GERMANY: Foreign Office declares Iraq unsafe
01 May 2001
The German asylum rights organisation Pro Asyl and Verband für Krienhilfe und solidarische Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (WADI), a development organisation, have welcomed the latest country report on Iraq by the German Foreign Office. The situation reports, which are regularly published by the Foreign Office, serve as a guideline for the government in its policy towards asylum seekers from the relevant regions. The report, which was published in February, abandoned the idea of a "safe zone" in northern Iraq and for the first time declared that the whole of Iraq cannot be assumed safe, because everybody who lodges an asylum application abroad can expect persecution. It contains detailed descriptions of the structures of political persecution and systematic violation of human rights in Iraq, so that torture, arbitrary arrest, "disappearances" and organised rape are not portrayed as exceptions but as regular practice by Iraqi security forces. Pro Asyl and WADI say the report falls short of portraying state brutalities against ethnic minorities, in particular the so?called Anfal campaign, during which around 200,000 Kurds have died in chemical gas attacks, as well as the chemical gas attack on Halabja in 1988, which killed 15,000 Kurds.
Whilst the human rights situation in Iraq is evidently not improving, ever more EU countries are starting to prepare the deportation of Iraqi Kurds back to northern Iraq. The UK, Germany and the Netherlands are holding talks with Turkey about allowing the EU to deport Iraqi Kurds via Turkish territory. In the Netherlands, around 9,000 Iraqi Kurds were in effect made illegal through changes in the law which instructed them to leave the country (deportation not being possible because there are no flights to northern Iraq) and the withdrawal of all social benefits whilst banning them from working (see Statewatch vol 11 no 2). In Germany, authorities have started DNA testing on Lebanese asylum seekers in order to declare them Turkish (see Statewatch vol 11 no 1). Soon it became clear that the exercise served the purpose of allowing non?Turkish asylum seekers from the "Near Middle East" (Northern Iraq and Lebanon in particular), who cannot be deported due to the situation in their countries of origin, to be deported to Turkey; they are told to make their way home from there. In the year 2000, refugees from Iraq were the largest single group to lodge asylum applications in Germany.
Pro Asyl press release, 13.3.01