Category Archives: refugees

Europe needs the migrants it doesn’t want

Paul Mason writes: The OECD’s central projection is that, to stand a chance of avoiding stagnation, the EU’s workforce will have to add 50 million more people through migration by 2060 (a similar number is needed in the US). The Paris-based thinktank says if that doesn’t happen, it is a “significant downside risk” to growth. What this means should be spelled out, because no politician has bothered to do so: to avoid economic stagnation in the long term, Europe needs migrants.

Consent for inward economic migration is fragile and falling – as evidenced by the sudden rush by politicians and tabloids to reclassify the Syrian exodus as a special case. Even if populist resistance to migration stops short of fascism, and even if anti-migration parties are disempowered by the electoral system, their existence highlights a failing consensus. And that is, in turn, founded on economic failure. The Eurozone has produced an arc of stagnation and discontent along its southern border. There is mass unemployment in the very countries that have become the first port of call for migrants and refugees.

So the challenge for Europe is clear. To absorb the refugees we are going to need a new set of rules about where they’re processed; new arrangements for internal travel in Europe. Plus a new social consensus about who can come, who can’t and where they are going to live and work. And, ultimately, a massive economic stimulus.

If the EU cannot do all this, its constituent nations will begin to do so separately. And so, in the space of a summer, the refugee crisis crashes into the Euro crisis, and the one consistent problem is failure of leadership, anticipation and vision. [Continue reading…]

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Faith in humanity should be restored

Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam International, writes: In 1978, I ran away from the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin in Uganda to the United Kingdom via Kenya. My family and I chose Britain, knowing then – as I do now – that this was a country with a door open to people like me. As I arrived in the UK, this black, 18-year-old African refugee girl was not deported. I got the chance to stay.

This was a European country where I safely had a chance to fulfil my potential. I studied at the University of Manchester and, years later, have been brought full circle back to the UK to serve a great movement, which started in the UK, called Oxfam.

My story might have turned out very differently if a door to a safe haven was closed to me forty years ago. That memory quickly turns now into a calling.

Today, we are in the midst of a global and complex displacement crisis. To view this global crisis solely through the lens of Europe is to miss the bigger picture.

According to the UN figures, 59.5 million people fled from their homes at the end of 2014 – an increase of 63 percent compared to a decade ago – and the highest number since World War II.

The majority of displaced people are as young as or younger than I was when I fled Uganda for the UK.

Oxfam is well-placed to connect the dots between the sources and the destinations of displaced people. This helps us understand the reasons for displacement and to strive for solutions.

We witness the terrible human suffering that every day forces people into exile. We know this well because we work in nine of the top ten source countries for refugees.

It is clear to us that the broken politics of conflict weigh most heavily on forced migration. The UN recently found that the majority of people arriving in Europe by sea were fleeing from war, conflict or persecution – half of them from Syria and Afghanistan.

Yet, conflict is preventable. Critical questions must be asked of international political leaders who are initiating or prolonging these conflicts but are unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their humanitarian consequences. [Continue reading…]

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On the refugee issue, French politicians are paralyzed by fear

Sylvie Kauffmann writes: When the body of a Syrian toddler was washed up on a Turkish beach, most European newspapers put the excruciating picture on their front page. In France, the only major national paper to do so was Le Monde. Have we become numb?

Polls actually reveal some uncomfortable truths. The number of people in France opposed to taking in refugees from Syria, for example, has decreased since July, down from 64 percent to 56 percent, but they are still a majority. There is a strong partisan divide: 91 percent of National Front voters and 67 percent of former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s supporters are against taking in more migrants, while 68 percent of Socialist voters and 73 percent of Green supporters are in favor.

There is also a generational and social divide; older and well-off people are more likely to accept migrants. The reason is simple: Older people have left the competition for jobs, and well-off people don’t live in neighborhoods with high immigrant populations. The age category most hostile to new immigrants is people 35 to 49; not surprisingly, it is also the one where the far-right National Front enjoys more support.

Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, has not been very vocal on the migrant crisis — she doesn’t need to. Her party is the elephant in the room. Its 20 to 25 percent share of the votes over the past year partly explains why French politicians, with the belated exception of the Greens, are so silent about the refugee issue: They are paralyzed by fear, the fear of feeding the xenophobic National Front. [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Some governments in Eastern Europe have even specifically indicated they don’t want to accommodate non-Christian refugees, out of supposed fear over the ability of Muslims to integrate into Western society.

“Refugees are fleeing fear,” urged a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency last week. “Refugees are not to be feared.”

It’s important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees. And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.

Consider this 1938 article in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid still known for its bouts of right-wing populism. Its headline warned of “German Jews Pouring Into This Country.” And it began as follows:

“The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.”

In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the ‘back door’ — a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.

The number of aliens entering this country can be seen by the number of prosecutions in recent months. It is very difficult for the alien to escape the increasing vigilance of the police and port authorities.

Even if aliens manage to break through the defences, it is not long before they are caught and deported.

No matter the alarming rhetoric of Hitler’s fascist state — and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others — popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.

“Of all the groups in the 20th century,” write the authors of the 1999 book, “Refugees in the Age of Genocide,” “refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as ‘genuine’, but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as sympathy.”

Part of that hostility was fueled, as some of the European grievances are now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this instance communism and anarchist violence. [Continue reading…]

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Refugee crisis spurs European interest in Israeli border barriers

Reuters reports: Faced with a surge in migration from the Middle East and North Africa, two European countries are exploring the possibility of erecting towering steel security fences along parts of their borders, similar to Israel’s barrier with Egypt.

Hungary and Bulgaria have made preliminary inquiries about buying the Israeli-designed fences, according to an Israeli business source who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the discussions.

Both EU countries are beefing up their borders to deter migrants, many of them refugees from wars, who are seeking to use them as gateways to richer countries further north and west, particularly Germany. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that his country does not want to take in large numbers of Muslims, in defence of Hungary’s response to the surge in refugees trying to enter the country.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Orban told journalists outside the EU headquarters at Brussels.

“We do not like the consequences,” he said, referring to the country’s 150-year history of Ottoman rule during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Orban said those fleeing conflict in countries such as Syria should not try to cross into Hungary, as he defended the country’s decision to erect a fence along its border. [Continue reading…]

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Neo-Nazi arsonists: German officials concerned by growing far-right networks

Der Spiegel reports: It was April 16 when around 100 right-wing extremists marched through the small town of Nauen in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Their message: “Nein zum Heim!” or “No to the Hostel!” They carried posters and German flags along with them. “Nauen Will Stay White!” read one. “Take Action!” read another.

One day later, employees of Mikado, a local youth center, found that the tires of the center’s minibus had been slashed. There was a note under the windshield wiper reading: “Dear asylum friends, Tröglitz is here too.” The reference was to an arson attack on a refugee shelter not two weeks before in the town of Tröglitz in the eastern state of Saxony.

Skip ahead to Monday night a week ago when a planned asylum hostel — to be established inside a high school gymnasium — was gutted by flames in Nauen, just outside Berlin. The fire occurred just a short time before the first refugees were scheduled to move in. On the Tuesday evening after the fire, a group of 300 assembled for a vigil amid the biting stench of the rubble. Local politician Roger Lewandowski, of the conservative Christian Democrats, pledged that town residents wouldn’t be cowed by the attack. “If you shrink in the face of such attacks, gymnasiums and hostels will soon be burning everywhere.”

Soon?

The fire in Nauen was the 27th at a German refugee hostel since 2012 — and the fifth within a single week. [Continue reading…]

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American paranoia and govt. red tape creates multiple barriers for Syrian refugees

Olivia Goldhill writes: [O]nce the US agrees, in theory, to resettle a refugee, authorities then begin a laborious vetting process that can take up to two years, a State Department spokesman told Voice of America.

