Germany Relents on Bosnia Deportations

BERLIN — German officials said Friday that they will stop deporting Bosnian Muslims and Croats to towns and valleys now controlled by Bosnian Serbs, in an apparent concession to the many critics of the current policy of sending such refugees home.

Human rights groups said that while they welcome the announcement, they do not know yet whether it represents a real change of heart or mere lip service to silence critics.

“This is an improvement,” said Stefan Teloeken, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Bonn. “But it’s the bottle story. Half-empty? Half-full? We have to wait and see.”

In a joint statement, the interior ministers of Germany’s 16 states said they recognize that sending refugees home to “ethnically cleansed” regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they would be in the minority, requires a “particular sensitivity” and that deporting such people to Bosnia “is not considered a priority at this time.”

In Germany’s decentralized political system, it is the states, not the federal government, that have ultimate authority over refugee policy, including deportations. States and municipalities have also borne most of the refugees’ cost.

In recent months, some German states have made international headlines by staging dramatic police roundups of Bosnian refugees.

In the most spectacular cases, refugees in nightgowns have been bundled off to remote airport terminals, where they could be loaded onto planes and sent home before advocacy groups were the wiser.

Although such abrupt deportations have been few--only about 200 so far--they have sent a powerful message to the tens of thousands of other Bosnian refugees in Germany: You are no longer welcome.

Teloeken said Friday that it is unclear whether the interior ministers’ new pledge to stop the roundups means that other forms of pressure on refugees will stop.

“Deportations aren’t the main problem,” Teloeken said. “The main problem is the people who are ordered to leave Germany and who then leave the country without knowing where they can go.”

In recent months, state authorities have been sending letters to Bosnians telling them their residency status in Germany was about to expire and they must go home.

The refugees have been made to understand that if they try to stay on illegally, they will be ineligible for welfare benefits and forbidden to work. They are also told that if they are caught as illegal aliens and deported, a record of their deportation will be stamped on their passports, making it impossible for them to reenter Germany for two years.

Fearing such consequences, some of the refugees have already left Germany “voluntarily,” even though they had nowhere to go after arriving in Bosnia.

Human rights groups have pleaded with Germany to screen the refugees before telling them to leave and let those from “ethnically cleansed” areas stay. More than half the refugees in Germany are Muslims and Croats from areas now under Bosnian Serb authority.

Human rights groups say that about 50,000 Bosnians have departed since last fall, when the letters started. There are no statistical data on what has happened to the returnees since, but there is anecdotal evidence of people drifting around Bosnia as internal refugees, crowding with strangers into scarce housing.

“Just yesterday, I heard of some people who went back and now they are sleeping on the streets,” said Tilman Zuelch, chairman of the German section of the Society for Threatened Peoples.

Human rights groups have argued for months that if a tide of returning refugees from Germany exacerbates the ethnic tensions in Bosnia, the shaky peace there could end.

When the war in the former Yugoslav federation began, Germany earned international high marks by taking in about 320,000 Bosnian refugees--far more than any other country. Germany also gave the refugees full access to its social welfare benefits.

But since last year, with most Bosnian guns warehoused and a force of international peacekeepers in the region, an increasingly cash-strapped Germany has been calling on the refugees to go home and cement the fragile peace by rebuilding their shattered country, much as the Germans rebuilt their own homeland after World War II.