Your inhuman deportation policy even of children makes you the most inhuman minister of the interior in Germany!

The award of the Lower Saxon Prize for Integration by the Minister of the Interior, Uwe Schünemann, has caused the Society for Threatened Peoples STP to hold a vigil in front of the Old Town Hall in Hanover against the merciless deportation policy of the CDU politician. In an open letter to the Minister of the Interior the STP will raise serious charges on the spot against Schünemann:

Dear Mr Schünemann,

Today you are bestowing the Lower Saxon Prize for Integration to worthy citizens with a background of migration. Our human rights organisation expressly welcomes this step.

However we would have preferred to have seen this prize handed over by a more suitable representative of the government of our province.

We have in Germany about 100,000 people, among them at least 30,000 children and young people, who have been living without any rights in our country for eight, ten or even twenty years. They regard Germany as their homeland. They came to us as refugees. They come from regions where expulsion, persecution or genocide are practised.

But as "tolerated persons” (i.e. persons with temporary residence permits)they are for many years not allowed to take up any work, their children cannot after completing school take up training for any job and for years or even decades are not allowed to travel outside their district. In the world of sport they and their children are often not even allowed to take part in events outside their community, let alone take part in the Lower Saxon or German championships.

Your, Mr Schünemann, are the most inhuman politician among Germany’s ministers of the interior. For, instead of offering integration to these people, who belong to many religious and ethnic minorities, you deport mercilessly month by month these people, who belong to us, to regions which their children have never seen, in which they are threatened by new persecution or discrimination.

You, Mr Schünemann, step back from no inhumanity. You have families hounded out of our country by night – often indeed without any warning, sometimes in handcuffs and with a strong police escort. You are not afraid of tearing families apart, separating parents from their children and men from their wives. You have a member of the Yezidi minority, who is soon to have a baby, separated from her partner. You drive out people who are seriously ill or traumatised in the full knowledge that they will certainly receive no adequate medical treatment in Syria or Kosovo.

Many witnesses in these countries have reported on the plight of these children, who are really Germans, and who are forced to live without any help, abandoned somewhere which was once home for their parents, but them is the wilderness.

Your deportations, Minister, of refugees who have been tolerated for many years mean in fact deporting them into nothingness. It was things like this which started the expulsion of the Jewish population from Germany. We are here not speaking of the horrors of the Holocaust, which then followed. Millions of our fellow-citizens suffered the fate of flight and expulsion after 1945. At least three million later fled from the GDR.

As a result of the crimes of the Third Reich we have taken in 200,000 people from the states of the Russian Federation, in the main members of the Jewish minorities and have integrated them without any problem. The area of Greater Hanover has also provided a new homeland for tens of thousands of Russian Germans whose parents and grandparents were victims of Stalin’s persecution. After all these historic movements of refugees and deportations it should be a matter of course for us in Lower Saxony to accept at last the few thousand refugees with temporary residence permits and to give them a proper permit of residence with the aim of rapidly giving them full citizenship.

Most of these people should have already earned a Lower Saxon prize for integration, particularly in the light of the fact that they have achieved integration under unspeakably hostile conditions.

It should have startled you that even in your hometown of Holzminden many of the people are indignant that you did not speak up for the Bosnian family Kurtanovic, who had been living in Germany for twelve years and who themselves provided good examples of integration when they were threatened with deportation.

We expect from the Lower Saxon government that they will at last stretch out a hand to those families and their children in a country which is often bewailed as childless.

Yours Truly,

Tilman Zülch Holder of the Lower Saxon Prize for Publishing, the Federal Cross of Merit and the Göttingen Peace Prize, refugee child of 1945,

Mr. Zülch can be reached via politik@gfbv.de