Germany in 2016: Mass deportations and brutality toward refugees
By
Stefan Steele
5 January 2017
The ruthlessness and brutality of Germany’s authorities against refugees now knows almost no bounds. In 2016 alone, some 25,000 desperate people were deported. Again and again, families are torn apart, children repatriated despite serious illness to war-torn homelands and refugees snatched from their beds without warning in the middle of the night.
The number of so-called “voluntary returners” is even higher, reaching some 55,000 in 2016. The “voluntary” nature of the return lies in the fact that following rejection of their asylum claims, refugees are given an ultimatum: either leave the country within a specified time period and receive some minimal support for their departure, or be forcibly deported and often bear the cost of it themselves. Those in this category are then banned from re-entry to Germany.
Not infrequently, part of a family is deported, so the remaining members follow them. This too is recorded as a “voluntary” return.
The Left Party celebrates this particularly insidious form of brutality as a “humane” alternative to deportation. Thuringia, the only German state under Left Party rule, with 1,726 so-called voluntary returns between January and November 2016, ranks second among the states behind Saxony.
In addition to these ruthless deportation practices, Der Spiegel recently published a survey revealing that refugees are treated badly as soon as they arrive in Germany. In nearly 1,500 cases over the past two years, property was confiscated from refugees. The sums involved totalled “at least 863,000 euros [$US 903,000]”, according to the news weekly.
The leader in this practice is the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-Social Democratic…