Demonstrators in Leipzig decry Afghan deportations

October 24, 2017

About 150 people gathered at Leipzig’s airport in the eastern German state of Saxony on Tuesday to protest the deportation of an unknown number of people from Afghanistan whose asylum applications had been rejected.

Deportations to Afghanistan are increasingly controversial as violence and persecution remain widespread in swaths of the country.

“I don’t know who is sitting in that airplane,” said Left party politician Juliane Nagel, “but even prisoners shouldn’t be exposed to dangers.”

In July, the Federal Foreign Office declared that in some cases, Afghanistan could be considered a safe country of origin.

“Taking into account the circumstances of each individual case,” the office said in a statement, “deportation to certain regions is responsible and possible.”

However, in just the past few weeks, a series of attacks in the capital Kabul killed about 250 civilians and security forces.

Saxony’s Interior Minister Markus Ulbig was adamant that the deportations were a necessary step. Ulbig, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), told German press agency DPA that “anyone who has been found to have no right to remain here after completing an asylum procedure and going through all the proper government channels must leave our country.”

Over the northern hemisphere summer, deportations to Afghanistan resumed after a long moratorium put in place in the wake of a December 2016 attack in Kabul that left 150 people dead near the German embassy.

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

By the planeload

On September 12, a flight is scheduled to leave Düsseldorf airport for Afghanistan, carrying 15 rejected asylum seekers in what is the first group deportation to the country since a deadly car bomb blast near the German embassy in Kabul in late May. The opposition Greens and Left party slammed the resumption of deportations to Afghanistan as “cynical.”

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

Fighting for a chance

In March, high school students in Cottbus made headlines with a campaign to save three Afghan classmates from deportation. They demonstrated, collected signatures for a petition and raised money for an attorney to contest the teens’ asylum rejections – safe in the knowledge that their friends, among them Wali (above), can not be deported as long as proceedings continue.

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

‘Kabul is not safe’

“Headed toward deadly peril,” this poster reads at a demonstration in Munich airport in February. Protesters often show up at German airports where the deportations take place. Several collective deportations left Germany in December 2016, and between January and May 2017. So far this year, the German government has sent back 261 people to Afghanistan.

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

From Würzburg to Kabul

Badam Haidari, in his mid-30s, spent seven years in Germany before he was deported to Afghanistan in January. He had previously worked for USAID in Afghanistan and fled the Taliban, whom he still fears years later – hoping that he will be able to return to Germany after all.

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

Persecuted minorities

In January, authorities deported Afghan Hindu Samir Narang to Kabul from Hamburg, where he had lived with his family for four years. Afghanistan, the young man told German public radio, “is not safe.” Minorities from Afghanistan who return because asylum is denied face religious persecution in the Muslim country. Deportation to Afghanistan is “life-threatening” to Samir, says change.org.

Deportations from Germany to Afghanistan

Reluctant returnees

Rejected asylum seekers deported from Germany to Kabul, with 20 euros in their pockets from the German authorities to tide them over at the start, can turn to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for assistance. Funded by the German Foreign Office, members of the IPSO international psychosocial organization counsel the returnees.

Author: Dagmar Breitenbach