The refugees, who have already been vetted by the UN, must then be screened by US authorities — involving the National Counterterrorism Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and Homeland Security officers, former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in February.

Syrians who have been approved for resettlement are often survivors of torture, female-led families without protection, and unaccompanied minors. They can be in danger throughout the vetting process, and delays are common, Daryl Grisgraber, senior advocate for the Middle East and North Africa at Refugees International, tells Quartz.

“Once the person is cleared medically, that medical clearance may even expire while the security check is happening,” she says from Washington. “There’s a whole cycle that makes the process quite slow.”

Syrian refugees face particularly long delays because of anxieties about terrorism in the Middle East. But excessive fears can make the resettlement process redundant. The US does not accept refugees who have given “material support” to armed groups, but this has previously been used to block people for the slightest excuse — a Burundi refugee was detained for 20 months because armed rebels robbed him of $4 and his lunch. The immigration judge decided this counted as “material support.” [Continue reading…]

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The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees

Ishaan Tharoor writes: To varying degrees, elements within Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have invested in the Syrian conflict, playing a conspicuous role in funding and arming a constellation of rebel and Islamist factions fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

None of these countries are signatories of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and lays out their rights, as well as the obligations of states to safeguard them. For a Syrian to enter these countries, they would have to apply for a visa, which, in the current circumstances, is rarely granted. According to the BBC, the only Arab countries where a Syrian can travel without a visa are Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen — hardly choice or practical destinations.

Like European countries, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors also have fears over new arrivals taking jobs from citizens, and may also invoke concerns about security and terrorism. But the current gulf aid outlay for Syrian refugees, which amounts to collective donations under $1 billion (the United States has given four times that sum), seems short — and is made all the more galling when you consider the vast sums Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. poured into this year’s war effort in Yemen, an intervention some consider a strategic blunder.

As Bobby Ghosh, managing editor of the news site Quartz, points out, the gulf states in theory have a far greater ability to deal with large numbers of arrivals than Syria’s more immediate and poorer neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan:

The region has the capacity to quickly build housing for the refugees. The giant construction companies that have built the gleaming towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh should be contracted to create shelters for the influx. Saudi Arabia has plenty of expertise at managing large numbers of arrivals: It receives an annual surge of millions of Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. There’s no reason all this knowhow can’t be put to humanitarian use.

No reason other than either indifference or a total lack of political will. [Continue reading…]

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A broken family: The father and relatives of the drowned Syrian toddler

The Washington Post reports: Somewhere between Turkey and Greece, the boat carrying Abdullah Kurdi and his family was filling with water. They wore life vests, and Kurdi was holding his wife’s hands, he later recalled. His children, 3-year-old Aylan and 5-year-old Galip, were seated nearby.

As the small boat began to sink, passengers panicked.

“My children slipped from my hands,” Abdullah told Turkey’s Dogan News Agency on Thursday. “We tried to hold on to the boat, but it deflated rapidly. Everyone was screaming. I could not hear the voices of my children and my wife.”

Abdullah swam to a beach on the Turkish coast, following the lights on the shore, he said. “I looked for my wife and children on the beach but couldn’t find them.”

By now, the world knows that his two sons and wife drowned, along with nine other migrants. A photograph of Aylan’s tiny body washed up on a beach has gone viral, shocking the world and starkly illustrating the plight of those caught in the conflicts raging in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa. These concurrent crises have produced the largest displacement of people since World War II. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: While the photograph of a 3-year-old Syrian boy’s body quickly focused the world’s attention on the migrant crisis in the Middle East and Africa, it has taken on a particular resonance in Canada with the discovery that the boy’s family had been unable to obtain immigration visas.

The death of the boy, Aylan Kurdi, who drowned with his brother and mother off the coast of Turkey, has also become an emotional issue in the Canadian election.

