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| Webjournal zum Flüchtlingskongress vom 21. April bis 1. Mai in Jena | zurück | back |
The international delegation from the Refugee Congress travelled in two cars, driving from Jena to Ansbach, in the southern state of Bayern in Bavaria. The racially mixed group of nine people included Africans, Asians and Europeans. We were stopped twice by police control just in the course of this three and a half hour journey. Once on the motorway, and once at Ansbach train station.
The main Ansbach camp (Heim) is a former US military base, on Schlesierstrasse situated about 1.5km from Ansbach town centre. There is a second smaller dwelling in a single building on Naglerstrasse which is much closer to the town centre. There are refugees from Chechnya, Kosova, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, Roma from former Yugoslavia, Kurds from Turkey and Armenia, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Many of them at this camp are near the end of the line in their asylum process. For them, it is the last stop before the deportation prison.
We could not clearly ascertain the number of refugees in the camp. A social worker told us that the camp was full in 1991-92, since then the number of refugees has been decreasing. The full capacity of the block is about 120 people. But the actual number of refugees staying in the building at any one point is apparently less than this. The camp is certainly a highly undesirable place to be.
We spent about four hours talking to refugees and the press. This was not enough time to get to the bottom of all the issues, nor to sort out some apparent inconsistencies of detail. But it was enough time to get a very clear picture of the main issues, because the human issues stand out very clearly.
As we were about to leave four refugee women came out of the camp to catch the bus so that they could go to the doctors. They were very nervous and asked us to accompany them. If the police stopped them they could be fined, or even imprisoned. At Ansbach going to the doctor means risking imprisonment for a refugee.
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After the visit the delegation group fell into conversation with a group of German pensioners in a nearby park. We showed them pictures of the conditions in the refugee camp. The elderly people could not believe the photographic evidence. At first they said that this was not in Germany. Then one elderly man said that the refugees were fouling the camp and causing the bad conditions. This denial by German citizens of what is happening under their very noses is almost as sad as the refugees\\\\' conditions. We urge all decent minded German people to apply themelves in full conscience to find out the truth of what their state is doing. We firmly believe that allowing the inhuman treatment of refugees is also an affront to the dignity of all.
One Kurdish refugee has been in Germany for 9 months "It has been a catastrophe" he told us. "I get 80DM a month, but I smoke two packets of cigarettes a day, each costing 5DM. What am I to do? Every day if I leave through the camp gate the police ask for my identity card. My asylum application is just started, and they should renew my temporary residence every six months. But already I am going mad here. I have a lot of Kurdish friends in many German cities, but I have no friends here in Bayern. I want to be free to visit my friends and family. I don\\\\'t want their food packages and their 80DM. My friends can look after me. What I want is the freedom of movement to join them."
We asked this man had he been able to make any friends in the town of Ansbach. He said "To tell you the truth there are some nice people here, but very often they are racist". This refugee is at an early stage of his asylum application process, which is not the normal case at Ansbach where most of the refugees are in the later stages of processing and are in an even worse situation as we discovered.
It is also important to note that all the refugees difficulties are made worse by the fact that they have to pay for all legal representation, but because they cannot afford it, many refugees have not continued contact with their lawyers.
A number of the refugees at Ansbach are from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Their asylum applications have been refused, and the German authorities are now trying to arrange for them to get passport documentation from their countries of origin. Up till now these countries have refused to issue the papers.
In the meantime these refugees are treated with absolutely no right to freedom of movement. As soon as they step outside the building in which they stay they are liable to being stopped by the police. In other districts the authorities issue the refugees in this situation with a temporary Duldung card, which at least allows them to move inside the Landkreis administrative district. But the Ansbach officials have not even issued the refugees with the Duldung.
The situation of the Ansbach refugees is worsened by the fact that part of the former US base is now used as a police station, which can be seen across a field and the police are always in close proximity. The police often wait outside the camp gate, or at the nearby bus stop and pick up the refugees.
The first two times the restriction is broken there is a 30 DM fine. After the first three \\\\'offences\\\\' there is an escalation and breaking the restriction is counted as a criminal offence. Punitive sanctions range from rapidly increasing fines, imprisonment or, as soon as circumstances allow, deportation. 10 refugees have been unable to pay their fine for breaking the restriction. They are not getting their 80DM a month until their fines are paid. In the words of one the refugees "You\\\\'re allowed three breaths of fresh air or three smokes a month".
