Bonn Mulls New Moves as Violence Continues : Extremism: Pressure grows to stop right-wing attacks. Emergency police coordination is proposed.

BERLIN —  With a sense of urgency bordering on desperation, German leaders considered new measures Sunday to better combat the revival of right-wing extremism in the country, but the attacks continued unabated, with police reporting firebombings or assaults against foreigners in six cities.

There were no deaths in any of Sunday’s attacks.

The incidents occurred as international pressure intensified against Germany in the wake of the recent attacks, with Israel demanding tough measures to counter violent racism and anti-Semitism and Turks burning German flags at the funeral of three Turkish nationals killed in northern Germany last week.

In a television interview Sunday, Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters said he has proposed forming an emergency coordinating committee made up of federal, state and local law enforcement officials to better focus the fight against right-wing extremism.

“We did this against left-wing extremists in the 1970s, and I am proposing a similar committee now,” Seiters said.

The Interior Ministry group that supported and coordinated police operations against terrorist groups such as the infamous Red Army Faction was considered a key factor in the government’s success in crushing the leftist extremist violence.

In recent weeks, critics have repeatedly questioned Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s failure to react to the threat of rightist extremism with a similar coordinated effort.

Indeed, aside from trying to cut off the influx of foreigners entering the country to claim political asylum, the government did virtually nothing until Friday, when Seiters announced a ban on a small neo-Nazi group called the National Front.

Although the National Front has only 170 members nationally and is not believed to be a major participant in the wave of recent violence, the move against it was interpreted as an important sign that the government had finally decided to take decisive steps to control the extremist violence.

The ban was one of a series of measures that ended months of government inaction in the face of a steadily growing wave of xenophobic, anti-Semitic violence.

On Saturday, police said they raided several National Front locations, seizing explosives, firearms and neo-Nazi literature.

The raids are unlikely to have a direct effect in ending the attacks.

Senior law enforcement officials claim that much of the violence is the work of groups of mainly directionless, disaffected youths, so ill-organized that they are virtually impossible to infiltrate and round up.

In several instances, the attacks have been traced to drunks as young as 14.

The violence and the prolonged government paralysis that accompanied it have left a nervous international community questioning whether Germans have the political will to defend their democracy from the extremist threat.

In a radio interview Sunday, Kohl reminded Germans that the level of their economic prosperity would not be possible without the help of the country’s 6 million foreign residents and that the attacks against foreigners and Jews must stop.

“We have to do everything to put the right-wing rabble . . . in their place and hit these people with the full force of the law,” he said.

But as Kohl spoke, the president of Germany’s Constitutional Court, Roman Herzog, rejected an idea floated by Interior Ministry officials that certain constitutional wording could be used to ban right-wing extremists from voting or making public statements.

“Such a step cannot be made on its own,” Herzog said, adding that what he termed “the first line of defense” against those who engage in such violence must be the political will to invoke existing criminal laws.

His comment appeared to be directed at the country’s judiciary, which has handed down a series of unusually light sentences in cases where young Germans have been convicted of attacking foreigners.

As officials scrambled for new ways of checking the violence, Germans began to take in the dimensions of the damage done to the country’s international reputation, painstakingly rebuilt from the ashes of the Holocaust over much of the last five decades.

On the main television news programs, German viewers saw the Israeli Cabinet demand an end to racist and anti-Semitic violence in Germany and then watched German flags being burned in the town of Carsamba, Turkey, where thousands attended the funeral of a 51-year-old Turkish woman and two young Turkish girls.

The three died last Monday in an arson attack on their home in the north German town of Moelln.

“Germany has not reverted to Nazi Germany and will never do so,” a German diplomat told those attending the funeral.

It was the death of the three Turkish nationals that seemed to shock the German government into action.

In a formal statement issued after a Cabinet meeting Sunday, the Israeli government expressed “grave concern” about the violence.

“Israel has demanded that the German government fight neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism with every means at its disposal,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said after the Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “We take a grave view of this phenomenon and therefore see ourselves as obligated, as the government of the Jewish state, to demand action.”

But Rabin’s government stopped short of the earlier demands of some of its members for a boycott on travel to Germany if the government failed to take immediate action.

“Maybe I exaggerated to say, ‘Stop going to Germany,’ ” Education Minister Shulamit Aloni admitted Sunday.

In a related development, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, said he saw no grounds for members of the country’s Jewish community to emigrate because of the violence.

“This is a firm democracy, and there is no reason to emigrate,” he said.

Representatives of the Jewish Agency in Frankfurt recently reported that the right-wing violence had led to a rise in the number of Jews applying to immigrate to Israel, although the numbers remain small.

Meanwhile, police in six German communities reported violent attacks against foreigners Sunday.

The worst incident occurred in Eberswalde, about 25 miles northeast of Berlin, where an apartment building housing Bulgarian and Romanian asylum-seekers was firebombed. Those inside at the time managed to escape.

In the western city of Wiesbaden, police arrested six youths and confiscated two baseball bats and neo-Nazi literature in connection with an attack on a Turkish woman and a Moroccan woman as they waited at a bus stop.