Even before the plight of the Kurdi family flashed across social media, opposition politicians, along with advocacy and religious groups, had strongly criticized the refugee policies of Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper’s Conservative government.

In January, the government promised that it would accept 10,000 refugees from Syria over three years. But over the next several months, immigration officials and Chris Alexander, the citizenship and immigration minister, repeatedly declined to disclose how [many] people had been admitted. [Continue reading…]

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Refugees — the real antiwar activists

For those of us living in countries where our daily lives are not impacted by the effects of war, there’s not much sacrifice involved in opposing war.

It was different during the Vietnam war. At that time, those who refused to fight might end up going to prison or fleeing the country.

Nowadays, it’s easier to declare one’s opposition to war than it is to go on a gluten-free diet.

For millions of refugees, however, this isn’t so much a moral or political question; it’s a question of life or death.

(Click the speaker icon, bottom right, to hear the simple message from this Syrian boy in Budapest.)

From the impoverished mindset of an anti-immigrant bigot like Peter Bucklitsch — a UKIP member and parliamentary candidate in Britain’s 2015 election — refugees are greedy people seeking “the good life” and their suffering is the result of their unwillingness to patiently wait in line.


This perspective mirrors a commonly-held view of the separation between the rich and the poor: that the poor, driven by envy, want to deprive the rich of the profits of their hard work.

What this separation actually represents is the psychological insulation provided by wealth: that it diminishes the individual’s capacity to empathize.

If the refugee is the archetypal outsider — the person who now belongs nowhere — perhaps the reason the images of Aylan Kurdi have had a wide impact after so many other images of human misery inside Syria have seemed easy to ignore, was because this innocent child, neatly dressed and still wearing his tiny shoes, looked like he could have belonged to anyone.

We didn’t see him as other; we saw him as ours.

And this signals what marks our world cleaved as it is by so many conflicting identities: a lack of solidarity.

The call to respond to the refugee crisis, is not just a call to take pity on those whose lives have been torn apart by war, but also to recognize that our lives are just as fragile as theirs.

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Just stop the war — easier said than done.

Aylan Kurdi’s family were originally from Kobane. Even though Kurdish fighters with U.S. air support were able to militarily reclaim the city from ISIS, it has since been left in ruins.

Turkey’s effort to prevent a Kurdish state emerge in northern Syria is likely to mean that Kobane has little prospect of reconstruction.

The Assad regime, propped up by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, will continue fighting for its survival for as long as it retains outside support.

And thus the tide of refugees will continue to flow.


The lack of response from the wealthiest Arab states is worth noting, but it doesn’t absolve Europe from the need to craft a coherent policy for confronting a collective crisis.

As Dr Françoise Sivignon and Janice Hughes underline:

Seeking asylum is not a crime. Migrants are not a security risk. They have not come to occupy Europe or to get medical care. They are simply, desperately, seeking a dignified life. In fact, migration drives economic prosperity and social and cultural diversity. It is an asset not a threat.

Likewise, the U.S., given its instrumental role in destabilizing the Middle East, and given its history as a nation of immigrants, should play a leading role in providing refuge for those who have fled from the wide-ranging effects of America’s wars.

For that to happen, pro-immigrant voices in the U.S. need to become louder than the anti-immigrant and xenophobic currents that exert an over-sized influence on America’s dealings with the rest of the world.

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Stranded on the platform, refugees feel the force of hostility in Hungary

By Umut Korkut, Glasgow Caledonian University

After being blockaded for days, Budapest’s main rail terminal has been reopened to migrants and refugees desperate to settle in the EU.

An estimated 3,000 people had been camped outside the station, and once it was reopened at least 1,000 rushed in to try and board trains – although there were none to board since departures to Western Europe had been cancelled for “security reasons”. The Hungarian authorities reinstated the policy of registering all migrants before allowing them to leave the country, a demand issued by various European leaders including Angela Merkel.

This remarkable series of events highlights the extreme intolerance that has characterised Hungarian politics for some time. But it must also serve as a warning to the rest of Europe. Hungarian xenophobia is becoming a template for rightist movements across the continent.

