Protect our refugee children!

To the:

President of the Republic

Prime Minister,

Federal Minister of the Interior,

Ministers and Senators of the Interior,

Members of Parliament of the Federation and Provinces

We are writing to you today because we are very concerned about the fate of 30,000 of our refugee children who have lived here for six, eight, fifteen or twenty sears and who have still been refused permits of permanent residence and naturalisation.

You all bewail our childless Germany , yet you mercilessly drive ever more of these refugee children with their parents from our country.

These refugee children, who have been born or have grown up here, speak German as their native language, often with a regional accent. Our German society has long since turned them into ethnic and cultural Germans. These children have taken refuge here, mostly from situations of war, genocide or persecution.

They are Roma, Ashkali and Egipcani from Kosovo, Kurds, Bahá’i, Yezidi, Christian Assyrian Chaldaic Arameans and Armenians, Alevites or Mandaeans from the Near East, Chechnya from the Russian Federation or Afghans, who escaped from the Taliban or before from the Soviet army.

Teachers, social workers, ministers of religion, refugee councils, human rights workers and many other citizens have fought and worked for their integration and have achieved a very great deal here both in word and deed. This capital is being harshly wasted by many German ministers, senators and members of Parliament.

While there is always talk of crimes committed in the past in our country, you often forget or push aside the fact that most of us were either ourselves refugees or descended from refugees, persons displaced or migrants.

We are ashamed that fathers are being separated from mothers, parents from children or siblings from each other, and that even the seriously ill, the pregnant, the elderly and traumatised war victims are deported into nothing.

While the Federation and the provinces are taking in 2,500 Iraqi refugees into Germany who had before sought refuge in Syria , the ministers and senators of the interior are driving out Christian, Yezidi and Kurdish refugee families from Syria back to their land of origin which is a totalitarian state. After the murder of 500,000 Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich – our human rights organisation moved the German President Karl Carstens and the Prime Minister Helmut Schmidt to an apology and the provincial governments to arrangements for compensation – the Federation and the provinces are refusing to finally give a home to just 10,000 Roma children from Kosovo. Both Serbs and Albanians have driven out these Roma families. German ministers of the interior have long enough made it difficult for the refugees to find work, prevented young people from taking up training and restricted freedom of movement to the immediate district.

We appeal to you, please make sure that these refugee children and their families are at last given permission to live in their homeland – Germany – and like the Germans from Russia and the Jewish settlers are quickly given their citizenship. You have the influence - please use it!

Yours Truly,

Tilman Zülch

President of the Society for Threatened Peoples International

Prof. Christian Schwarz-Schilling

Federal Minister (retired) and High Representative of the International Community for Bosnia and Herzegovina

Prof. Ernst Tugendhat, German philosopher

Member of the Advisory Committee of the Society for Threatened Peoples

Mor Julius Dr. Hanna Aydin

Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Germany

Telim Tolan

Central Committee of the Yezidi in Germany