Deportation
	Frankfurt, Germany
	By URSULA SAUTTER | Frankfurt airport

Posted Sunday, June 16, 2002; 11:45 a.m. BST
Salwan Jaber Ghareb's dream has become a nightmare. In 1999, hoping to escape religious persecution in Iraq, where he grew up in the country's tiny Baptist community, the 19-year-old fled to Jordan. On April 18, 2002, after he'd scraped together $4,000 to pay a people smuggler to get him to Germany, he finally boarded a plane bound for his chosen destination, Germany. On arrival in Frankfurt, however, Ghareb was arrested as an illegal alien and his application for asylum was turned down within a couple of days. Now, he awaits deportation at the airport's transit area. "I was told this was the best country to live in peace," he says. "Now I have no future."

Like Ghareb, many refugees try to enter the country by plane, the vast majority of them — more than 25,000 during the last nine years — via Frankfurt's busy international airport. Detained at the holding facility, recent arrivals are subjected to the so-called airport procedure. Introduced in 1993, a year after the influx of asylum seekers skyrocketed to almost 440,000 — primarily in response to the Bosnian war — the airport procedure is a fast-track way of shunting illegal asylum seekers back from whence they came. Within two days, claims by refugees can be rejected as "manifestly unfounded." In about one-fourth of these cases, expulsion is the result. Germany has long been a prime destination for asylum seekers. Between 1990 and 2001, almost 2.05 million people applied for asylum in the country — and according to the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees (BAFL) this amounts to 41% of the overall number of applicants in Western Europe during that period. According to bafl, only 10% were eventually granted asylum, although some rejected asylum seekers may be allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons.

While asylum seekers are supposed to stay in the airport's refugee center for a maximum of 19 days, an increasing number "voluntarily" remain for weeks or months while they wait for new passports or visas — or a flight back to the country from which they fled. The alternative is incarceration. Though a new €13 million facility with 25 rooms for 100 inmates has just opened, most refugees think life in the sterile transit quarters is like being in jail anyway. "This place is a prison," says Ghareb, who has languished here for eight weeks. "There are security cameras and I can't get out. It's driving me crazy."

	"45% of Germans think the number of immigrants in the country should be reduced" — Emnid, March, 2002

Small wonder that, in the past, some inmates have escaped or gone on hunger strike to draw attention to their plight. "Frustration and fear of being expelled sometimes vent themselves in self-mutilation or suicide attempts," says Clemens Niekrawitz, head of the Ecumenical Service for Refugees at Frankfurt airport. In May of 2000, these fears became too much for Algerian asylum seeker Naimah Hadjar. After spending eight months in detention at the airport, a mental institution and a jail — and terrified at the thought of returning home to face persecution — she hanged herself in the shower.

Hadjar's suicide intensified criticism of the airport procedure and the no-man's-land the refugee center had become. Commissioner for Foreigners' Issues Marieluise Beck — a member of the Greens, junior coalition partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's center-left government — believes the procedure with its "mad conditions" is a "deterrence scenario" designed "to prevent immigration by air." Any "improvement necessary for humanitarian reasons" — such as shortening the maximum stay in the transit area — "is considered a loophole" for increased immigration, Beck complains. So far, though, the Greens' repeated attempts to remedy the situation have failed.

Human-rights organizations are even more vociferous in their condemnation. "This is a parody of what an asylum procedure should be," says Bernd Mesovic, head of legal affairs at the pro-refugee group Pro Asyl. Currently, asylum seekers only have three days to lodge an appeal against a negative first decision by the bafl. "That's much too short," Mesovic argues. He wants the airport procedure abolished completely.

Since the number of asylum applications in Germany has fallen dramatically over the past decade, the number of refugees deported from Frankfurt has fallen too. With the country now likely to accept only skilled immigrants, the drop in deportations should continue. But the flow of asylum seekers won't cease, and people like Ghareb — with no prospects in Germany and no hope at home — could still find themselves stranded at the airport's transit facility.

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