The inhuman deportation of our refugee children must be stopped at once!

In the light of the dramatic decline in numbers published yesterday by the Federal Statistics Office and of the disastrous German birth-rate, which is long since a well-known fact, the Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) is appealing to the ministers of the interior, both centrally and in the 16 provinces, to stop the preparations for the deportation of at least 30,000 of our refugee children and their parents. This appeal has been directed by the Chairperson of the STP, Tilman Zülch, to the ministers of the interior, the senators and the meeting of their permanent state secretaries in Bremen for the Conference of Ministers of the Interior, which begins at the beginning of December.

Zülch writes to the ministers: "How on earth can you deport refugee children and their families to regions where expulsion, genocide or persecution have been or are still being practised? Just remember that these children have been born or grown up here and that these families have lived here for six, eight, ten or even 20 years! These children speak German, mostly with a regional accent, go to German schools and have German friends. They have come as refugees to a country in which half the people today were themselves refugees, expelled or repatriated or descended from these. Our new refugee children belong for the most part to minorities. Their parents are Christian Assyrians, Chaldaeans and Armenians, Alevites or Mandaeans, Kurds or Yezidi from the Near East, Chechnyans from the Russian Federation, Roma and Ashkali from Kosovo or Afghans who have escaped from the Taliban.”

Teachers, social workers, ministers of religion, Christian communities, refugee councils, human rights activists and many thousand other citizens

have with their ideas and actions done a great deal for the integration of these refugee children, continued Zülch. From the economic point of view also these deportations mean a great loss for Germany and thus the squandering of this "human capital”, for which a high price has been paid.

Tilman Zülch will be glad to answer questions at politik@gfbv.de