Refugees: Sharp criticism of planned deportations

"In the third Reich we Jews were considered sub-humans, and indeed the Sinti and Roma are today not called sub-humans, but they are seen and treated that way”.

(Prof. Ernst Tugendhat, German Jewish philosopher)

Statement of the General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV), Tilman Zülch, on the planned deportation of 10,000 Roma to Kosovo.

The Ministers of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, particularly the radical hardliners in matters of refugee politics Uwe Schünemann (Lower Saxony) and Wolfgang Schäuble (for the Federation), are planning to deport this autumn over 10,000 Roma – children, women and men – to Kosovo. There they are not welcome. Following the liberation of the Albanians by the NATO in June 1999 masses of Albanian extremists throughout the country turned against this helpless minority. 70 out of 75 of their town quarters and villages were set alight or otherwise destroyed. People were mishandled, tortured, raped, murdered and the great majority had to flee or were driven out.

The situation of the persecuted minority in Kosovo has not greatly changed. It is only the construction of one single example of the destroyed town quarters and villages, the Roma Mahala in South Mitrovica, which has been started in grand style. The unemployment of the Roma is with almost 100% greater than that of the Albanians (approaching 70%). Medical care for this discriminated minority is practically non-existent. School attendance is only conceivable in exceptional cases since children and parents cannot bear the discrimination of the majority.

Although most of the Roma families have been in Germany for ten years and the children and young people have been born or grown up here, the Ministers of the Interior are forcing the authorities responsible for foreigners to take merciless action. Fathers are being separated from their families, women with small children, people who are old or severely ill are to be deported, parents must leave teenagers by themselves, children are to be torn out of their surroundings, out of schools and sports clubs. In many places teachers, social workers, ministers of religion, human rights organisations and refugee councils, and also German friends at school or college are speaking out against this barbarity.

The Society for Threatened Peoples sees these deportations as nothing but the dumping of these people into nothing more than nothingness. It is incomprehensible that it is possible to refer continually to the crimes of the Third Reich, but to forget and push aside the brown-skinned victims of the Holocaust, of which 500,000 lost their lives in the gas-chambers. Simone Veil, former President of the European Parliament, who as a child lost her mother in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, said on 27.10.1979 at a public meeting of our human rights organisation which attracted considerable international attention: "Some of them had lost their parents, their children, their siblings and their friends and wondered why they themselves were not yet dead. They all suffered the same fate, most of them being Jews or gypsies. Knowing that we have mourned together for our dead, who were burnt in the crematoria, that this memorial encloses the last remains, the ashes of all our parents, then my presence here is a sign of my solidarity with the gypsies. We were cut off from each other in the camps. We were sacrificed one after the other, but with the same hatred and the same efficiency.”

Since 1999 the STP has tried, mostly in vain, to draw the attention of media and politics and the general public to the fact that some 600 Roma refugees are forced to live in refugee camps in Mitrovica which are contaminated with lead. 83 of these refugees have died – often as the result of the lead poisoning. A meeting with Peter Altmaier, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, has not produced any result either. So we welcome the appeal of the World Health Organisation and of the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg, and the report in the main news programme on German TV last night on behalf of these refugees.

The Society for Threatened Peoples calls for the generous acceptance of these 10,000 innocent victims of war and racism in Kosovo in just the same way as the 120,000 Jewish families of the Holocaust survivors and the over two million Germans from Russia who lost 500,000 members of their families during the rule of Stalin.

Tilman Zülch, General Secretary and expert on Sinti and Roma, who has produced many publications on the Holocaust, and the persecution and discrimination of this ethnic group, can be reached at politik@gfbv.de