In 2014, I conducted research on anti-immigrant feelings in Hungary and Turkey, and it was clear to me that fear of migrants was far outpacing the reality of the “threat”.

While there were already signs that Turkey was becoming a major destination for refugees leaving Syria, there was little indication that Hungary would also feel the brunt of the refugee crisis caused by wars in the Middle East. Given its position in central Europe, you might think Hungary would have little to fear from prospective refugees. But the number of immigrants rarely bears any relationship to the fear of them.

Right after the EU accession, a 2007 opinion survey saw 80% of Hungarians say they would not welcome ethnic groups such as Arabs, Chinese and Russians into their country. The same refusal rate applied for the Pirez – a completely fictitious group added into the survey.

So it is perhaps not surprising that the actual arrival of migrants and refugees in Hungary this summer has caused such a stir.

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Father of drowned boy Aylan Kurdi plans to return to Syria

The Guardian reports: The father of the drowned Syrian boy who was photographed lying lifeless on a Turkish beach has said he is preparing to take the bodies of his two sons and wife to be buried in his home town of Kobani.

Abdullah Kurdi, a Kurdish Syrian who has been in Turkey for three years and previously lived in Damascus,said he no longer had any desire to continue on to Europe. [Continue reading…]

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Refugee crisis: Hungary PM says Europe in grip of madness

The Guardian reports: Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has claimed Europe is in the grip of madness over immigration and refugees, and argued that he was defending European Christianity against a Muslim influx.

Orbán’s incendiary remarks came as he arrived in Brussels for a confrontation with EU leaders over his hardline policies in Europe’s biggest migration emergency since the second world war.

“Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe,” Orbán wrote in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

“Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.” [Continue reading…]

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The world’s failure in Syria

The Guardian reports: The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west. [Continue reading…]


To speak of the world’s failure in Syria, presupposes some sort of global responsibility, yet many war-weary Americans might wonder: what makes Syria our responsibility?

The answer is simple: the war in Iraq.

Had the U.S. and its allies not invaded Iraq in 2003, it’s hard to envisage that the region with Syria at its epicenter would now be ripping itself apart.

That’s not to suggest that absent the Iraq war, there would now be something that could reasonably be called Middle East peace.

Yet it’s fair to assume that however the region’s systemic injustices might have metastasized over the last decade, the result would most likely not have been the worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

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Britain takes in so few refugees from Syria they would fit on a subway train

The Washington Post reports: Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled their country since the war began, including hundreds of thousands who have poured into Europe, the number who have been resettled in Britain could fit on a single London Underground train — with plenty of seats to spare.

Just 216 Syrian refugees have qualified for the government’s official relocation program, according to data released last week. (Tube trains seat about 300.) British Prime Minister David Cameron has reassured his anxious public that the total number won’t rise above 1,000.

As Germany prepares for an expected onslaught of 800,000 asylum applications just this year, the contrast between the two biggest powers in Europe couldn’t be sharper. On a continent that is supposed to be bound together by a common set of rules and values, the impact of this summer’s migrant crisis is being felt disproportionately by a handful of countries while others, such as Britain, have resisted efforts to more equitably share the burden. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: David Miliband has called on the British government to take in its fair share of refugees fleeing the war in Syria and other conflicts, and said continued failure to do so would represent an abandonment of the UK’s legal and humanitarian traditions.

The former foreign secretary, who now heads the International Rescue Committee (IRC) aid agency, has told the Guardian that the strict limits Britain has placed on the acceptance of refugees represented a double standard that would ultimately undermine Britain’s influence abroad.

“When I hear people say we’ve got to firm up our borders, it makes me think of the message we’re sending to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, which is to keep their borders open for Syrians,” Miliband said in an interview in New York.

