Many Sent by Parents to Safety in West : Young Refugees Seek Haven in Germany

Not long after Indian occupation troops hung him up by his thumbs in his native Sri Lanka, Sivanesweran, a Tamil teen-ager with haunted eyes, says he is grateful for refuge in West Germany.

The youth is one of thousands of refugee children, mostly Sri Lankan and Iranian, who escaped war and misery to West Germany after their parents heard it requires no visas for travelers under 16, unique among Western nations.

Parents in Sri Lanka and Iran have paid exorbitant sums to shadowy travel agents for passports and airline tickets to send their children to West Germany to stay until things get better back home, West German border police and social workers say.

More than 2,500 children, traveling alone or with others they met on flights, swamped Frankfurt international airport in 1988. Even more are expected this year--319 children arrived in January and 149 in the first week of February.

Since the end of the Persian Gulf war last August, most of the children have been Tamils, a religious and ethnic minority in Sri Lankan. But officials now anticipate a parade of children fleeing Afghanistan once Soviet troops have withdrawn from that war-torn country.

Right to Seek Asylum

Adult refugees also continue to stream into West Germany, taking advantage of the law enshrining the right of foreigners to seek asylum when they show up at the border or an airport.

The arrival of a record 103,000 in 1988 and an unabated influx so far this year has spurred the governing Christian Democrats to propose legislation curbing asylum rights.

Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann vowed last month to seek a visa rule for foreigners under 16.

Pressure on the Bonn government to amend the asylum law magnified after a rightist party hostile to foreigners took 7.5% of the vote in a state election in January.

But the proposed crackdown is opposed by the Christian Democrats’ junior coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats. They and opposition parties argue that Bonn is bound to preserve the asylum right as atonement for the nation’s xenophobic Nazi past.

Housed in Mansion

Once the child refugees are processed through airport customs, they are shunted to the Villa Mumm, a former industrialist’s 19th-Century mansion on a wooded hill in nearby Kronberg.

The stucco, tile-roofed building served as a Nazi Gestapo school before being donated to Workers Welfare, a union-linked charity group, after World War II.

On a recent visit by a reporter scores of mostly Tamil and Iranian children were playing pool in a game room, learning German with texts and notebooks, phoning home or just “hanging out” in chatting groups.

But many suffer severe homesickness and nightmares of ordeals back home, even after being handed over to relatives or family friends who reside in West Germany, said Bernd Jacob, a staff social worker at the mansion.

“I’ve only been here three days. I was held in Indian troop camps five times after being rounded up with other young people during hunts for Tamil Tigers (guerrillas),” Sivanesweran, the Tamil boy, said through a translator.

“The last time, they hung me up by my thumbs.”

Bribes to Organizers

After he was freed the fifth time, his parents decided that they could guarantee his life only by sending him to West Germany. They sold jewelry and other valuables to pay the $2,430, including bribes, demanded by travel organizers for the trip.

Other Tamil children interviewed had similar stories of brutality in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Most were waiting to be retrieved by relatives, themselves asylum seekers or legal residents in West Germany. A review process by welfare workers lasts from several days to several months.

The process was tightened after reports that some children had wound up in brothels or fallen into the hands of people trading in human beings, welfare staff say.

The Frankfurt Youth Affairs Office, with ultimate responsibility for resettling the children, complains of being overwhelmed by a national problem left to be handled by a local authority for national political reasons.