No. 769
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Plan de desabastecimiento
de alimentos en el Zulia.
Por: Monarte Culiccio
Publicado el Jueves, 07/08/03 07:33pm |
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Pruebas de
actos de sabotaje contra Pdvsa en los ultimos 2 meses, fueron presentadas
hoy
Por: Venpres
Publicado el Jueves, 07/08/03 06:57pm |
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On July 13, the German Interior Ministry presented asylum statistics for the first six months of 2003. According to these figures, only 26,452 people sought asylum in Germany in this period. This represents a 27 percent decrease compared to the same period last year, and is 24 percent less than the second half of 2002.
The number of asylum-seekers also fell drastically last year in comparison with 2001. Since the month-on-month trend is also down, the number of asylum-seekers coming to Germany in 2003 looks set to fall to its lowest level since 1985.
The percentage of those asylum-seekers who were recognised as suffering political persecution and granted asylum remained at the markedly low level of the previous year. Altogether, 48,045 asylum decisions were taken by the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees. However, in only approximately 2,000 cases were the applications for asylum regarded as justified or the applicants granted limited protection from deportation on political or humanitarian grounds. This represents a recognition rate of just 4.2 percent.
In 2001, almost a quarter of those seeking refuge in Germany were at least granted temporary protection. In the mid-1980s, with around the same number of asylum applications as today, almost 30 percent of applications were granted asylum.
This alarming development, which is celebrated as a success by the German government, is a direct consequence of its policy of rejecting refugees. The Social Democratic Party-Green Party coalition in Berlin has intensified the inhumane policy of its conservative predecessors, and in only five years has cut the number of asylum-seekers by around nearly two thirds. It retained the conservatives’ “safe third country” rule, the most restrictive in Europe, the concept of “safe countries of origin,” the excluding of civil war refugees from the asylum process. It also instigated the quartering of refugees near their homeland, making it increasingly impossible for those needing protection to lodge an asylum application in Germany.
If, despite these obstacles, asylum-seekers nevertheless manage to make it to Germany, they face further deterrents. These include the legally dubious rapid deportation proceedings at airports and the setting of welfare support for asylum-seekers 30 percent below the standard rate, while simultaneously prohibiting them from working.
The dramatic decrease in the numbers of asylum-seekers and those granted asylum has nothing to do with an improved security situation worldwide, and this is demonstrated by what is taking place in the main countries of origin of most refugees. These include states like Turkey, China and Iran, which are continually reprimanded (by the German government, amongst others) for their offences against human rights and the use of torture.
Although Turkey has since replaced Iraq as the country of origin for the majority of those seeking asylum in Germany, nearly 12 percent of asylum-seekers still come from Iraq, whose population is suffering from the brutal occupation regime under American and British troops. The situation facing the population has catastrophically worsened since the beginning of the war. The US-British forces confront a guerrilla war involving widespread popular resistance. The response of the occupying powers has been to increasingly resort to arbitrary arrests. Amnesty International has documented serious cases of human rights violations, including the use of torture by the American and British occupiers.
It is worth noting that nearly 25 percent of refugees originate from countries that have been dragged into war at the hands of NATO (or the changing coalitions under US control). Aside from Iraq, these include Serbia, Montenegro and Afghanistan. Official political rhetoric praises these wars as efforts to liberate people from dictatorial regimes and establish “democracy” and “liberty,” but the numbers of refugees fleeing from these same countries paint another picture: one oppressive regime is replaced by another. Moreover, the wars are accompanied by a dramatic economic decline. In the resulting desolate social situation minorities rapidly become scapegoats, the target of discrimination and violence; the circumstances facing Roma peoples in Serbia and Montenegro are just one example.
A German Foreign Ministry report last year noted: “The situation facing minorities in the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, now Serbia and Montenegro] does not meet...international standards by a long chalk.” However, the proportion of refugees from Serbia and Montenegro who are granted asylum is just 0.1 percent. And although there are already hundreds of thousands of internal refugees in the former Yugoslavia, and more who are returning to a life of poverty and desperation, the German government concluded an agreement with Yugoslavia in November 2002 whereby all refugees, bar a few exceptions, are forced to return.
The result of Germany’s deportation policy was clearly shown in a June 23 report in the Frankfurter Rundschau. A Roma family, who had lived 12 years in Syke, in Lower Saxony, was taken at night by the police and deported to Belgrade. There they live with thousands of other refugees in misery in the illegal settlement of Deponia. Dominated by huts made from cardboard and corrugated sheeting, there are neither proper roads nor adequate water or electricity services. Since there is no work, they scour the garbage containers coming from Belgrade for bottles, bread and paper. The children are sent to beg on the streets of the Serbian metropolis.
