Germany's co-governing Green party last night rallied to the support of its leader, the foreign minister Joschka Fischer, in his backing for Nato's bombing campaign against Serbia after a day of high drama and violence at a watershed congress in the party's 20-year history.
The Greens voted by 444 to 318 to support Mr Fischer and defeat a motion demanding an immediate and unconditional end to the Nato bombing.
The vote came at the end of a day of ferocious infighting that had threatened the survival of the seven-month-old coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and could have thrown into question the cohesion of the Nato alliance.
Anti-war delegates engaged in fisticuffs with Fischer supporters, nude male streakers confronted party leaders, and the rostrum was pelted with stink- and paint bombs at the special congress in the western town of Bielefeld.
Almost 800 delegates wrestled with the dilemmas thrown up by the Kosovo conflict - whether a party reared on pacifism and militant protest could or should support Nato's war policy.
Many disgruntled anti-war Greens were expected to quit the party after Mr Fischer's victory. Fighting for his political life, he took to the rostrum smeared in red paint from a missile that struck him on the head, requiring brief treatment at a nearby hospital.
Mr Fischer struggled to contain his anger and make himself heard over the din of the anti-war left, delivering an impassioned plea against ethnic cleansing and the atrocities licensed by President Slobodan Milosevic. He insisted that Germany and its allies had exhausted all diplomatic options before resorting to force.
'You call me a warmonger, and next you'll want to nominate Milosevic for the Nobel peace prize,' he yelled at his hecklers. 'You can whistle as much as you want, but go and talk to the deportees in the refugee camps in Macedonia.'
Despite constant interruption by whistles and jeers, and a large banner that read, 'With permission, Mr Minister, you're an arsehole', Mr Fischer won a standing ovation for a speech that stated: 'Peace requires that people are not murdered, that people are not deported, and that women are not raped.'
Without overtly threatening to resign, he boldly defied the congress by saying he would not observe any resolution that ordered an end to the Nato bombing campaign.
A resolution calling for a 'unilateral, indefinite halt' to the Nato bombing would be 'fundamentally wrong' and strengthen Mr Milosevic who, Mr Fischer pointed out, had routinely flouted 18 signed ceasefires and 73 United Nations resolutions through eight years and four wars in former Yugoslavia.
'I will not implement that if that's what you decide,' he said.
Dozens of anti-war motions demanding a halt to the Nato bombing were whittled down in favour of a compromise resolution. This backed Mr Fischer's push for a diplomatic settlement while urging a unilateral, but limited, suspension of the bombing.
Hundreds of riot police patrolled the streets around the hall to safeguard the Green delegates, an irony not lost on Mr Fischer, who found it 'incredible that we should have to hold a Green congress under police protection'.
The party of rebels and radicals born of the student tumults of 1968 and the anti-nuclear movement of the 70s and 80s has been thrust into an existential crisis by the Kosovo war. The congress was a seminal moment in its turbulent odyssey from protest to power.
For seven months the Greens have been in government for the first time, while for 52 days Germany has been at war for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich. For a party whose programme eschews the use of force to achieve political ends, the clash of principle and power has proved crippling.
'We all have doubts and we are torn,' said Kerstin Muller, the Greens' parliamentary leader, summing up the mood of a party deeply divided by the Nato campaign.
'This is a decision on the future of the Greens and on the future of German foreign policy,' said Angelika Beer, the party's defence spokeswoman.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green MEP and intimate ally of Mr Fischer, was shouted down as he told the chaotic congress his 'bitter truth'. 'If you want to go into government, you take over the world as it is,' he said.
The 1968 student radical known as Danny the Red - who sits in the European parliament as a German Green but is leading the French Greens' campaign for next month's European elections - said it would be perverse to tie Mr Fischer's hands, and cowardly to forfeit the use of force for the sake of principle.