http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010309/wl/germany_greens_1.html

STUTTGART, Germany (AP) - An outspoken human rights activist was elected the new co-leader of Germany's Greens party on Friday and immediately assailed the United States for its national missile defense plans and airstrikes on Iraq.

Members of the Greens, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's governing coalition, cheered and applauded the speech by Claudia Roth, who was elected with 92 percent support to one of the two top party posts at a national convention.

``The American bombings in Iraq are no way to overcome the dictator Saddam Hussein - quite the contrary,´´ Roth said, laying out her credo to delegates gathered in this wealthy southern city.

``And it´s just as right to persuade the Americans that (national missile defense) doesn´t mean more security but more confrontation,´´ she said.

Schroeder is expected to raise missile defense and the Middle East when he travels to Washington on March 29 for talks with President Bush. Germany has urged the United States to consult widely over its missile plans, which have angered Russia and China.

Roth, a former manager of an anarchist rock band, was the lone candidate to replace Renate Kuenast, who has sharply lifted the party's standing since taking over the government's fight against mad cow disease in January as the head of a new Ministry of Consumer Protection and Agriculture.

In her speech, Roth also endorsed demonstrations against transports of waste from German nuclear power plants and said the outbreak of mad cow disease in Germany was a chance for the Greens to rally support for their ecology-minded policies.

``Yesterday, people just smiled at us,´´ she said. ``Now organic farming is a mainstream movement.´´

Roth has headed Parliament's human rights committee since Schroeder's Social Democrats and the ecology-minded Greens formed a government in 1998. She represents her party's left wing, where many share her opposition to the airstrikes on Iraq.

Her views have put her in conflict with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Greens' most popular politician. The party has closed ranks behind Fischer and Environment Minister Juergen Trittin in recent weeks amid a furious partisan debate over their past as leftist radicals. Fischer was to address delegates Saturday.

In Germany's long-running debate on immigration, Roth has also strongly defended keeping borders open to victims of political persecution. In the Greens' two-member chairmanship, she will complement Fritz Kuhn, a pragmatist and Fischer ally.

The national convention was also meant to rally Greens activists for two state elections this month and dampen infighting over the party's stand on protests against nuclear waste transports, just weeks before Germany and France resume such shipments.

With activists calling for a revival of demonstrations and blockades that disrupted transports of radioactive waste from German power plants in the 1990s, Greens leaders have drafted a compromise saying the party can't endorse violent protest, but not rejecting peaceful demonstrations.

Party leaders say they do not want to endanger a consensus plan with German utilities to phase out nuclear power over the next few decades.