Society for Threatened Peoples demands residence right for Roma and Ashkali people from Kosovo as a "gesture of compensation for Nazi crimes”

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) is strongly protesting against the collective deportation of around 100 Roma and Ashkali planned for this tuesday. The refugees from North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Saxony will be flown from the Düsseldorf airport to Kosovo. The Secretary General of the STP Tilman Zülch, demands a permanent residence right for the Roma and Ashkali as a "gesture of compensation for Nazi crimes done to the Sinti and Roma”. The human rights activist explained verbatim:

"It should be possible for the German state governments and their ministers from the CDU, SPD and Greens to accept at least one Roma-Refugee from the Kosovo civil war in our country for every 20 "Gypsies” the Nazis murdered. 500,000 German and European Sinti and Roma were assasinated during the third Reich. A maximum of 100,000 Roma live in Germany today.

With inhumane hardship, family members are being torn apart from each other, like a young family in Lower Saxony today. While the father quarantineed in the hospital with Tuberculosis, his wife and their four small daughters aged one, two, four, and five were taken in police custody to be deported at the Düsseldorf airport. The federal police confiscated the cellphone of the young mother so that she is unable to inform her husband or friends of what is happening to her. The German speaking children and the mother are now threatened with poverty, misery, illness and discrimination.

Of what use is it to talk about a different part of the Nazi history in the media every day if defenseless members of the former victim groups of Sinti and Roma are deported unscrupulously to misery without a public outrage or extensive media coverage? The fact that something like this is possible even in the green-social democratic ruled North Rhine-Westphalia demonstrates the emptiness of "anti-fascist declarations of intent”. We therefore demand a sustainable refugee policy, so that these families for which, social workers, civil rights activists, teachers, professors, and clergy have been standing up for years and centuries, will no longer be hunted out of the country. Coming to terms with the past is absolutely necessary!

Some 20,000 Roma from Kosovo, many children, women and men have largely lived for years in Germany. When the German army within the scope of Nato liberated Kosovo in 1999 and one million displaced Albanians were able to return home, Albanian chauvinists burned 70 of 75 Roma settlements and neighborhoods under the eyes of the Germans. Roma and Ashkali were beaten, tortured, raped, kidnapped and disappeared, thousands had to leave the country.”