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Sending Kosovars Home, an Awkward German Moment
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/20/world/20GERM.html

November 20, 2000

By ROGER COHEN

MUNICH, Germany, Nov. 17   The girl is pale-skinned and green- eyed
with blond hair cut to frame her face. Now 12, she arrived in
Germany from Kosovo almost two years ago; her German is now near
perfect. At home in her adoptive land, she seems a model immigrant,
bright and integrated.

 But Lumturije Bytyqi is to be expelled from Germany on Monday. She
must leave with her two brothers, 15 and 9, and her parents. They
have been told to gather outside their Munich asylum-seekers' home
for transport to the airport, where a special flight to Pristina,
Kosovo's capital, awaits the family and others like them.

 "I like my life here," the girl says, sitting in a room where
half- packed suitcases are piled in a corner. "German was not
difficult to learn. But now I am being sent back and I don't
understand why." Her father, Zymber, a crumpled unshaven figure,
says the family's only plan once in Kosovo is "somehow to survive
the winter."

 For German authorities, this is a clear-cut case. The Bytyqi
family, like about 160,000 other Kosovo Albanians, was admitted to
Germany as a refugee family because of persecution and a war; the
war is now over, so the Kosovars must return home. "Legal
alternatives are exhausted," said Stefanie Weber, a Bavarian
Interior Ministry official. "They must go."

 Deportation has become a non- word in German since Hitler and no
official here would ever use the term, "deportieren." But
departures, forced or not, have been proceeding briskly in the
southern state of Bavaria, where about 22,000 Kosovo Albanians
remained at the start of the year.

 Of these, 16,000 have now left, said Hermann Weishaupt, an
official dealing with foreigners. About 12,000 flew out
"voluntarily," another 3,000 chose freely to go overland, and 1,000
were "sent back."

 That drastic measure, and the linguistic contortions dictated by
history that surround it, illustrate the highly charged nature of
an intensifying debate about immigration in Germany, the European
country with the largest population, and, at seven million, the
largest number of foreigners.

 As elsewhere in Europe, that debate centers on whether foreigners
like the Bytyqis should be allowed to stay, and   if so   how far
they should adapt to the local culture. The discussion goes deeper:
should Germany, where nationhood has long been associated with
blood lines and where it was more traditional to emigrate than to
integrate strangers, view itself as a "land of immigration" at all?

 These questions reflect what is now the fundamental divide in
many European countries, accentuated in Germany both by its past
and the size of the foreign minority. 

 On one side stands a resurgent band of patriots angered by what
they see as the dilution of German national identity through an
influx of foreigners; on the other, the German "Europeans" forged
by postwar culture who say the German nation state died with Hitler
and the only future for the country is as a multi-cultural unit of
the European Union.

 This month, Bavaria's dominant Christian Social Union, a sister
party to the opposition Christian Democrats, made its position
clear. "Germany is not a classical country of immigration and must
not be in the future," it stated.

 The party added that any foreigner in Germany must adapt to a
"Leitkultur," or "guiding culture" it defined as having a "European
western foundation of values rooted in Christianity, the
Enlightenment and Humanism."

 Given that the more than two million Turks in Germany are Muslims,
as are most Kosovars (albeit few of them very religious), the
reference to a western and Christian guiding culture was
provocative.

 But similar language has been used recently by several Christian
Democratic politicians. Laurenz Meyer, the new party secretary
general, declared this month that, "I am proud to be a German"  
the exact language used on many badges of far-right parties.

 The reactions have been vigorous and included an extraordinarily
angry outburst this month by the leader of the largest association
of German Jews.

 `What is all this talk about guiding culture?" Paul Spiegel
demanded. "Is it German guiding culture to hunt down strangers, set
fire to synagogues, and kill homeless people? What is the point of
turning the immigration question into a campaign theme, of babbling
about so- called `useful' and `useless' foreigners?" Mr. Spiegel
was referring to the tiny fringe of rightist Germans who have this
year committed the acts he described, and to discussion about how
to prevent the entry of unqualified foreigners like the Bytyqis
while promoting that of educated immigrants able to spur high- tech
industries. But his fury reflected Germany's growing unease.

