February 5, 2016
6:58 am
Frustrated
by Germany, Iraqi migrants beat a path back home
Guy Chazan in Berlin
Asu Hassan is
throwing in the towel. Frustrated by bureaucratic hold-ups, money
troubles and months spent living in an overcrowded gym, he is leaving
his new home in Germany and returning to Iraq.
“Since I was a
child I dreamt of Germany,” the 31-year-old mechanic says. “Now
my dream is never to have to see it again.”
Mr Hassan is one of
hundreds of Iraqis who reached safe haven in Berlin after a perilous,
months-long journey to the heart of Europe but are now heading in the
opposite direction. It is a measure of his disenchantment that he is
willing to trade a new life in one of the world’s richest and most
stable countries for the violence and insecurity of his homeland.
“In a year there
will be no Iraqis left here,” Mr Hassan says.
In Berlin’s Tegel
airport, queues form at the check-in counter for Iraqi Airways, which
operates three weekly flights from Germany to Iraq. Andesha Karim, an
airline official, says around half the passengers — 150 people a
week — are returning refugees. Demand is growing: plans are afoot
to double the number of flights.
The volume of
returnees is a mere trickle compared to those staying. More than
30,000 of the more than 1.1m refugees Germany welcomed last year were
Iraqis, making them the largest group of migrants after Syrians,
Albanians, Kosovars and Afghans.
But the outflow
reflects growing disenchantment with life in the west, where social
services have been stretched to breaking point by the massive influx
of foreigners. Even in Germany, a country that prides itself on its
reputation for efficiency, authorities are struggling to cope.
For the German
government, the reverse exodus is a small piece of good news in what
has otherwise been a confounding crisis. With citizens increasingly
clamouring for authorities to get a grip on the situation, Chancellor
Angela Merkel gave assurances last month that she expected large
numbers of migrants to return home once peace was restored in Syria
and Isis defeated in Iraq. Some 70 per cent of refugees fleeing the
wars in Yugoslavia for Germany in the 1990s ultimately went home.
CHART: Applications
for asylum in Germany in 2015
Officials have
therefore seized on the reverse-flow to Iraq. Peter Altmaier, Ms
Merkel’s chief of staff, said last week that 2,000 Iraqis had
voluntarily returned home since December, largely because Isis had in
recent months “lost a third of its territory”.
The German
government has encouraged people to return by offering to pay for
their tickets home. Last year, some 37,000 people signed up for its
voluntary repatriation programme, nearly three times as many as in
2014. More than 700 were Iraqis. (Syria is not included in the scheme
because it is too dangerous).
Meanwhile, hundreds
of other Iraqis are leaving under their own steam. The Iraqi embassy
in Berlin has issued some 1,400 one-way travel documents for
returnees since the end of October.
Alaa Hadrous owns a
Middle East-focused travel agency and jewellery shop in Berlin, where
some Iraqis sell their last remaining valuables to pay for the €250
ticket home.
“Their
expectations were too high,” he says. “They thought as soon as
they got here they would be given a flat, money, free healthcare.
They didn’t realise they would have to wait days even to register —
and then live in a hostel for months.”
CHART: Voluntary
repatriations from Germany to Iraq
Sa’ad Rubeyi, a
former soldier in the Iraqi army now about to board a flight back to
Baghdad, says he lost patience after waiting five months to obtain
asylum. He says that for the last two months he’s received none of
the pocket money all refugees are entitled to.
“Merkel’s
mistake was to say ‘you’re all welcome here’,” he says. “She
should have been honest and said, ‘We don’t want you, we can’t
take you all in, we can’t cope’.”
There is no evidence
so far that recent Iraqi migrants are less able to adapt to life in
Germany than other newcomers from the Middle East. Some suspect the
affordability and availability of direct flights home has played a
role in their decision to leave.
The returnees’
problems are often specific to Berlin. The city’s State Office for
Health and Social Affairs, known by its German acronym LaGeSo, has
become a byword for administrative chaos: asylum-seekers have often
had to wait days to register there for access to healthcare, housing
and welfare benefits.
Things have improved
at LaGeSo since a management shake-up in December, with most waits
cut from days to hours and heated tents installed to shelter
applicants. But Asu Hassan, who arrived in Germany from Diyala
province, north-east of Baghdad, last September after an odyssey that
consumed his $7,000 life savings, sees little change.
For four months, he
says, he lived in a “dirty, overcrowded” school gym together with
300 others. There were three showers and three toilets for all and
only intermittent hot water. “I lost all hope of getting out of
there,” he says. By the time of his departure he was still waiting
for a residence permit and ID. “We didn’t run away from Isis to
be treated like this,” he says.
The complaints are
seeping back to Iraq and could be one reason fewer people are making
the trek to Germany of late. In January, around 18,500 Iraqi
asylum-seekers registered here, 10,000 fewer than in December.
Sherzad Salah Hassan
is returning to Sinjar, a town in northern Iraq which was retaken by
Kurdish peshmerga forces from Isis last November. His house was
destroyed in the fighting and his wife and three children are still
living in tents, but that is not deterring him. Having waited five
months in Germany for his official papers, he says, it is time to
call it quits.
“I’m not
disappointed in Germany,” he says. “The people are good. But
they’re obviously overstretched.”
Additional reporting
by Stefan Wagstyl
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