We now come to the point in our visit where it is necessary to fill in some background to fully realise the totality of the repression faced by the refugees.
Everybody in Germany, whether a national or a foreigner, has a legal personal identity document. This may be a passport or a replacement document. Refugees who have been denied asylum and so have no right to stay acknowledged by the German legal system, and yet who also have not been issued with personal identity documents by their states of origin, are thus caught in a state of suspended animation. They have no legal right to stay in Germany and they have been given notice of their deportation, but they cannot actually be deported. (From this point of view it can be seen that the untested issuing of peronal identity papers by the country of origin is tantamount to collaboration in the deportation).
Refugees with this status have no legal right to stay in Germany but they are in fact staying, at least for the time being. In such cases the authorities will normally issue the refugee with Duldung card, which gives the refugee no rights, rather it is a temporary identity document in lieu of a passport. The Ansbach authorities have not even provided the refugees at this point in the process with a Duldung, they have no identity document whatsoever. The White Paper that the authorities issue to the refugee is simply a deportation order, stating that they must leave the country immediately.
These refugees, whose asylum has been rejected but who are not yet deported, are put in the Ansbach camp by the German state but without any legal right to be there that is recognised by the very same German state. They are present physically but not legally. It is not only their right to move freely, but their very existence that is negated.
One African refugee has a wad of penalty statements. The outstanding fines totalling over 2,000 DM. And not all of these fines result from being stopped outside the camp gate. The police come into the building. This happens several times a month, the police come with dogs in the middle of the night or early morning. They search through all the rooms, on the pretext of looking for drugs, and body search all the refugees. They take fingerprints. This refugee told us he had been handcuffed during one night raid. The police did not find whatever they were looking for. The police demanded his papers, but the only paper he had from the authorities was the White Paper deportation notice, and so again the police penalised him for his illegal stay in Germany. He was illegally in the room that had been assigned to him. This man had been forced into an untenable, impossible situation. And yet he had to live through it. Whenever the police chose they can come and penalise him for being illegally present, but he cannot leave.
These refugees are thus in extreme anxiety about the vulnerability of their position.
The danger of police intervention affects all the refugees at the camp, whether they have reached the final stages of their process or not. And so the Ansbach camp has become the complete opposite of a place of refuge. It is in Germany but not in Germany. Ansbach is not a safe haven but a danger zone. The refugee is penned in and can be punished at any time because s/he is there.
The general state of decoration and repair is very bad, the paintwork is peeling away and the interior of the building is dirty. The bedrooms accommodate anything between four to even eight or nine people. In one room there are five people, but two of them are in prison. In another room, out of eight people three are in prison. The housemaster also lives in the camp. When he does not see anybody for more than two weeks, he throws all the belongings of the person into the garbage bin and declares that they are missing. This happens quite regularly, even with persons who he knows are living in the house. Sometimes, the belongings are thrown out of the window.
The rooms are single sex. If there are two family members in a room, for example a mother and daughter, then the room will be shared with somebody from another family. There is one pay phone for the all the refugees in the entire camp. Twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, the refugees receive a food package. We were told different things about the contents. The Kurdish refugee said that his pack consists of one orange, orange juice, apple juice, bread (which is often stale) and a little bit of cheese. He gets meat or poultry for 10 meals each month. Another refugee, a Roma mother, told us that her family gets 2kg of rice per person, margarine, some fruit and vegetables which are often rotten.
There are televisons in most rooms. The refugees collect them from garbage and get them to work. There is one washing machine for 20 to 25 people, but the conditions in the wash room are filthy. There is one shower room for men and women. It is a large communal shower with just one spout working. If women want a shower then one has to stand gaurd while the others take their shower. There are two kitchen rooms for the floor. The conditions in one of the kitchens are filthy.
The very worst conditions are the toilets. There are two toilet facilities on the floor, but the door on one is padlocked up. The other toilet facility consists of a broken filthy open toilet and a broken water closet. The water closet was full of excrement and the room stank. The smell of excrement spread along the corridor to most of the floor.
The restrictions on movement and being have a specific affect on the health and well being of the children.
For example, one 14 year old boy in an Azerbaijani family said that he is being stopped by the police every time he goes to and from school.
