CDU Refugee Policy is merciless

"Merciless CDU refugee policies make a mockery of Christian principles of

brotherly love" - No deportation of persons with long-term permits of residence and their children who have grown up in Germany !

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has termed the statement of the CDU politicians that they will vote against a liberalisation of the laws regarding foreigners at the Conference of Ministers of the Interior which begins in Bremerhaven today, Thursday, as a "mockery of the principles of brotherly love". "As an international human rights organisation centred in Lower Saxony we are ashamed above all of the merciless attitude of the Lower Saxon Minister of the Interior, Uwe Schünemann (CDU), who does not want to spend "mo re than five minutes" on the subject of refugees and is so cold-heartedly deciding on the fate of 110,000 people", criticised the head of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. For the more than 30,000 children and young people among these refugees, whose home is Germany because they were born here, have gone to school and university here and whose native language is German, deportation to the country of origin of their parents is deportation into "nowhere".

The human rights activist - accompanied by two refugee families from Syria and Kosovo - handed the ministers and senators on Thursday afternoon an appeal to grant at long last permanent residence permits to the refugees with long-term residence status and their children, who have "become German".

Here is the text of the appeal of the GfbV:

Daily deportations of refugee children to "nowhere" amidst complaints about our childless country!

Appeal to

The Chancellor,

Minister Schäuble,

Minister Steinmeyer,

The Ministers and Senators of the Interior

Germany could be a model for many countries in many ways concerning the co-existence of people of different backgrounds. Our country has in the last few decades taken in many persecuted people.

This must not however be the occasion for self-satisfaction. We have the impression that the majority of our politicians and parliamentarians, particularly the majority of the German ministers of the interior, are closing their eyes to the problems of a group of about 100,000 people who have - mostly as refugees - sought a new home in our country and who have lived amongst us for eight, ten, fifteen or more years and who still have not been given any right to feel at home here. They are Roma and Ashkali from Kosovo, Kurds, Bahai, Yezidi, Christian Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans and Armenians, Alevi or Mandeans from the Near East, Chechnyans from the Russian Federation or Afghanistan escaping the Taliban or the Soviet army beforehand.

Week by week we at the Society for Threatened Peoples are confronted with the fate of these people. For years they have been given temporary permits of residence, often for merely one or three months. For a long time they have been denied the right to work. People should be aware that their freedom of movement is restricted to their town or district of residence.

Among these refugees are tens of th ousands of children who have been born or grown up here. Thy speak German in fact as their native language, often with a regional accent. Our German society has turned them into ethnic and cultural Germans. Most of these children and young people have no real link with the land of their parents. But Germany refuses them citizenship.

Teachers, social workers, ministers of religion, Christian parishes, councils for refugees, human rights experts and many other citizens have done a great deal, both in word and deed, for their integration. Yet most of them are soon to be deported. In economic terms these deportations mean also the squandering of the capital which has been invested.

Many of these deportations, especially for the children and young people, will be a deportation into nothing. These factual Germans of culture and language have in the main no chance in the former homeland of their parents. Most of them come from situations ruled by war, genocide or persecution.

If one uses the term deportation for many of these cases there is a stir among the ministers of the interior and the authorities concerned with foreigners. But this is only right and proper since the genocide and other crimes of the Nazis were preceded by deportations of this kind for people who had lived many years in the Germany of the Weimar Republic .

Germany is after all a country of refugees and deported people. After the Second World War 14 million of them were taken into Western Germany, among them about four million refugees from the Soviet Occupied Zone, which became the German Democratic Republic, and then millions of German settlers from Eastern Europe , among them the "Russian Germans", many of whom to the present day complain about discrimination.

But in any case the refusal today to take in these 100,000 refugees is a break with tradition and a cold-hearted game with the fate of human beings.

As politicians you complain of there being too few children in Germany.Why then do you deport week by week and month by month well integrated children? Why then do you make children and young people who have "become German" unhappy and drive them from their homeland?

In many cases you separate fathers from mothers, parents from children, children from their brothers and sisters. You deport children, the sick and the elderly. You turn the deportations into "voluntary return". You discover for illnesses possibilities of treatment which often do not exist in the countries to which they are being deported. The deportations become in these cases crimes against these families.

This is why we are asking you - give at long last these 100,000 people, these families and their children, who have been living in Germany for many years, who need only their de facto German citizenship, their right to permanent residence and ensure that this process of naturalization is speedily dealt with. These children must no longer suffer injustice! But give these rights to all persons concerned. Do not exclude people who have to live as recipients of social welfare payments - after you have in most of the federal provinces for years denied them work permits and denied their children further education at the end of their school careers.

The demands of the Society for Threatened Peoples: