Werner Schuster (politician)

Rudolf Werner Schuster (20 January 1939 – 9 May 2001) was a Tanganyika-born German physician, specialist in health informatics, and SPD politician.

Raised in a colonial East African household, Schuster studied medicine at the University of Tübingen in the 1960s and during his professional career worked mostly in health informatics and medical computer science.

Schuster was born in 1939 at Moshi in the Kilimanjaro Region of the Tanganyika Territory, now part of Tanzania, into a family of German settlers.

As a member of parliament Schuster was chiefly concerned with development and with health policy and took a particular interest in Africa and the fight against AIDS.

[1][2] In a debate in the Bundestag on 21 June 1991 on the situation in the Sudan, Schuster said that the bombing of United Nations and Red Cross supply depots by government forces in the south of the country was "completely perverse", and his position was supported on all sides of the chamber.

[6] After a trip to Rwanda in 1993, Schuster unsuccessfully called upon the German federal government led by Helmut Kohl to offer financial support for an enlarged United Nations peace-keeping force there.

He was closely associated with Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, who in 1998 became federal minister for economic cooperation and development under Gerhard Schröder, the new SPD Chancellor.

[7] In December 1995, following the NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia, Schuster was one of only fifty-five SPD members of parliament who voted against sending four thousand German soldiers to join the IFOR international peacekeeping force in Bosnia, with the Bundestag approving the deployment by 543 votes to 107, with six abstentions and sixteen members absent.