EU: Deportation class a reality with Austrian business plan
01 January 2007
In 1999, when activists spoofed Lufthansa, KLM and TAROM leaflets offering cheap flights to migrants' countries of origin with deportees on board, they used the tactics of “image pollution” to force respected businesses to take a public stance on their involvement in the forced practice of deportations (
http://www.deportation-class.com/). In an ingenious communication guerrilla stunt, the campaign shocked customers and shareholders by spreading glossy flyers advertising deportation class:
When you use Deportation Class to travel to dozens of cities in thirty-five countries, you can subtract a very substantial discount from the lowest published rate. What's more, when booked for your Deportation Class flight, you will automatically participate in our inaugural program. In addition to our extraordinarily low fares, you will benefit from the following services:
- After your special cargo area check-in, border police officers will help you through a separate gate into the high security deportee sector.
- While restrained, you will enjoy special privileges such as seating priority, access to exclusive lounges, and even an increased luggage allowance.
- After you board, you will be provided with a special helmet allowing you to take advantage of internal multimedia entertainment.
- You will adjust to the delights of your travel destination in an atmosphere relaxed by obligatory sedative usage.
- After being booked in Lufthansa's Deportation Class, you will be driven in a specially protected vehicle from your home to the airport, completely free of charge.
As a result of the campaign, Lufthansa and TAROM temporarily stopped deportations and the German pilot's association Cockpit advised their members to refuse flying with deportees on board; it became increasingly difficult for governments to find willing collaborators to reach their deportation targets (166,909 people were deported by plane from EU member states and Norway during 1999).
What no one expected is that eight years later, deportation class no longer shocks the public, nor does it scare off businesses fearing for their reputation. On the contrary, Austrian immigration lawyer Hermann Heller and "aviation experts" Carl Julius Wagner and Heinz Berger have announced they are planning to cash in on EU plans for joint deportation flights with their project "Deportation-Lines". "Asylum airlines", a concept developed by the five richest countries in the world at the Evian meeting in June 2005, has become a viable business option not only for venture capitalists but, unimaginable to most of his colleagues, also for an immigration lawyer claiming to promote "humane deportations". They are not the first ones, however, to make money from the deportation business. A German charter flight company started mass deportations for the government in 2004.
Carl Julius Wagner is a Vienna-based management consultant who, as a representative of the US helicopter producer Sikorsky, managed to convince the Austrian authorities to buy nine multi-purpose transport "Black Hawk" helicopters for 2.3 bn Austrian Schilling (after tax) in 2001. The deal allegedly generated 4.6 billion profit for the Austrian business world in form of so-called offset trading.
Deportations - a profitable business
These past six months, Heller and his partners have been developing a new deportation aircraft that will make resistance futile. The first step in their plan towards successful mass deportation is to do away with the general public, which gets upset when confronted with bound and shackled people kicking and screaming to resist their deportation, which often leads to the deportation being abandoned. The second step is to make deportation less labour-intensive by building an aircraft with small padded cells in which refugees and migrants can be locked up without having to be physically restrained by police for<