Germany must not cooperate with the dictatorship!

Tilman Zülch, General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), has written today to the German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, with the urgent request that Kurdish refugees should not be deported to Syria. "It is irresponsible to send these persecuted, humiliated and discriminated people back to dictatorship and torture”, criticised Zülch. "Many refugees have lived in our country for ten years. Their children have grown up in Germany, they go here to kindergarten or school and are well integrated. A country which complains of sinking birth-rates cannot afford the luxury of continually chasing from the country refugee children who have been born and gone to school here. Schäuble should distance himself from the agreement on the taking back of refugees between Germany and Syria.”

In Arab-speaking Syria these children, who only speak German and some Kurdish, have no chance of continuing the training they have begun in the German education system. In ruins is the work of integrating them, which has lasted many years, on the part of teachers in school and kindergarten, of social workers, parishes, ministers of religion and professors.

"The up-rooting of children, pupils and students, who have done no wrong and who have long felt themselves part of German society, and deporting them is cruel and inhuman”, said Zülch.

Following the signing of the agreement on the return of refugees between Germany and Syria on 14th July 2008 the first Kurdish Syrians living in Germany have been issued with notice requiring them to leave. Some 7,000 refugees, most of them Kurds (Moslems and Yezidi) and Christian Assyrian Aramaeans, are threatened with deportation to Syria.

This is why Kurds are constantly calling out to demonstrations, vigils and even hunger-strikes. Some Yezidi associations are planning a demonstration in Hanover on 20th February. In Berlin a hunger-strike is planned to begin on 23.2.2009.

"The cooperation of Germany with Syria, a state which practises torture, is scandalous”, said Zülch. In the past two years the human rights situation in Syria has steadily deteriorated. The regime in Damascus has reacted with new waves of arrests following the call of the opposition for the right to freedom of speech. The Kurdish ethnic group has also supported this demand with peaceful protests. In Syria 2,500 to 3,000 political prisoners are being held in prison.