Green Party politician Claudia Roth, the German government’s human rights spokesperson, visited Belgrade in order to gain a first-hand picture of the situation confronting refugees deported there. She maintains that a continuation of the deportation policy is inhumane and cannot be justified politically. But these hypocritical words were intended for the press corps accompanying her visit rather than for her government coalition partners, since Berlin continues its policy of deporting people, even into crisis areas.
The German federal and state interior ministers have encouraged the authorities to carry out ever more arbitrary and illegal actions, in order ensure deportations.
On June 26, the deportation of 64 refugees from Düsseldorf to Kosovo failed. Members of minorities such as Roma, Ashkali or Egyptians can only be deported after the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) has examined each individual case. In addition, a detailed list of the refugees being deported has to be submitted to UNMIK beforehand. This is what was missing on June 26, as the German authorities clearly tried to illegally deport members of minorities.
As the airplane neared Kosovo, UNMIK refused it landing permission. The flight was swiftly rerouted to Podgorica in Montenegro, in order to then take the deportees by bus to Kosovo. Since UNMIK also rejected this approach, the refugees were finally flown back to Düsseldorf. They had to endure nearly 10 hours of intense heat in an airplane hangar, whose windows and doors were firmly locked, and were refused food the entire time.
In the course of this incident, the Kosovo co-coordinator of the UNHCR, Karsten Luethke, declared that the German government was continually deporting refugees to Kosovo who did not originate from the province.
In June, a mother and her seven children were deported to Turkey. The family’s door was battered down in the early morning hours and the eight people shipped by airplane to Istanbul, without being able to contact a lawyer or even to take some basic luggage.
The deportation was illegal not only because they were refused a legal hearing. The mother and her children were deported to Turkey despite being Lebanese Kurds, who had fled the civil war in Lebanon years ago. The claim by the authorities that this was a Turkish family is purely capricious and was a blatant excuse to accelerate the deportation of unwanted refugees.
Moreover, in contravention of both German and international law, the family was torn apart, since the father was excluded from the deportation. German authorities then cynically declared that he could seek to reunite the family by travelling to Turkey.
On July 15, in the course of a failed deportation of a Congolese man, Raphael Botoba, it came to light that despite the escalating violence in the Congo—and the participation of Germany in a military intervention there—further refugees were being deported to the central African state. According to parliamentary state secretary Fritz Rudolf, the government is not considering a ban on deportations to the Congo at this time.
According to the twisted logic of the German government, military intervention by the imperialist powers leads automatically to an improvement in the human rights situation. This argument has been used successively in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where following military interventions the proportion of refugees granted asylum sank in each case as forced deportations increased. It will not be any different in the Congo.
The government does not even attempt to hide the duplicity of its own arguments. While it justifies its participation in a military intervention with reference to the increasing violence in the Congo, deportations are pushed through mercilessly, citing the relatively safe situation in the capital. The Congolese churches and international human rights organisations point out that “safe survival is hardly possible” for those returning.
Berlin’s ever more ruthless deportation policy is not only directed against refugees in Germany. The government is setting a clear sign of what can be expected by potential refuges should they ever get to Germany. The drastic fall in the numbers of those granted asylum clearly shows that refugees should no longer expect protection from persecution should they make it to German soil. Instead, they face a life under miserable social conditions, with strongly curtailed democratic rights, and under constant fear of deportation to a country where even more intolerable conditions predominate.
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While heads of government at the European Union (EU) summit in Thessaloniki, Greece, last month resolved on further measures to restrict refugees, more than 250 were estimated to have drowned in the Mediterranean in two shipping incidents. According to a study undertaken by United, an anti-racism network, documented deaths directly attributable to the border security measures and the consolidation of Fortress Europe rose to a total of more than 4,000 in the last 10 years.
On June 16, a refugee boat carrying more than 60 people capsized 50 miles south of the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. Only three refugees who set out in a small lifeboat were rescued.
The second catastrophe took place four days later, on June 20, as a hopelessly overloaded boat set out from Libya towards Italy despite bad weather. The boat sank only 60 miles from the African coast. A fishing boat’s crew sighted the sinking ship, sounded the alarm and began to organise a rescue operation, in which a number of boats from nearby oil-rig platforms took part. However, only 41 refugees were saved; 50 bodies were later recovered from the Mediterranean Sea. More than 160 people were still missing as the Tunisian rescue ship abandoned the search on Sunday due to bad weather. It was the worst shipping tragedy in the Mediterranean for years.
It was only a matter of luck that the week did not claim more victims. On June 17, in the Gibraltar Straits, the Spanish coast guard captured a distressed refugee boat carrying 160 people. In the same week, the Italian coast guard escorted a small 12-metre boat transporting 107 refugees into Lampedusa Harbour after an eight-day journey beginning in Turkey.
