Federal government pushes migrants to Afghanistan

Germany, for the second time since the Taliban take over the takeover of power, pushed Afghan citizens into their country of origin in August 2021. As a spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior of Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) confirmed, an aircraft started on board with 81 people from the airport in Leipzig this morning to bring them back to their country of origin.

It is “heavy and heavy criminals that are deported,” said Dobrindt on Friday morning after the machine started in the ARD “Morgenmagazin”. The interior minister praised “the close cooperation between the Federal Foreign Office, the Ministry of the Interior and Chancellery”, which made the flight possible. The flight “with the help of the strategic security partnership with the Emirate of Qatar”.

At the end of August last year, Afghan criminals had been deported for the last time – with the help of the GulfMirat Qatar, 28 men were also brought back to their country of origin from Leipzig. Qatar had already mediated between the West and the Taliban in the past.

The first deportation freight since the black and red government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) started immediately before the start of a meeting of Dobrindt and several EU colleagues on the Zugspitze, which should be an exacerbation of EU asylum policy.

After acts of violence in Mannheim and Solingen, the traffic light government had announced last summer to make deportations possible again to Afghanistan. The one flight remained.

After the new election this year and a few weeks before the new government started, today’s Chancellor Department Thorsten Frei (CDU) promised regular deportation frequencies to Afghanistan and Syria on request. The Germans could rely on this. You will “get this permanently and in much larger areas”.

But the implementation is difficult to this day: Germany maintains no diplomatic relationships with the Islamist Taliban in Kabul. The group is isolated internationally in particular because of their disregard for human and especially women’s rights. The regime is not recognized as a legitimate government that Germany has only been in contact with the rulers there at a technical level via a liaison in Qatar, Federal Foreign Minister Johann WadePhul (CDU) had recently said. “That was it, and that’s it.”

Dobrindt confirmed that in his view, conversations with the Taliban are necessary: “If you also remember that we want to continue to enable deportations to Afghanistan in the future, then you also have to have these contacts, you have to have these conversations. This is below the diplomatic relationships, but these conversations have to be held,” he said.

The United Nations’ refugee and human rights organizations reject the plans. The conditions on site are not yet suitable for returns, said Arafat Jamal, the representative of the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Kabul at the time in response to Dobrindt. The spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, Ravina Shamdasani, referred to ongoing human rights violations in Afghanistan, such as executions or the oppression of women.

Note: This message has been updated.