Germany
targets migrants from North Africa
Angela
Merkel’s government pushes deportations in response to Berlin
terror attack.
By JANOSCH
DELCKER 12/30/16, 5:23 AM CET
BERLIN — As
Germans try to come to terms with the bloodiest attack on their
country in decades, their government is focusing on toughening the
deportation laws.
Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s conservatives are eager to push through legislation,
currently blocked by the opposition, that would declare Tunisia,
Morocco and Algeria “safe countries of origin,” allowing
authorities to easily reject asylum applications from nationals of
those countries as “clearly unfounded.”
Armin Laschet,
deputy party chief of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU,)
said in an email that his party wants to see an end to this
parliamentary blockade in January.
Critics argue that
even if Tunisia had been considered a “safe place of origin,” it
wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the Berlin Christmas market
attack, help catch the 24-year-old Tunisian suspect Anis Amri, who
German authorities knew had been radicalized, or speed up his
deportation to Tunisia.
“Even if [Merkel’s
conservatives] had declared the entire world a safe country of
origin, this attack would have happened,” said Konstantin von Notz,
deputy group leader of the Green Party. “This is a diversionary
tactic.”
“We owe it to the
victims, those who were affected and the entire population that we
should now think over and adjust our entire migration and security
policy” — Horst Seehofer
Beneath what is
essentially a symbolic debate — very few applications for asylum
from Tunisians, Moroccans or Algerian are approved — is a political
struggle among the government leadership to agree on a common
response to a growing anxiety over migration in the aftermath of the
terrorist attack on December 19 that left 12 dead and 53 wounded.
Search for common
ground
In the last two
years, Germany has labeled six countries — Albania, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia — “safe
countries of origin.”
Around a year ago,
Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social
Union (CSU), commonly known as the “Union,” began to demand that
Maghreb countries be added to the list, claiming this would
accelerate deportations and deter other migrants from seeking refuge
in Germany.
“It worked with
applicants from the Balkan, why shouldn’t it work for Tunisia or
Morocco?” Laschet said in the email.
Since Merkel’s
controversial decision to temporarily open the borders to refugees
stuck in Hungary in the fall of 2015, political resistance to her
open-door policy has steadily grown. The far-right, anti-immigrant
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has grown from 4 percent to around
12 percent, according to polls. And Merkel’s decision has fractured
relations between her party and the traditionally more conservative
Bavarian CSU.
Although Merkel has
since changed her rhetoric and toughened up rules for asylum seekers,
her Bavarian allies have continued to be among her most vocal
critics, demanding, for example, an upper limit on migrants entering
Germany, which Merkel rejects.
The issue of asylum
seekers from the Maghreb countries first became a political lightning
rod last year when hundreds of women reported that they had been
sexually assaulted during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne
and elsewhere. Officials later confirmed that of the almost 900
sexual offenses registered that night, most were seemingly committed
by young men from Algeria, Morocco and Iraq.
Soon after, the
German government began to draw up a plan to declare Morocco, Algeria
and Tunisia “safe.” The move was intended as “a signal that
it’s not worth applying for asylum,” an official of the state
interior ministry of Saxony, where most Tunisian asylum seekers in
Germany live, explained at a hearing of a German parliamentary
committee in April.
In May, Germany’s
lower house of parliament, where Merkel’s conservatives hold the
majority in a coalition with the Social Democrats, passed the law.
However, it was blocked by the upper house, where the opposition
Green Party has more power, because of concerns that migrants
deported back to North Africa could face persecution and human rights
abuses, particularly in the case of political dissidents or members
of the gay community.
Since then, the
German parliament has been in a de facto deadlock over the issue.
Just hours after
news broke of the Christmas market attack, the CSU renewed calls for
a shift in Germany’s migration policy. “We should now think over
and adjust our entire migration and security policy,” said party
chief Horst Seehofer. “We owe it to the victims, those who were
affected, and the entire population.”
Both parties are
aware that, with an election looming next year, they need to put an
end to the political infighting if they are to avoid losing votes to
the ascendant AfD or others.
Declaring Maghreb
countries “safe states of origins” is one of the few policy
responses to the refugee crisis that the sister parties have
consistently agreed on.
But the Greens have
so far resisted.
