Appeal to the Conference of Ministers of the Interior: "Right of residence for persecuted Roma from Kosovo!” – "Help the persecuted Assyrian Chaldean Arameans from Iraq!”

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) will be addressing an urgent appeal on Thursday to the ministers of the interior and senators of the Federation and Provinces in Potsdam to grant right of residence to the Roma from Kosovo living in Germany and asylum to a contingent of the Christian Assyrian Chaldean Arameans from Iraq.

The appeal of the human rights organisation, which is supported by the German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat,* will be handed over personally together with people affected to the politicians (dt. den Politiker). In view of the threatening situation for the Roma in Kosovo Tugendhat and the GfbV General Secretary,Tilman Zülch, point to the responsibility of Germany towards this ethnic group. The Roma were also victims of the holocaust in the Third Reich.

For the Assyrian Chaldean Aramean Christians from Iraq, who have been systematically terrorised by radical Islamists, the human rights workers are calling for concrete offers of help.

The ministers of the interior should grant permanent residence permits to the 50,000 Roma from Kosovo living in Germany. The appeal says that they would then be able to go to work and take up training. All barriers for the members of this ethnic group should be removed and an end put to the constantly repeated terms of "exceptional leave to remain”, as prescribed in the Ausländergesetz (the law concerning foreigners). Above all, the many thousand German-speaking Roma children, who see Germany as their homeland, must at last be placed on a level with their German peers. A generous special arrangement must be found for the Roma from Kosovo who have had temporary residence permits for many years.

Germany cannot just continue to stand by and watch while the Christians are being persecuted in Iraq, wrote the GfbV. The Assyrian Chaldean Arameans are being driven out of the country with calculated acts of terror, murder, attacks, abductions and rape. Just a few days ago two Christian sisters were victims of a cowardly murder in Mosul. It is above all those Christian refugees from Iraq who must be given asylum here whose present situation in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon is particularly desperate. The ministers of the interior must also make sure that Germany provides humanitarian aid for the destitute refugees in neighbouring countries. Since these countries have authoritarian governments the funds should be paid through the Christian churches there. Germany must also give political, economic and diplomatic support to the only place of refuge for the persecuted Christians in their own country, the peaceful autonomous federal province of Iraqi Kurdistan with the near-by Niniveh Plain.

*Ernst Tugendhat, born in Brünn, comes from a German Jewish family. Most of his relatives were able to escape the holocaust. Tugendhat was a member of the executive committee of the GfbV and remains today one of the patrons. He has always supported the human rights work of the GfbV for the suppressed and still widely discriminated minority of the Roma. He emphasised in 1979: "In the Third Reich we Jews were seen as sub-humans. The gypsies are today not openly called gypsies, but they are still seen and treated as such.”