“People in Britain have got to understand that these countries notice the difference between what we’re saying and what we’re doing.” [Continue reading…]

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Finding a refugee in my basement was a wake-up call to the crisis

Bernie Duffy writes: ur neighbourhood in the western suburbs of Hamburg was built during the Nazi era. Short, uniform red-brick buildings, covered in lush ivy, stand in neat rows perpendicular to a quiet leafy street. My girlfriend and I, from Scotland and Ireland respectively, love it here. The neighbours are largely foreigners too and there is a great sense of community.

One unusual feature of our street is the basement complex that connects the buildings. During the war, this labyrinth of tunnels was used for air raids. Blast-proof metal doors are still in place and have to be opened with huge levers, like on a ship.

Hamburg is a tolerant, cosmopolitan city. It has been relatively welcoming to refugees (compared to some other German cities). The biggest humanitarian crisis to hit Europe since the war is happening, and everyone here is acutely aware of it. At Hamburg’s main train station, hundreds of migrants arrive every day, and can be seen standing around in groups, looking confused and not knowing where to go next. In response citizens are mobilising to provide support. Container-style villages have been popping up in some of the nicest neighbourhoods, to provide emergency housing for the sudden influx of people. As a freelance consultant, I visit many clients’ offices and in each I see a corner with donations piled high to send to the refugee centres.

Last Thursday morning I had an earlier than usual start. Dragging myself out of bed at 6am for an important meeting on the other side of the city, the refugee crisis was the last thing on my mind. Dressed and ready, I went to the cellar to fetch my bike. I was just about to pull it out of the storage room when there was a movement at the edge of my line of vision. I nearly hit my head on the low ceiling in fright, as there was a woman, scrambling to pick up her clothes from the floor. [Continue reading…]

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Icelanders call on government to take in more Syrian refugees

The Guardian reports: Thousands of Icelanders have called on their government to take in more Syrian refugees – with many offering to accomodate them in their own homes and give them language lessons.

Iceland, which has a population of just over 300,000, has currently capped the number of refugees it accepts at 50.

Author and professor Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir put out a call on Facebook on Sunday asking for Icelanders to speak out if they wanted the government to do more to help those fleeing Syria. More than 12,000 people have responded to her Facebook group “Syria is calling” to sign an open letter to their welfare minister, Eygló Harðar. [Continue reading…]

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Under the strain of refugees, which Germany will prevail? The dark or the bright?

Der Spiegel reports: Anger is in the air. Angela Merkel has come to Heidenau and the locals are lined up to see her. But it is anything but a friendly welcome: It is a crowd full of hate. Some call out: “Traitor to Your People!” Others yell “We Are the Pack,” a reference to Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s strong condemnation of right-wing, anti-refugee demonstrators.

It is the pride of idiots. After the chancellor disappears into the former building supplies store, where 400 refugees have found shelter, the residents of the small Saxony town begin talking about the outsiders who have become their temporary neighbors.

“Did you see the young men? Full of hormones and with nothing sensible to do. They can’t help but get dumb ideas,” says one tanned pensioner wearing a bike helmet. A woman nods and says she no longer allows her granddaughter to walk past the building supplies store alone.

A policeman with foreign features is standing in front of the villagers wearing a firearm and a baton, but his face is friendly. Eventually, he joins the discussion. “I was born in Germany in 1980, but my parents are from Afghanistan,” he says. “They came to escape the war with the Russians.” His German is flawless. The emblem of the Lower Saxony police force is displayed prominently on his breast. The Saxons around him listen closely. And are amazed.

“My father was a teacher in Afghanistan and my mother worked in the technical field,” the policeman says. “But of course they could no longer practice their professions here.” The young man speaks calmly, but insistently, looking at the people behind the police barricade directly in the eyes. He declines to give his name — not out of fear, but because he doesn’t want to speak of his political viewpoints while in uniform. The man with the Afghan parents has completely internalized Germany’s civil servant principles.

The Heidenau residents say nothing; their enmity goes silent for a short moment. For the first time all day. [Continue reading…]

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