The German government announced on Friday the first deportation of Afghan citizens since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. The departure comes just two days before crucial elections for Germany in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony, where the far-right is leading the polls. A plane carrying 28 Afghans took off early in the morning from Leipzig airport. They are all convicted criminals who “had no right to remain in Germany and were subject to expulsion orders,” announced a spokesman for Olaf Scholz’s government.
The operation has been carried out in the utmost secrecy, to the point that German government ministers continued to speak publicly about how difficult it would be to fulfil the promise made by Scholz last June to expel Afghan and Syrian nationals, countries considered unsafe. The chancellor said shortly after the knife attack in Mannheim, which ended the life of a policeman, that the government was going to start negotiating how to deport criminals of those nationalities. The attacker in Mannheim is a 25-year-old Afghan who has been living in Germany since 2014.
Another knife attack in the city of Solingen, which left three people dead last Friday, has intensified the debate on migration and asylum laws in Germany and increased pressure on Scholz’s government to adopt a tougher stance. The government’s response came on Thursday, with the announcement of the tightening of several regulations, but the biggest shock is undoubtedly the announcement that the first deportation of Afghan criminals has already taken place.
The symbolic value of this flight is enormous. The departure of the 28 Afghans comes two days before crucial elections for Germany, in which the far right is leading the polls, while the three parties in the coalition – Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals – are even playing for their presence in the regional parliaments of the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony.
“We announced, I had announced, that we would also deport criminals to Afghanistan,” Scholz said on Friday during a visit to a mining museum in Saxony. “We have prepared this carefully without talking about it too much, because such plans only succeed if you make an effort, if you do it carefully and very discreetly,” he added, thanking all those who had contributed to making the deportation possible: “This is a clear signal that anyone who commits criminal offences cannot count on not being deported, but that we will find a way to do so, as this case shows.”
The government spokesman explained that the Government “has made great efforts in recent months to resume returns in these cases. [delincuentes convictos] and has supported the responsible federal states for this purpose.” They are the immigration authorities of the 17 countries those with the authority to repatriate foreigners. “In view of the notoriously difficult conditions, Germany has asked key regional partners for support in facilitating repatriation,” he added: “Germany’s interest in security clearly prevails over the interest in protecting criminals and dangerous persons.”
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Each deportee, with a thousand euros in hand
The weekly The Spiegel The newspaper claims that the operation was possible thanks to the mediation of Qatar. A Qatar Airways charter flight took off from Leipzig to the Afghan capital Kabul at 6:56 a.m. on Friday. The Boeing 787 was carrying 28 Afghan criminals who had been transported to Leipzig in advance from various German states in great secrecy. According to official sources cited by the publication, each deportee received 1,000 euros in cash before boarding the plane, which also included a doctor. This first deportation of Afghan citizens had been in preparation for two months.
The German government did not negotiate directly with the government in Kabul, with which it has no diplomatic relations since the Taliban came to power, but instead asked the emirate of Qatar for “discreet support” in deporting the criminals to Afghanistan, he said. The Spiegel.
The government is determined to make the deportation system more effective after it emerged that the suspected Solingen killer had an expulsion order to Bulgaria – where he entered the European Union – which was never executed. When the authorities went to look for him, they did not find him and did not try again, something that Justice Minister Marco Buschmann described on Thursday as “shocking”. The government’s plans include withdrawing public benefits from refugees who return to their countries of origin without valid reasons and from those who previously requested protection in another EU country.
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