c. 1996 Religion News Service
BERLIN _ Religious leaders and refugee advocates here are in an uproar over the recent decision by the German government to force many of the estimated 320,000 Bosnian refugees who have sought safety in Germany to go back home.
According to a new policy that went into effect Tuesday (Oct. 1), federal states may begin sending refugees back to Bosnia. The reason, according to Manfred Kanther, Germany’s conservative interior minister, is that Bosnians have no further need of refuge now that relative peace has returned to their war-torn country and democratic elections have been held.
In states like Bavaria and Berlin, whose legislatures are controlled by the conservative Christian Democratic Union, authorities are expected to begin immediately informing select groups that their refugee status will not be renewed. In states like Hessen and North Rhineland-Westphalia, where legislatures are dominated by more liberal Social Democrats, the process of returning refugees to Bosnia is expected to start in the spring.
Single people and couples without children are at the top of the list of those whose refugee status will not be renewed.
The new policy has sparked outrage among refugee advocates _ and comparisons to the experience of Jews in World War II.”These are people who went through the most horrible things since the Holocaust,”says Hajo Funke, a professor at Berlin’s Free University and German coordinator of the Sarajevo based German-Jewish aid organization La Benevolencia.
He calls the decision to send refugees back”cynical and populist.”It’s as if, he says,”Jews were turned back to Germany forcefully immediately after the Second World War into a situation in which a lot of Nazis are around.” Church leaders and religious groups are leading a coalition of political parties and humanitarian organizations that say conditions on the ground in Bosnia are still unacceptable for refugees who have so recently fled war and ethnic persecution.”It’s simply inhumane to even consider sending these people back now,”says Evangelical Church Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin. When they return to Bosnia, he says, it should be voluntarily, with”security and dignity.” Huber points out that more than 60 percent of primarily Muslim refugees from Bosnia in Berlin come from Bosnian-Serb controlled regions, those ethnically cleansed during the four years of war. “These people can neither return to their original homes nor do they have other alternatives,”says Huber. The victims of ethnic cleansing cannot be expected to return to places where the same people hold power who expelled them in the first place, he says.
Huber, whose denomination includes both Lutheran and Calvinist churches, is in the forefront of refugee advocacy in Germany. He and his Roman Catholic counterpart, Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, initiated a weekly roundtable early this year as a forum for Bosnian refugees and the dozens of groups engaged in meeting their needs. But these days, the refugee roundtables are more like strategy sessions on how to challenge the government’s new refugee policy.
The churches are expected to shift focus from simply providing aid to providing legal help to block the expulsion of the selected refugees. About 1,500 of the 36,000 refugees in Berlin will be expected to leave before the end of this year, according to the Interior Ministry.
In addition to exploring legal channels that could stall deportations for months, religious groups say they will also continue placing Bosnians in adult education and vocational programs to acquire skills for when they finally return to their war-shattered country.
Meanwhile, other groups are applying political pressure on federal and state governments to reverse the new refugee policy. In an open letter to German officials, the Green Party, the Catholic Caritas organization and the Protestant charity Diakonische Werk, as well as many prominent German intellectuals appealed to the government for more compassion.”The trauma of expulsion and escape should not be exacerbated by the trauma of premature, forced return,”the groups said in the letter. As long as the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) declares the region unsafe, says the letter, refugees should only return voluntarily.
The UNHCR has also criticized Germany’s decision, citing inadequate housing in Bosnia, the unstable political situation and the current refugee problem the UNHCR already faces there now.
A delegation from the Dresden branch of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, recently back from a fact-finding trip to Bosnia, expressed shock at the conditions in the Muslim-Croat Federation.”The cities are full with refugees from nearly completely destroyed villages,”the Pax Christi delegation stated in a published report. The delegation saw one school with several hundred refugees from eastern Bosnia crammed into tiny classrooms in unhygienic conditions.”They can’t return to their homes because their homes don’t even have roofs,”concluded the report.
German church leaders and religious groups involved in refugee work have won high praise from secular organizations.”The churches have become the moral institution in German society today,”says Bosiljka Schedlich, director of the Southeast Europe Cultural Center, a prominent refugee organization in Berlin.
She calls the churches”a great ally. They’ve publicly taken a strong stand against xenophobia and hatred,”she says.
Critical though they may be of present government policy, advocates for refugees acknowledge that during four years of war in Bosnia, Germany has responded quickly and generously to the plight of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, giving shelter for more Bosnian refugees than any other nation in western Europe. “The Germans are good people,”says Schedlich, herself a Croat.”Something like this sullies their image unjustly.”
MJP END HOCKENOS