There is an Ethiopian couple with a 7 month old baby boy. The father has an excellent work reference from his former employer of nearly 5 years. And then after his asylum application was rejected he and his pregnant wife were ordered into Ansbach in August 1999. Neither parent has a Duldung and are thus subject to the restrictive house detention, or, in their case literally room detention. Their baby has known no other home than the single room to which the family is now confined. The mother was stopped twice by the police control when she was still pregnant. The baby has a medical appointment once a month, and the parents take a risk to take the baby to this appointment. The doctor has advised them that the baby needs fresh air three times a day. But the mother is too scared of the police to do this, and only takes the baby out after 6pm if the street is clear, and then only in the immediate vicinity of the building. The family lives behind a locked door and both parents are under extreme psychological pressure. The father seldom leaves their single room. This is because the police patrol the corridors of the building in Naglerstrasse two or three times a week, so the father believes that he could be subject to police control even while going to the toilet.
There is a Roma family from former Yugoslavia which has been living in German refugee camps for 11 years. They have been at Ansbach for 6 years. There are two parents, a three year old boy and a one year old baby. The three year old is deaf. But he is not allowed to attend a special school, that the parents know about, in the nearby city of Nürnberg. The child\\\\'s mother told us that because the father is working and they have a small income, and the parents would be willing to pay for treatment of their child, but still this is refused. She told us her 3 year old has bronchitis, and that all children are frequently sick, because of the confined and unsanitary conditions.
There is another Roma family from Kosovo. The father told us that "It\\\\'s difficult for children because its very loud and dirty." He has children aged 17, 15, 12, 8 and 6 years old. His wife and two of the children contracted tuberculosis during their former stay at a camp in Solingen. Two other children contracted the same disease during their stay at Ansbach. The father has been in Germany for 9 years but is still not allowed to work. He is frustrated by this. He complained about the food packages saying "We are not allowed to eat what we want to eat".
The recent history at Ansbach illustrates the additional difficulties that refugees have to deal with when they try to alert public opinion to their conditions. We were told of two cases where the authorities have moved to prevent the growth of public awareness to the refugees plight. Isolation of the refugee from human contact with the German society is a key component of the state\\\\'s strategy.
In the first case, four refugees held a press conference, which was reported in the local newspaper the Ansbach Stadt und Land of 29 June 1999. Shortly afterwards one of them was sent for three months in prison. He believes that this action had no explanation except as a punishment for having his photograph in the press and complaining publicly about the conditions.
Even when they have been able to make strong links with German friends and communities, the regime under which the refugees live under tends to push them away from these links and friendships. This second case was explained to us by a Congolese refugee. "Everything is very difficult here. For example, we have an evangelical Choral group. We sing for God. This is the eighth year of our group\\\\'s existence. The authorities are threatening us all with deportation to the Congo, where conditions are very difficult and there is still a war going on. The rebels are preparing to attack the capital. So our situation is very insecure. We made some demands as a musical group. We are all here in Ansbach and we are invited to German churches . We wrote to the responsible minister in Bayern but still we have had no result."
Why is this refugee struggling only for the survival of the music group? He submitted all the documentation needed to prove his political situation. On the basis of this evidence, the judge announced that he would get protection as per § 51 of the Foreigners Law. However, the written judgement overruled the verbal commitment and rejected the asylum case. The judge has sent experts in Congo three times to verify his story. The German authorities know the truth but will not accept any evidence that corroborate refugee\\\\'s testimonials.This man\\\\'s wife\\\\'s application procedure is not ended. But the judge decided not to handle it, as she cannot prove that she entered the country legally. So the entire family\\\\'s status depends on the child.
Some years ago, the refugees from the Congo organised a legal demonstration in Ansbach to protest the arrest of political leaders in their country. More than 500 Africans took part in the demonstration. But local inhabitants complained to the police that refugees had no right to demonstrate here. The participants were severely penalised. Since then such political demonstrations have been de facto banned. He himself has not participated in such demonstrations again, but turned his entire attention to music.
In sum, the German state seeks to enforce a climate where nobody knows about the refugees and their problems, apart from the refugees themselves. This makes it easier for the state to continue with its policy of denying refuge to the asylum seeker. The state\\\\'s dual strategy of social exclusion and deportation is expressed in its inhuman and degrading conclusion at Ansbach camp.
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