million) in cash for Christian Democratic Union (CDU) causes from 1993 to 1998 when the party was in power.

However, just as he has done ever since the scandal broke last November, Kohl said he has no intention of breaking his "word of honour" to keep the identity of the donors secret and accused the media of unfairly portraying him as "a corrupt and power-greedy politician."

Kohl, who has been subjected to grillings by a parliamentary inquiry and is under criminal investigation for breach of trust against the party he led for 25 years, denied all knowledge of corruption in a series of arms export and privatisation deals.

"The goal of this campaign is to criminalise me and discredit my 16 years as chancellor. I can't accept that," Kohl wrote in the Welt am Sonntag, which is publishing the extracts of his diaries covering the two years since his 1998 general election defeat.

Kohl, 70, saves his most personal criticism for his long-time confidant Schaeuble who is accused of dumping him at the height of the furore over the funding scandal.

Referring to a telephone call with Schaeuble on Christmas Eve last year, Kohl writes: "The conversation made clear to me something I had not wanted to believe -- that Wolfgang Schaeuble wanted to make a final break from me."

Kohl also suspected Merkel -- who was then the CDU's chief of staff -- of colluding in efforts to bring him down.

He cited an article by Merkel shortly before Christmas in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calling on the party's "old battle charger" to leave the field to a younger generation.

"That is an outright demand to me to quit all political office immediately," Kohl wrote. He suspected Schaeuble's hand in the article, but when he confronted his former lieutenant got no answer.

Kohl eventually gave up his honorary party chairmanship under pressure from the CDU leadership. But Schaeuble was felled as party leader not long afterwards after lying to parliament over a $50,000 donation he took from an arms lobbyist who is now fighting extradition from Canada.

Schaeuble has accused Kohl in his own memoirs published earlier this year of pulling strings behind the scenes to bring about his downfall.

Kohl looks back after his general election defeat in September 1998 at his role in German unification and muses: "I am thankful for the historical chance to shape political decisions which were of extraordinary significance for German, European and World history."

The diaries will be published in book form on November 27 and his publishers have printed an initial run of 100,000 copies. He plans to publish a fuller book of memoirs in around a year.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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German Government
Christian Democratic Union
Die Welt

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