The mortality rate for refugees in the overloaded and decrepit boats continues to rise. People smugglers, demanding up to 2,000 euros for the passage to Europe in unseaworthy boats, get their best returns by catering to the needs of desperate people.
However, the growing mortality rates on European borders are not simply the result of people smuggling but due to the ever-harsher measures of the EU against refugees and asylum-seekers. With no hope of gaining a visa and thereby no possibility of crossing borders legally, refugees are left to the services of smugglers. Ultimately, it is the increasingly restrictive immigration policies of all European countries that are responsible for the two latest shipping disasters.
Both tragedies, which were widely reported in the media, are nevertheless only the tip of the iceberg. On an almost daily basis, refugees die unnoticed on the outer borders of Europe or in the detention centres of the European Union. United, a network against racism that supports refugees and migrants, and comprises more than 550 European organisations, has put together a document that lists almost 3,800 officially recorded victims of Europe’s refugee policy from January 1993 to March 2003 [http://www.united.non-profit.nl/pdfs/listofdeaths.pdf]. In fact, this figure is likely to be far higher under conditions where the fate of many refugees—who pay with their lives during their flight or who perish from exhaustion in the barren tracts of an east European winter—go unrecorded.
The majority of the deaths documented by United consist of refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean. Most are anonymous victims, who remain unidentified and whose identities are of little concern to the authorities.
For example, on November 30 of last year, 100 refugees of mostly unknown origin lost their lives in two sea-damaged vessels off the Libyan coast near the Canary Islands. On October 8, 2002, 16 Africans died in the Straits of Gibraltar as their boat sought to avoid the ultramodern Spanish surveillance craft, purposely built to ward off refugees and fitted out with radar and infrared cameras. Twenty-two refugees died in July 2002 following a collision with an Italian coast guard boat. On March 7, 2002, 59 refugees from Nigeria and Turkey drowned near Malta, after an Italian navy ship, despite its proximity, offered assistance only after some hours, managing to pull only two refugees out of the water. A small fishing vessel that immediately set out to help was able to save seven lives. Similarly, 30 refugees lost their lives in August 2000 near Tangier, Morocco, due to tardy rescue operations, this time by the Spanish coast guard.
Other refugees drowned because they were ordered off their ships by people smugglers miles from the coast and told to swim towards land.
However, the sea is by no means the only cause of fatalities for refugees. Refugees also die in minefields on the border between Greece and Turkey, as in the case of two men from Burundi who came across minefields in heavy fog on January 4 of this year. They drowned in the Oder, the river bordering Poland and Germany, unnoticed by the border patrols and ignored by German authorities. Many continue to suffocate, crowded in air-tight containers like the 58 Chinese who were found in Dover, England, on June 19, 2000.
In addition, United lists many instances in which refugees were either shot by Turkish, Spanish or German border guards, or were so badly beaten they died of their injuries.
On November 2, 2002, a 23-year-old Albanian illegally crossing a border was mortally wounded by Greek border police. Idris Demir, a Kurd fleeing an imminent deportation after his asylum application was rejected, was shot near Jönköping in February 2001 by Swedish police. On May 2, 2000, in Austria, police beat a Nigerian to death in a refugee centre near Vienna. Two days later, a 40-year-old Slovakian died in Vienna under interrogation for illegal residency.
Immigration officials also bear responsibility for the deadly toll of refugees. On February 12 of this year, in the Swiss town of Thurhof, Nigerian Osuigwe C. Kenechukwu died after being refused medical assistance in a refugee transit centre. Similar cases that the authorities prefer to keep hidden have been documented in nearly every EU country.
The consequences that follow the denial of asylum-seeker status are similarly disastrous. Suicide occurs frequently in deportation centres and the homes of those seeking asylum. Mikhail Bognarchuk, a 42-year-old Ukrainian, hanged himself in the deportation centre in British Haslar on January 31, 2003. Shortly before, David Mamedov, 45, a Georgian who had resided in Germany for some years, hanged himself at his home in Schloss-Holte in eastern Westphalia after receiving his deportation papers.
Two instances occurring on March 22, 2001, and April 23, 2000, respectively, illustrate in an especially stark manner the despair to which refugees are driven. In Spain two years ago, a Moroccan refugee threatened with deportation murdered a 40-year-old asylum-seeker from Guinea, preferring a sentence in a Spanish jail to deportation to Morocco. A year later in Holland, a Chinese asylum-seeker, fearing deportation for himself and his girlfriend whose application for asylum had already been rejected, stabbed her and then killed himself.
