GERMANY: DNA tests to prove "bogus Lebanese" are Turkish
01 January 2001
Kurdish civil war refugees from the Lebanon are being accused of being bogus asylum seekers in a publicity campaign started by some German local authorities early last year. In the northern town of Bremen, the Interior Minister deployed special police units in 1999 to uncover "possibly one of the biggest known cases of systematic, organised asylum abuse in the history of the German Federal Republic". Now conservative law and order representatives from the town of Essen have exploited a legal loophole to initiate DNA testing in order to prove that the Lebanese families, who fled to Germany over ten years ago, are in fact Turkish. Apart from the fact that over 60% of the people in question were born in Germany, others have pointed out to the German authorities that there is no such thing as a "nationality" gene.
When civil war broke out in the Lebanon in 1982, many Kurds (some of whom settled in the region during the 1920s from Turkey), fled to Germany. Most of them had never been given Lebanese citizenship during their stay in the Lebanon, thereby remaining a stateless ethnic minority without citizenship rights, but more importantly for the German asylum procedure, without a Lebanese passport. In February 2000, Bernt Schulte (Christlich Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, CDU), Bremen's Interior Minister, thought he could finally remove the most common obstacle to deportations, the fact that there is no viable country to deport the refugee to. More than 500 stateless Lebanese refugees live in Bremen alone, and some estimate several thousand live in Germany as a whole. Schulte declared they were all Turkish. The Bremen police, he said, had gathered evidence that the city was the victim of an immense "asylum scam" which had cost the authorities thousands of Marks. He calimed 531 Turks/Kurds had disguised themselves as stateless Lebanese in order to circumvent their deportation after a failed asylum application. The logical conclusion being that all of them, mostly families with children born and/or brought up in Germany, should be deported to Turkey.
Three months later, this apparent abuse of Germany's asylum system was spotted by Ludger Hinsen (CDU), head of the law and order department in Essen. A scandal had been uncovered, he said, as the around 2,000 "bogus Lebanese" living in Essen had claimed up to 25 million Marks a year from the local authority's budget. The true identity of 640 people had finally been established: "460 for example originate from Turkey, 180 from Syria", he declared. During the following months however, Hinsen failed to deliver any proof for his allegations and increasingly came under pressure by the Green, Social Democrat and Socialist opposition on the city council. So he applied for permission with the regional administrative court to carry out DNA tests on the refugees, on grounds of "indirect falsification of papers, amongst others". DNA testing in asylum procedures was introduced in Germany in 1997, with a view to slowing down family reunion. The only legal safeguards are laid down in the prescribed "individual case examination". Dietrich Deiseroth, a member of the regional data protection office, questions the validity of any such individual examination in this case, as he received DNA testing orders which could have fitted any of the cases and there was nothing individual about them. The police in Essen have taken around 40 DNA samples already, and families have complained about police conduct. In 35 of the cases, the authorities claimed, they could prove a Syrian background.
When the media started picking up the story as representing the biggest hit by the fraud investigation departments for decades, the Bremen based AntirassismusBuro (ARAB) and the Research Centre for Flight and Migration (FFM) pointed out to the authorities several inconsistencies in their stories. Apart from every asylum seeker in Germany being forced into the social security system through a work ban, rather than opt