Permanent residence for refugees who have lived for many years with temporary permits!

From:

Martin Walser and Prof. Ernst Tugendhat for the Advisory Council of the Society for Threatened Peoples,

Tilman Zülch, General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples

Dear ministers and senators,

"Blind on no eye" is the motto of the international human rights organisation the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV). We dedicate our work to threatened religious and ethnic minorities, and so also to the people who have been living in Germany for many years under the constant threat of deportation. We beg of you not to close your eyes to their fate!

Our patron, the internationally renowned Jewish philosopher, Ernst Tugendhat, born in Brünn, Moravia, thrown out of the country by a German government, added the following to the letter:

"It is sad enough that the right to asylum in Europe has today been reduced to practically nothing. But deporting people who have been living among us for many years is a grave injustice and dreadfully cruel. If we no longer have respect for other people we lose our own self-respect."

Germany is in many respects a model for other countries, also as regards the living together of people of different origins. And our country has for a long time taken in people suffering from persecution. All the more reason for not closing our eyes to the fate of a group of 200,000 people who have been living amongst us for many years, where they have found a new homeland and who have nevertheless been denied any right to a homeland. They are on the waiting-list for deportation week by week, month by month. In most cases they have been refused work-permits and on leaving school they cannot begin any training.

Tens of thousands of their children speak German as their mother-tongue with a Lower Saxon or Bavarian accent, they have become de facto ethnically and culturally Germans. Most of these children have no links of any kind with the homelands of their parents, who are themselves firmly anchored here.

Teachers, social workers, ministers of religion, Christian parishes, refugee committees, human rights workers and also sports clubs and neighbours have achieved an enormous amount to give them in another way the integration denied them by the authorities.

One example is the fate of the Christian-Assyrian family from Tur Abdin. As Christians their position in their home in the south-east of Turkey was hopeless. They fled to Germany. This year they were deported. All three sons were successful at our schools and universities. The father had a job.. The 15-year old daughter was led out of her class at school in Kassel in handcuffs. Deportation was carried out by force.

We say expressly that nearly all these deportations become deportations into nothing. That is what these "germanified" people find in the former homelands of their parents. They come from countries which after civil wars, genocide, flight or deportation for many members of minorities cannot any longer be their homelands.

If one then speaks of forcible deportation for many of these deportations the ministers of the interior feel themselves provoked because we are reminded of the horrors of recent German history. Quite right too, because such "deportations" of Jewish people started already in 1933 before the holocaust.

These fatal German policies of deportation show that nothing has been learned from the horrors of the past, not even from the deportations suffered by 14 million Germans from the former eastern Germany, a subject which has often been held taboo. One should however bear in mind that nearly every second German today has a parent or grandparent who was one of these people deported, from whom the homeland was taken away.

All politicians are now complaining that too few children are being born in Germany. Why then do they deport week by week, month by month well integrated children? Why are they making children and young people, who have become German, unhappy and driving them from their German homeland?

We beg of you to give these 200,000 people, who have been living for many years in Germany and who need only German naturalization, at long last the right of permanent residence and make it possible for them to receive German citizenship. Germany needs these families and must not continue doing an injustice to its children.

However a decision to exclude those refugees who have no jobs from a permanent right of residence does not change the injustice, but only increases the suffering of this group of people.

Yours Truly,

Tilman Zülch, General Secretary

Martin Walser, Patron