Many refugees fail to reach Europe’s borders. For example, many fatalities due to the actions of border guards are documented in Turkey. The shelling of a refugee boat near Cyprus in May 2002 by the Turkish coast guard caused widespread outrage. Hidar Akay from Turkey was killed in a hail of bullets. Nine refugees were shot and another five wounded as a group of 139 people from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan crossed the border between Turkey and Iran at the beginning of May 2000. This incident rated only a brief mention in the press.
Turkey, which has been warned that it would fail to gain membership to the EU due to its record on human rights, was in reality only following EU practice in regard to refugees. With the Amsterdam agreement and the decisions adopted at the EU summit in 1999 in Tampere, Finland, the enacting of ruthless border security measures against refugees became a requirement for EU membership. The harsh measures carried out by the Turkish border guards are also a result of the pressure the EU exerts on neighbouring counties and candidates for EU membership.
Libya is the last potential entryway to Europe due to the trade embargo decreed against the Qadaffi government, which consequently does not collaborate with the EU over the issue of refugees. Many refugees become victims of the murderous desert conditions. According to an article in the German tageszeitung, the Ghanaian embassy reported in recent weeks that more than 200 Ghanaians died of thirst in the desert. In May 2001, tourists made a gruesome discovery when they came across a van from Niger in the Libyan desert that had been lost three months earlier. The van contained 40 corpses.
The hundreds dying annually in European processing centres attempting to get to Europe are the direct result of increasingly intensified border patrols on Europe’s external borders.
While claiming that its coffers are empty when it comes to its domestic budget, Germany has dramatically increased its spending on border protection. The number of security guards patrolling its eastern borders exceeds those standing sentry on the closely watched border between the US and Mexico.
In recent years on its southern coast, Spain has established the world’s most modern and expensive surveillance system for the detection of refugee boats. Equipped with radar and infrared cameras, Spanish authorities are able to identify, along a 115-kilometre stretch of coastline, even the smallest boat on the Moroccan shore. Coast guard ships then force detected boats to turn back.
Partly through financial aid, partly by the exertion of tremendous pressure, countries bordering the EU have been forced to step up measures against asylum-seekers. The EU has almost completely equipped Hungary with its border control equipment. The sum of 50 million euros was foisted onto Rumania to turn its border with Moldavia into an impassable wilderness for refugees. Pressure was exerted on Poland, particularly by Germany, to set up 25 deportation centres. The Czech Republic established its first deportation centre in November 1998. Inmates in both countries are mainly refugees who have been sent back by German authorities according to the “safe” third-country rule.
In a communication on July 1, the EU Commission proposed the strengthening of an agreement between neighbouring states with future boundaries with EU states after the EU expansion of 2004. It is estimated that about 1 billion euros, a figure that could be increased, out of the total directed to development aid for future border regions will go towards the militarisation of the borders for refugee protection.
The collaboration within the EU on border security in refusal of entry permits, deportations and the development of a common policy on asylum and immigration issues at the lowest level continues to take ever more drastic forms. At the EU summit in Thessaloniki, 140 million euros were expressly allocated to intensify cooperation on policing the EU’s external borders; 250 million euros were allocated for deportations and the development of cooperation with third countries for the return of refugees. This was in order to further streamline the mass deportation of refugees out of the EU. Already, 350,000 people annually are expelled and approximately 150,000 forced to return to their countries “voluntarily.”
The summit also established a common visa system allowing complete surveillance by recording biometric information, recorded on the passport of the bearer. In centralised records, the Visa Information System (VIS) would then assemble data that would be made available to all border and police authorities.
There are also plans to link the VIS to the Schengen Information System (SIS). The latter was strengthened after an agreement was reached in Thessaloniki to broaden and accelerate the data system. Together with the ongoing militarisation of the EU’s external borders, the VIS draws the EU electronic curtain ever tighter, with ever more deadly consequences, as the United report notes.
The only ones to profit would be the people smugglers, whom the EU is ostensibly aiming to combat. A market would be established by the EU’s xenophobic policy against the asylum-seekers. People smugglers can already demand exorbitant fees for the Mediterranean crossing or for a lorry transport across the eastern borders of the EU. Prices range from the “all-inclusive” (i.e., guaranteed transport from the origin of the journey to a destination point with forged papers) for around 10,000 euros, to a guided escort across the border on foot for a few hundred euros. Prices will increase as border-crossings become riskier and the illegal paths longer due to ever-tightening EU borders.
Refugees, who borrow heavily in order to take the road to Europe, will become victims not only of higher financial debt. In the ruthless trade of people smuggling they will increasingly pay with their lives.
The narrowing of freedom of movement and travel as well as the death of refugees on the inner German borders (the so-called “wall deaths”), deplored by Western countries during the period of the “iron curtain,” are increasingly becoming a feature of EU politics.
