Terminal
test of Merkel’s migration mettle
A
fight over disused Tempelhof airport brings to surface political
divisions in Germany.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
2/29/16, 5:32 AM CET
BERLIN — Just five
kilometers from Angela Merkel’s office, at Berlin’s mothballed
Nazi-era airport, the German chancellor’s refugee crisis slogan —
“We can do it” — is sorely tested.
Inside the now
defunct hangars of Tempelhof airport in the southern part of the
capital, city authorities keep adding housing units to the sprawling
facility. It was meant to be a transit camp, an emergency shelter for
refugees waiting to get asylum papers and then moving on to more
permanent accommodation within days, weeks at the most.
Since Tempelhof
opened for refugees in late October, 3,500 refugees have come
through. Like the rest of the country, the refugee-friendly capital
has filled up quickly with many of the million newcomers who entered
Germany last year. Now thousands could be stuck in transit at
Tempelhof for months, if not years, turning the airport complex into
a “city within the city,” or “refugee ghetto,” depending whom
one asks on the political spectrum.
Officials with
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) acknowledge that despite
their leader’s other famous proclamation in the refugee crisis —
“I have a plan” — to integrate refugees into society as fast as
possible, city and state authorities are scrambling to find temporary
fixes. It leaves them, they say, little time to find permanent
shelters. Robust as it seemed five months ago, when Merkel rallied
Germans behind her cause (what some understood as an attempt to
redeem the country from its World War II past by putting out a
welcome mat), Germany’s infrastructure is creaking under the strain
of far higher than expected number of new arrivals.
Michael Elias
manages the company running the refugee center in Tempelhof, inside a
makeshift office on the first floor of the former airport hangar. |
Janosch Delcker
Michael Elias
manages the company running the refugee center in Tempelhof, inside a
makeshift office on the first floor of the former airport hangar |
Janosch Delcker
“The core of the
problem is that we don’t have other possibilities to accommodate
them,” said Dirk Gerstle, a CDU official and deputy state minister
of social affairs.
“It wouldn’t
help anyone to transfer people from Tempelhof to a gym,” Gerstle
said. “They need to be transferred into more permanent community
housing, and we have to build that first.”
‘State failure’
Merkel’s critics,
politicians and activists say it’s too late to be pouring over
construction plans. Earlier this month, a coalition of 31
Berlin-based volunteer groups published an open letter to the mayor
of Berlin, accusing the local authorities of “state failure,”
demanding that all refugee centers below minimum standards, like
Tempelhof, be closed.
“Tempelhof is
nothing but a strategy born out of despair,” said Antje Kapek, head
of the opposition Green Party block in Berlin’s state parliament
during a session in late January.
Criticism is growing
in Merkel’s ranks with one CDU MP Kai Wegner calling Tempelhof a
“ghetto, which people were initially trying to avoid.”
RefugeesMap
Those are words not
often heard in connection with Tempelhof, the site of one of city’s
finest hours – the Berlin Airlift.
When the Soviets
erected a blockade of the city in 1948, the first major showdown of
the Cold War, the U.S. and U.K. responded by sending in the so-called
“Candy Bombers” to maintain the flow of essential supplies to the
western part of the city that was under their control. During the
airlift’s peak, the western allies transported about 4,500 tons of
cargo per day on some 1,500 flights.
The herculean effort
saved West Berliners from having to beg for food and other essentials
from the Soviet authorities, earning the US and U.K. the enduring
allegiance of grateful locals.
In contemporary
Berlin, the airlift is as much a symbol of West Berlin’s hardy Cold
War resistance as it is of Western solidarity. An imposing sculpture
memorializes the event in front of Tempelhof on Platz der Luftbrücke,
or “Airlift Square.”
Those memories have
added another emotional layer to the debate over the refugees, but
there are no signs that Tempelhof will be closed for them any time
soon. Of 3,500 asylum seekers that have landed there since late
October, only 400 have been moved to more permanent housing. About
1,000 people took off on their own, their destination unknown, but
new ones keep coming. If they keep arriving, officials say there
could be up to 7,000 people living there by the end of the year.