“The union
exploits this attack for demands, which have nothing to do with the
attack committed by Amri,” said the Greens’ von Notz, “It’s
not that he wasn’t sent back because Tunisia wasn’t a ‘safe
country of origin,’ but because he didn’t have any identity
papers.”
Certainly, the Amri
case has demonstrated how much governments depend on the cooperation
of recipient countries in deportations. But that, too, has become
political football.
“We need to
increase diplomatic pressure on countries that are unwilling to take
back their citizens,” said CDU deputy party chief Laschet, “This
is particularly the job of the foreign minister, and one would hope
for a little more commitment from him.”
Germany’s foreign
ministry is headed by the Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier,
whose party is running against Merkel’s CDU in next year’s
election.
After arriving in
Italy in 2011, Amri was reportedly due to be deported first in 2015
after serving time in prison in Italy. He managed to make his way to
Germany, where he filed another application for asylum. Although it
was soon rejected, authorities again failed to send him back when he
failed to provide them with proof of citizenship.
It wasn’t until
two days after the attack that Tunisia delivered replacement
documents necessary for the deportation, said Ralf Jäger, the
regional interior minister in North Rhine-Westphalia state, where
Amri had registered as a refugee.
The Tunisian
government rejects those claims. On Monday, Radhouane Ayara, a
spokesperson for the Tunisian Foreign Ministry, told German press
agency DPA that Tunisian authorities had approved Amri’s
deportation two days before the attack.
Crime spike
Details about the
Amri case also raise doubts about the effectiveness of an agreement
Germany made with Tunisia earlier his year. In March, Interior
Minister Thomas de Maizière announced a “breakthrough” regarding
the deportation of migrants back to the Maghreb region.
After three days of
touring Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, de Maizière introduced a
roadmap to speed up deportations, stressing his plan was not about
sending back the “tens of thousands of law-abiding [Tunisian
citizens living in Germany] who own businesses, pay taxes, and send
their children to German schools,” but those who had recently come
to the country as part of the influx of refugees to Europe, some of
whom claimed to be from war-torn Syria.
While the number of
deportations to Maghreb countries have gone up since then, they
remain a small fraction of the overall number of denied asylum
claims.
“They pretended in
March that things were solved,” said Ulf Küch, the deputy chief of
BDK, a Germany police union. “But nothing was solved, by no means.”
Around 9,000 people
from the three Maghreb countries, who have been denied asylum,
currently live in Germany, according to government numbers from
November. Of those, 6,200 have had their deportations suspended
temporarily, for example, because they failed to provide sufficient
documentation about their original nationality, as was reportedly the
case of Amri.
In the first 11
months of 2016, 111 asylum seekers were deported to Tunisia, compared
to 17 the year before, according to the German interior ministry. The
number of people deported to Morocco rose from 61 to 99 between 2015
and 2016. And deportations to Algeria rose from 57 to 140.
“It’s less about
terrorism. It’s about pickpocketing, shoplifting, some burglary –
small-time crime that worries the population” — Ulf Küch, deputy
chief of a German police union
Merkel’s
government seems eager to convey the message that her government is
working hard to bring the numbers further up. But the administration
wants to be seen as tough on North African immigrants for other
reasons, as well.
In general, crime in
Germany has not gone up following the influx of hundreds of thousands
of refugees since the fall of 2015. Of roughly two million people
investigated for crimes in Germany in 2015, 6 percent were migrants,
less than the overall proportion of foreign-born people in the
population which stands at 10 percent.
Asylum seekers from
the Maghreb, however, are the outliers.
While only two
percent of asylum seekers came from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, 14
percent of all crimes by newly arrived migrants were committed by
those nationals, according to a 2015 crime report from Germany’s
Federal Criminal Office (BKA.)
“It’s less about
terrorism. It’s about pickpocketing, shoplifting, some burglary —
small-time crime that worries the population,” said Küch, echoing
concerns from other law enforcement officials.
Alarmed by accounts
like these, Merkel’s conservatives are eager to push their bloc’s
traditional image as a bastion of law and order ahead of next year’s
elections.
“A consistent
zero-tolerance-policy would have prevented — as we now know —
both the excesses during New Year’s Eve in Cologne and other
crimes,” Laschet said.
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