Syria refugees mull ‘leaving’ Germany

New level of hate

FREITAL, Germany, Oct 7, (AFP): One had a beer bottle flung at him on a train. Another was woken at midnight as three men holding wooden slats rang his doorbell. A third had her headscarf pulled off by a stranger in the street.

A year after they arrived in Germany seeking refuge from war, some Syrians say they have experienced so much animosity that they are contemplating leaving.

The trouble is, they have landed in the eastern state of Saxony — a flashpoint zone home to the Islamophobic PEGIDA movement that has seen a spate of racist hate crimes.

“It’s too scary here,” said Fares Kassas, victim of the train aggression. “The man threw the bottle just as the door was closing and the train left the station. There was nothing I could do,” said Kassas, who has obtained refugee status in Germany but is now contemplating leaving for Turkey, where his parents are living.

Mohammad Alkhodari, who spoke of a car that pulled up next to him with men preparing to beat him before he ran away, said he avoids going out after 6:00 pm.

“I am so stressed that I have developed a stomach problem,” he said.

In Saxony, the number of far-right crimes, including assaults against asylum seekers and arson at refugee homes, tripled to 784 last year compared with 235 in 2014.

Both Kassas and Alkhodari are in the town of Freital, scene of anti-migrant demonstrations a year ago.

The area is linked to two neo-Nazi groups that plotted attacks against refugees but were dismantled by security forces last year.

In a report last month taking stock of the quarter century since reunification, the government warned that growing xenophobia and right-wing extremism now threaten peace in eastern Germany.

“Eastern states are bad states for refugees. It’s hard to find apartments. There are no jobs and no contact with locals,” said Alkhodari, a dental hygienist who desperately wants to move to western Germany.

The arrival of 890,000 refugees last year has deeply polarised Germany, and misgivings against the newcomers run particularly deep in eastern states like Saxony.

The former communist state has become fertile ground for the far right, with unemployment fuelling resentment and xenophobia.

“They should all just disappear,” said a man in his fifties, when asked what he thought of the refugees in Saxony.

Enrico Schwarz, who runs an association in Freital that has been helping Kassas and Alkhodari, said “latent racism and latent right-wing radicalism” has always existed in German society, but “at this time of the refugee movement, they have become bolder.”

He said eastern Germans were more susceptible to xenophobia because many felt like migrants in a new country when Germany reunited.

“And (they feel) threatened by other migrants who are arriving now,” he said.

Right-wing extremists are capitalising on fears with arguments such as “they’re taking jobs away, or they’ll drive health insurance contributions up”, and lines are gradually blurring between those who are stirring up hate, and others who are simply worried about their future.

“Who is the ‘concerned citizen’, and who is the violent citizen? Who is the extremist citizen and who is the one who only has fears? It’s no longer so clear,” Schwarz said.

Erdmute Gustke, pastor at a church in Heidenau — another Saxony village hit by violent anti-refugee demonstrations — said some saw the migrant influx as another unwanted change affecting their lives.

“There is a feeling of ‘leave us in peace, we’ve only just found our way after reunification and now we’re facing something new again,’” she said.

Social media has also lifted the expression of hatred for foreigners to a “new level”, said refugee aid volunteer Marc Lalonde.

“Before this social media explosion, people were probably racist but they kept it to themselves,” he said.

Now they see that “they are not alone.”

Schwarz

As France prepares to close down the squalid ‘Jungle’ migrant camp in the northern port of Calais, Amjad from Pakistan can’t wait to get away.

“That’s six months they have been telling us that the ‘Jungle’ is done with ... but it never ends,” he told AFP.

“Everyone here knows that they will soon have to leave and are wondering what they are going to do,” he said. “Me, I’ll take the train to Paris.”

Work to tear down the sprawling slum in the Channel port could start before the end of the month, according to French officials.

The plan is to scatter the migrants from the ‘Jungle’ to around a hundred reception centres across France, and at least some camp residents seem willing to make a go of it.

“It’s good that the dismantling is coming,” said Noah, a young Sudanese migrant. “When the ‘Jungle’ is destroyed we will be spread around to better places.”

President Francois Hollande announced during a visit to Calais last week that the camp would be dismantled by the end of the year.

The makeshift settlement has become the focal point in France of Europe’s migrant crisis, fought over by politicians and a constant source of tension with Britain.

The UN Security Council adopted a resolution Thursday authorizing the European Union and individual countries to seize migrant-smuggling vessels on the high seas off Libya for another year.

The resolution, adopted by a vote of 14-0 with Venezuela abstaining, stressed that the council’s aim is “to disrupt the organized criminal enterprises engaged in migrant smuggling and human trafficking and prevent loss of life.”

Britain’s UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said after the vote that he wanted to make clear that the EU’s Operation Sophia “is only targeting smugglers and empty boats.” He said migrants found during the operation are taken to Europe.

Since the UN authorized the interdictions in October last year, Rycroft said, the Operation Sophia flotilla has directly apprehended 90 suspected smugglers and has made over 300 smuggling vessels unusable.

The EU operation is also estimated to have rescued over 26,000 people, he said.

“But the smuggling networks have not been defeated,” Rycroft stressed.