Violence update - July 1993
Ich habe in den Jahren 1992-1994 für die Usenet-Forum soc.culture.german über viele Fälle von rechts-gerichteter Gewalt berichtet, die mit kleine Notizen in den Zeitungen erschienen sind. Ich habe einige wiedergefunden über Google, ich verlinke sie hier mit einer Überblick.
Prenzlau (Brandenburg): Two cars filled with Skins drove up to an asylum shelter here. The youth got out, screamed "Heil Hitler" and "Auslaender raus", fired "Schreckschusspistolen" (air guns?), and then drove off.
Frankfurt/Main: A fire in a large house in which many Germans and foreigners lived resulted in 30 people being admitted to the hospital with smoke inhalation. However, the police is not sure that racist motives are a factor.
The German high court has refused the case of an asylum seeker from Ghana, who requested to stay in Germany until his case for asylum has been decided. Ghana is considered to be a "secure country". The man is one of the many persons being detained at a special compound constructed at the Frankfurt airport for holding detainees since the new asylum law took effect July 1. There had been a hunger strike conducted by the detainees, but it had no effect, and the strike was called off on the advice of medical and social personell taking care of the asylum seekers.
Justice Senator Jutta Limbach (Berlin) has suggested that foreigners be permitted to become justices and the like. She notes that the interior minister occasionally makes exceptions to the rule to let some foreigners [like me] into the Beamtentum. Somebody complained that it was impossible for a "fine German citizen" to have to plead for justice in front of a foreigner. Ms. Limbach noted that that was exactly Goebbels reason for keeping women out of such positions.
East Berlin : A public hearing in a posh East German neighborhood (villas and boats, was posh before the wall went down, too) about the plans to open a refugee camp here in September was disbanded shortly after it began. The social services politician was so shocked at the anti-foreigner sentiment that was roundly applauded by most of the 300-odd attendees that she packed up and left. One of the more printable epithets stated that refugees are all "Schweine und potentielle Kriminelle", pigs and potential criminals. The politician stated to the "Tagespiegel" that she was so shocked, as these were all affluent people, not out-of-work thugs.
Bavaria? I caught a snippet on the 9 o'clock news last night about a fire in a Bavarian refugee home in which some persons were injured, but it was not repeated at 10 o'clock, and was not in the paper this morning.
Good news! Schleswig-Holstein has announced plans to permit foreigners to join the police force.
[In the Tagespiegel from Saturday there was a little article about the daily discriminations. I decided to translate it for you. Tagespiegel, 24. July 1993]
Excrement at the door
It's the daily humiliations that makes life difficult for foreigners
Claudia and her Iranian life partner Sia are afraid. They have been receiving threatening letters for months: "If you don't disappear something will happen", "you foreigner-whore [Auslaenderhure]", "Germany for the Germans". Their bicycle tires are often found cut open. The latest episode was a pile of human excrement they found on their doorstep.
Racism - that is not just the brutal assaults, but also the daily humiliations: the "foreigners out" graffiti in the stairwell or the swastika at the bus stop. The critical once-over in the subway, a comment on the job. "The atmosphere hat gotten quite bad in the past few years," commete Ulrike Haupt from the office of the Foreigners Ombud [Auslaenderbeauftragter]. "The subjective feeling of being able to develop a secure future in Germany has become quite uncertain, even for those 'foreigners' born in Germany."
Discrimination against foreigners does not even stop at the door of the intensive care unit of a hospital, as a doctor has reported. A patient who had suppered a heart attack made disparaging remarks about a dark-skinned nurse - who happend to be the person who spent the most effort seeing him through the crisis. A Turkish family moved out of their long-year home to another part of Berlin after they began to be insulted by their neighbors, and were even assulted by them.
"There are people who get physically sick after a while," said Ms. Haupt. Stomach problems, sleep disturbances and headaches are the commonest complaints. Especially after assults such as Moelln or Solingen, many people become panicky.
Even TV-personalities such as the dark-skinned Charles Muhamed Huber, aka Henry Johnson in the ZDF-Series "Der Alte" [detective show] feel the effects of discrimination. Just recently, some one came up to him from behind and tried to knock him down a flight of stairs. From behind, the offender had just identified him as a "Nigger". "This sneakyness" is what makes Huber so mad: "I would not want to live here as a normal black man."
The authors of threatening letters and assulters seldom have to account for their deeds in court. "It is very difficult to apprehend such persons," said the speaker for the justice department, Bruno Rautenberg. The crime of "Volksverhetzung", inciting the people, can only be committed in public. Letters secretly thrown in a mailbox are not public.
The last resort, accusing the perpretrators of insult, usually results in a fine. "Scheiss-Kanake" ("shitty person-from-Kanak = foreigner), vor example, "costs" someone with low income only 150 DM. Right-wing insults, however, can be peanalized more drastically by the court.
-- Jutta Lauterbach, dpa
Three asylum seekers have managed to get a court order restraining them from being immediately deported. Two are from Ghana, a supposedly "safe" country. Lawyers in the Frankfurt area have been helping the asylum seekers detained at the Frankfurt airput to prepare restraining order requests for the high court. The response in the CSU: we have to tighten up the Asylum law so that they have no recourse to the courts. Why, they'll tie up the courts with all these appeals!
The Tagespiegel had a long article this morning describing the conditions in the detainment center. 88 beds in 2 large rooms. A "pen" in which the detainees can get "fresh" air, just large enough for a soccer game and room to sit on the sidelines. Nothing to do all day but stare at the walls. The new
rules states that they have to be deported inside of 19 days. They sit and wait: envious of the very, very few wo are admitted to Germany, sad for the ones who paid so much money to come to Germany and are being sent "home". Interviews with some of the detainees: a young woman who wants to learn German and continue her technical studies outside her war-torn land; a woman and child who had hoped to join their husband and father; the young man from Ghana who has had members of his family "disappear".
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