 Danijela Karic, the daughter of immigrants who came to Germany
from Yugoslavia in the 1960's under the country's former
gastarbeiter (or guest worker) program, now works for the Interior
Ministry in Bavaria, the most conservative and Roman Catholic of
Germany's states. She has no doubts about her current mission to
send Kosovo Albanians home.

 "You cannot compare the reasons why people like my parents came
and why those now here from Kosovo came," she said. "My father came
as a guest worker, with the idea that he would work for a few years
and then go back. But he had the will to stay and the readiness to
learn the language and accept the ground rules of German society.
The Kosovars are not working, the war is over, and German society
is supporting them."

 A colleague, Michael Ziegler, added that Germany itself was a very
different place from the country of the 1960's, when the economy
was booming. How, he asked, can you have "guest workers" today when
there are more than three million Germans unemployed?

 In Canada, Australia or the United States, he said, immigrants
"were wanted and needed to civilize the country." But Germany, he
suggested, was in danger of losing its civilization by becoming a
place where people of different cultures lived beside each other
with no binding thread.

 All the Bytyqis know is their immediate fate: forced return to a
Kosovo where their home has been destroyed by the Serbs and no job
awaits. Zymber Bytyqi carries a bag full of official correspondence
informing him of the repeated rejection of his requests for asylum.

 A recent letter, dated Sept. 5, told him that if he was still in
Germany after Oct. 5, he and his family must reckon with
"Abschiebung"   that is, "sending away." On appeal, this deadline
was extended to Nov. 20.

 Mr. Bytyqi has been in Germany, at first illegally, then with
temporary papers, for seven years. He fled from Kosovo after the
Albanians in his factory in Urosevac were replaced by Serbs and he
found himself jobless. Since arriving in Munich, he has worked on
building sites and, most recently, at an Italian restaurant,
earning about $1,000 a month.

 Some of this money was sent home, where his wife and three
children remained until the end of 1998. Then, as conflict and
killing between Serbs and Albanians intensified, he paid about
$4,000 to Albanian people-smugglers to bring the family to Germany.

 Under Germany's welfare system, the newly reunited Bytyqi family
was housed and fed and, as Lumturije explains, given about $40 a
month spending money for each adult and $20 for each child. Her
education, and that of her brothers, was paid, as were medical and
dental bills.

 Mr. Weishaupt of the Bavarian Interior Ministry put the cost to
the German taxpayer at about $450 a month per immigrant   a sum
that, together with high unemployment, helps explain German
reluctance to embrace mass immigration, although it is a fact of
postwar German life.

 As in France, the large Muslim presence stirs particular unease.
This month, a Dýsseldorf court sentenced Muhammad Metin Kaplan, a
radical Islamic leader from Turkey often referred to as the "caliph
of Cologne," to four years' imprisonment for ordering the killing
in Berlin of a rival, more moderate religious leader. Mr. Kaplan
heads a Cologne-based group called "Islamic State" that has called
for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Anatolia.

 Volker Brinkmann, the state prosecutor, said Mr. Kaplan and his
followers "believe they live in a state within a state in the
Federal Republic of Germany and attempts to adapt, to integrate,
are foreign to these fundamentalists."

 Mr. Bytyqi, a Muslim in name but not much more, says that he has
tried to integrate, although he speaks no German, and would like to
become a German citizen. Alexander Schmidt, who runs the
asylum-seekers' home where the family has been housed, described
him as an honest hard worker who had never given trouble.

 "I would at least have liked to stay the winter," said Mr. Bytyqi.
"I was even ready to send my family home, if I had been allowed to
stay. But it seems there is no way for people like us to get
permanent papers or citizenship."

 In Germany, as in most of Europe, the uncertain quest for asylum
is the only way for a foreigner with no special qualification to be
allowed to remain. Because he will not face persecution in a
largely Serb-free Kosovo, Mr. Bytyqi's asylum request was refused.

 In official terms, he is going willingly   no police escort will
be required to get the family to the airport. So they will be
listed among the voluntary departures rather than the deported. As
such, they will qualify for a last payment of about $600 from
German authorities to help them on their way.

 Asked if it was not difficult for her, as the daughter of
immigrants, to do this work, Ms. Karic of the Interior Ministry
replied, "No, I am a functionary, and as such can only pose myself
one question: do they have a right to stay, according to the law,
or do they not?' 
      


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