No deportation into the icy Kosovo winter!

"No deportation into the icy Kosovo winter! People sent back will be met with life-threatening cold, illnesses and misery!” With this dramatic appeal the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) wrote today to the Minister of the Interior, Uwe Schünemann, and Prime Minister, Christian Wulff. Forcing refugees and their families with small children, pregnant women or elderly people to return now in these extreme conditions is against all precepts of Christian brotherly love and mercy.

"Our human rights organisation, which has an office there, will make you responsible, Mr Schünemann, and therefore the provincial government also for any deaths among those deported. When one speaks of deportation one must realise just what this means under these conditions. Under the present conditions you are recklessly accepting the possibility that deportation could cause the deaths of Roma refugees”, wrote the Chairperson of the STP, Tilman Zülch. "I should like here to draw attention to the fact that 500,000 Sinti and Roma were among the victims of the Nazi regime and that it was the well-known CDU politicians Wilfried Hasselmann and Ernst Albrecht who worked for the relief of this ethnic group together with the Society for Threatened Peoples.”

The human rights organisation, which is centred in Göttingen, fears that Lower Saxon authorities will in the next few days be deporting Kosovo refugees with temporary residence permits. "It is unbelievable that the permits of refugees, some of whom have been with us since 1992, have been renewed in the past few days by only one week”, wrote Zülch. This applies mainly to members of the Roma minority and their children who have grown up here.

The STP representative in Kosovo, Dzafer Buzoli, reports that families returning have to be accommodated in badly isolated emergency buildings. It is only a question of time before children or elderly people become ill or die as a result of the cold. In the extreme temperatures of minus ten degrees many people are at present suffering from virus infections.

Only in a few cases can families be supplied with firewood by the International Red Cross. Most of the Roma there are already undernourished. They have no money with which to pay for medicine for themselves and their children against fever, pain or diarrhoea. There is no free medical care.

For further information please approach the STP Chairperson, Tilman Zülch, at politik@gfbv.de
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