“We’ve become
bottled up. People don’t move on to other places,” explained
Michael Elias, manager of the private company that runs the refugee
shelter, explaining the standstill on a lack of permanent housing for
refugees in the city.
Inside one of the
capacious hangers, hundreds of people share the space. It smells like
it. People live up to 10 in a large cubicle. A mashup of chatter,
kids screaming, cell phones ringing, and the noise of men playing
football provides the background noise. At the edges of the room,
people gather around columns, to charge their phones at some of the
few available power sources. Once in a while, fights over outlets
break out. Employees at the center privately speak about a growing
problem of alcoholism. Refugees themselves complain about poor
hygienic conditions and lack of privacy.
“Most of the
Iranians who arrived with me have already gone back to Iran,” said
Kurosh Shahiriari, a 35-years old cook, who moved into Tempelhof four
months ago.
Slow German
reactions
The growing flap
over Tempelhof also illustrates the limits of Germans’ willingness
to lend a helping hand. The complex offers more than enough room to
accommodate the refugees.
To many Berliners,
however, Tempelhof is more than just an old airport: it’s an
escape, a vast public space in the city center, a place that for many
represents the qualities that make Berlin unique. On weekends the
park fills up with families, cyclists and joggers, kite flyers and
even kite surfers. People flock to Tempelhof to forget about daily
worries like the refugee crisis, not to be reminded of them.
Across Germany,
authorities have put up tents, remodeled gyms or moved newly arrived
refugees into abandoned industrial complexes, gyms and halls.
Tempelhof stands
out, and not just as the “birthplace of aviation.” After the
airport closed down in 2008, Berlin split over what to do with the
facility. This political fight is being revived by the debate over
refugees and the airport, showing the refugee crisis has blurred the
distinction between national and local politics in Germany.
Many groups that
today protest the expansion of Tempelhof predate the refugee influx.
In a 2014 referendum, a majority of Berliners approved a law
preventing the city from opening the former airport area to
investment. Now Berlin’s state government has altered the law to
allow for the construction of temporary housing, saying it had to
address an urgent need.
Volunteer activists
like Kerstin Meyer of “100 percent Tempelhofer Feld,” who
actively campaigned to stop development at the airport two years ago,
have since revived their movements. They say the city of Berlin is
using the refugee crisis to undo the outcome of the referendum and
trying to hide the refugees in an isolated spot, out of public view.
“We want those
people to be placed among the neighborhood of Berlin, inside
pre-existing buildings that sit empty,” Meyer said about the
emergency shelter at Tempelhof. “Where they are now, they are
completely isolated.”
Merkel’s critics
say the German chancellor is so preoccupied with enlisting Turkey to
save her refugee strategy that she’s failing to honor her
5-month-old pledge to integrate refugees into society.
“In retrospect,
all over Germany, authorities initially reacted too slowly to the
refugee crisis,” said Angelika Schöttler of the Social Democratic
Party (SPD) and the mayor of the borough where Tempelhof is located.
“When it comes to
registering [refugees,] we still have a huge backlog,” Schöttler
said at her office in the red-brick borough mayor’s office.
Although she said that no one could have predicted the high numbers,
local and state authorities should have started six months earlier to
prepare, she added. “Hindsight is easier than foresight.”
For her part, Merkel
deploys her chief of staff and head of the government’s migration
coordinating committee, Peter Altmaier, out on the talk show circuit
to give her rebuttal: An action plan is in place, just give the
government more time to implement it. With a sense of pride, Merkel’s
supporters say that while conditions might not be ideal, no refugee
in Germany is sleeping rough or going hungry.
There are other
Tempelhofs in Berlin. About 30,000 refugees, according to city data
provided to POLITICO, live in temporary housing in the capital. Only
about 15,000 asylum seekers live in permanent refugee accommodations
run by the city. By the end of the year, Berlin is planning to create
up to 34,000 new permanent units. Even if they are built in time,
there’s doubt that they will be enough since new people keep
coming.
The number of
arrivals is steady, currently at 1,900 a day. Since the beginning of
the year, 99,600 refugees have entered the country, according to the
German federal police.
Matthew Karnitschnig
in Berlin and Hans Von Der Burchard in Brussels contributed to this
report.
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