Syria, not safe. Syria, not safe, Syria, not safe, Syria, not safe.
It starts with talking about deporting criminals, but it does not stop. This is just the beginning.
Germany is lifting an eight-year-long ban on deportations to Syria, creating a way to
send people back to the devastated and dangerous country. It was announced after a meeting
of the country’s regional interior ministers late last year.
Anyone who commits serious crimes or pursues terrorist intentions in order to seriously
harm our state and our people must leave our country. There are currently around 90 people
seen as possibly dangerous Islamists with Syrian citizenship in Germany. It is hard
to understand why deportation is not even considered in these cases.
Officials insist the decision will only affect a very small group of serious offenders, but
that has done little to comfort many in Berlin’s Syrian community.
I want to know what is driving their fears, understand the consequences of the decision
and why it’s happening now. Wafa Moustafa is one of the hundreds of thousands
of Syrian refugees who’ve found safety in Germany.
She knows what the Assad regime can do. An officer in Syria can ruin your whole life,
can deprive you your freedom, can ruin your family’s life like mine.
Wafa says her father had been taking part in anti-government protests - and was kidnapped
by regime forces. She has not heard from him in more than seven years. She is not a criminal
or a terrorist, but the German government lifting the ban on deportation to Syria worries
her. Her fears are driven, she says, by what has happened with asylum seekers from other
countries with volatile security situations. We know from previous experiences like the
Afghans that the minute the door for deportation is open, everyone is fair game.
The German government warns its own citizens not to go to any part of Afghanistan because
it's so dangerous. This graph shows the number of terror attacks
that have taken place there since 2013. It was so contentious to send people back
to Afghanistan that initially deportations were sporadic and involved convicted criminals.
From 2013 to 2015 less than 10 people were sent to Afghanistan per year.
But numbers increased from 2016 - and those on the deportation list were not all criminals
or terrorists. Like 20-year-old Asef N. His application for
asylum had been rejected. But he was studying at a vocational school with the prospect of
being taken on as an apprentice. That's where police arrested him in 2017 pending
deportation. His classmates protested and he was eventually
released. Stories like these concern Wafa even though she has protection under asylum
laws. I studied here. I've been here now for almost
five years. And yes, I feel that I'm also at risk. I know it is now a matter of time
and maybe in a few years I will also be deported to Syria to a torturous state.
Organizations like Amnesty International say the Assad regime is guilty of gross human
rights violations like forced disappearances, systemic torture and arbitrary executions.
A 2016 report found that in one prison near Damascus, as many as 13,000 people were executed
by hanging between September 2011 and December 2015 with no due process.
Amnesty International is not standing up for criminals saying that they are great. We are
standing up for their rights. And they also have the right not to be sent back to death.
Under the rule of law that we have in Germany, it is really possible to deal with people
who do not abide by German laws. We do have courts that will maybe find those people should
be sent to prison. What we cannot do, Germany is bound to international
law, we cannot send people back to a place that will not guarantee that these people
are not subjected to torture or maybe even die because the situation on the ground is
so poor as it is in Syria. Berlin has yet to announce any concrete plans
to attempt a deportation to Syria and it may prove impossible in practice to do so.
Germany has no diplomatic relations with the Assad regime or direct flights to the country.
But interior minister Horst Seehofer said he is open to deportations following a case-by-
case evaluation. He has been accused of pandering to the far-right
ahead of an election year. I think it is not a question of moving to
the right or moving to other political positions. It's a question about securing our society.
Patrick Sensburg is a law professor and a member of Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian
Democrats. He says lifting the ban on deportations to Syria is above all about prevention.
We are signaling that we do not accept people that are doing major crime or major offences
here in Germany, they are not in a safe haven. We had several attacks in other European countries.
We had attacks also here in Germany. In recent years German authorities have arrested
a number of Syrian migrants who posed a threat to public security.
Despite the arrests, attacks have also taken place.
In 2016, a Syrian who’d been denied asylum blew himself up near a music festival in the
southern German town of Ansbach. And in October of 2020, a 20-year-old Syrian
stabbed one person to death and wounded another in the eastern city of Dresden. The attacker
was said to have had an “Islamist background." If we have clear indicators that these people
planning attacks, are radicalized, we don’t want to wait until the attack takes place
and then react with penal law. We want to get there before because we have to save our
people and our country as well. Sensburg says that finding safe areas and
ensuring deportees are not subjected to violations have to be secured beforehand.
He insists none of this means Germany is willing to deal with the Assad regime as such - just
with lower levels of administration. We do not want diplomatic relations to the
government yet so we have to open other channels. We can talk about discussions on the police
level, we can talk about a level that is lower than the minister state secretary, so we have
many possibilities about communication. We are in communication about, for example, the
intelligence institutions, so of course if we want somebody to be brought back to Syria,
I think there will be channels of communication that secures that.
To Wafa, the interior ministry’s decision to lift the ban on deportations to Syria could
cast a shadow over Germany’s reputation as a beacon of hope - and justice - for those
who fled the Assad regime. The country’s laws recognize universal jurisdiction
for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
So, when refugees identified two alleged former Syrian intelligence officers here,
German officials acted - and the two men were arrested and charged. Their trial started
in April 2020. Wafa spent days outside the courthouse holding
photos of her father and others who've disappeared in Syria.
She says that was when she found something, she had long searched for but only found in
her adopted homeland. I was like, ‘Ok, this is what justice looks
like.’ And this is the first step on a very long,
exhausting, difficult road towards justice for Syria and for Syrians. Germany decided
that they will not compromise, they will not forgive war criminals and they will prosecute
them even though they are not Germans. The crimes [were] not committed on German land.
And the victims are not German. And now we're here today talking about refugees,
even criminals are to be deported to Syria. So, it is a contrast and it doesn't make any
sense to us. And we're here to say that this is not acceptable.