“They should just shoot us all”

Refugees, politicians and desperation

by Matern Boeselager

August 28, 2014

[Translated with permission from original article in German on Vice]

“They should just bring guns and shoot us all!”, Mohammed from Niger shouted in rage into my audio recorder last Monday. “We have survived the NATO bombings in Lybia! We have survived crossing the sea! But this is a fucking stupid life, three years on the streets of Europe, no job, nothing. If they don’t want us here, they should just kill us”.

Now Mohammed is on the roof of a hostel in the Gürtelstraße in Berlin and threatens to jump to his death if the police attempts to get him down with force. Together with eight other refugees, he set off the second Berlin refugee crisis in two months. In July it was Ohlauer Straße that was besieged by police, supporters expressing solidarity and journalists; now it’s the Gürtelstraße in Friedrichshain. But by now, it feels like the German public is mostly getting bored with the protest.

It’s not just the BZ expressing its irritation with a headline such as “Will the refugee theatricals ever stop?”. In almost all comment columns, you come across the same opinion over and over again: the refugees are “blackmailers” who are being “instrumentalised” by left-wing radicals and exploit the alleged weakness of Berlin politicians in order to obtain unfair advantages, trigger expensive police operations and generally get on the nerves of all respectable citizens. In Münich they would have dealt with this in short order!

People who write those things are to some extent right: first of all, no one really wants this kind of crisis to happen – not the politicians, not the police, and certainly not the refugees themselves to start with. And secondly, it is true that the refugees are being instrumentalised – by the Berlin Senate.

These 108 refugees, who were given notice on Monday from the State Office for Health and Social Affairs (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales, LAGeSo) that they would have to leave their accommodation by Tuesday morning, are part of the group from Oranienplatz [former refugee protest camp in Kreubzerg]. Last April they had accepted the Senate’s offer – granting accommodation for six months and a sympathetic review of each individual asylum application – and had voluntarily demolished the protest camp themselves [English version here]. In order to prove their goodwill, they even challenged, partly also with force, those other camp occupants who refused to trust the Senate’s promises. The refugees thus fulfilled their part of the agreement and provided the Senate with the “peaceful eviction” that it so urgently needed for PR reasons.

In return, the Senate has taken refugees for a ride. Promises were made that asylum proceedings for refugees coming from other German states would be moved to Berlin, but that never happened — there is no single case where that actually took place. Instead, now the LAGeSo claims that the review of those 108 applications is already completed, unfortunately all have been rejected and therefore refugees must please leave their accommodation and go back to those other German states or European countries they came from. According to refugee supporter Dirk Stegemann, there is no way the administration could have reviewed those cases so fast: “they must have done that in 10 minutes each, that is not a proper review”.

But left-wing supporters are not the only ones who are shocked by the Senate’s behavior: the mayor of Kreuzberg, Monika Hermann, issued a statement calling it “disgraceful”, Fabio Rheinhard of the Piratenpartei called it “sleazy and dishonest”, and the Berlin Refugee Council (Flüchtlingsrat) described it as “breach of promises” taken to “a whole new level”. For the refugees themselves, it means that the protest they carried on for almost two years has been completely useless – just because they did trust the Senate. Now they are not only homeless, but also threatened with deportation.

On Monday they returned despondent to Oranienplatz, to rebuild the protest camp. The police didn’t allow that and in the ensuing scramble several of the refugees were injured, seven were arrested. Anyone who has seen the impotent fury with which the refugees shouted at police to just arrest them all or shoot them right there, knows how wrong it is to dismiss these people as lazy “asylum blackmailers”, occupying the roofs of buildings purely for the sake of confrontation. They just see no other way to deal with the indifference at federal and state level.

After two years with no success, the refugees are at the end of the line. “Just let us go, we want to leave,” said their leader from Oranienplatz, Bashir Zakariah. “Now we only want Germans to say it out right in front of the media: ‘We do not want you in our country. We do not want black people here.’ If they say that, then we will all go. They have destroyed our lives.”

[Translated with permission from original article in German on Vice]