Germany Plans Camps to Hold Refugee Flood

German leaders decided Thursday to house all asylum-seekers in special “collection camps” and speed up the deportation process in a controversial attempt to cope with an inundation of refugees and an epidemic of racist violence.

The new rules agreed upon by the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and opposition parties at a three-hour summit would take effect in January, most likely using former Allied and German military bases as campsites.

German communities have been “simply overwhelmed” by the estimated 200,000 refugees who have flooded in this year, joining almost 300,000 already here and awaiting decisions on their applications for asylum, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman who declined to be identified.

The refugees flooding into Germany are from Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and Czechoslovakia. Turks, Gypsies and Kurds also make up large numbers of asylum-seekers, as do people from various Third World nations. They have been attracted by Germany’s affluence, liberal asylum policy and generous social aid programs.

But the Interior Ministry spokesman said that only 7% of the refugees actually would qualify for asylum; the rest are, for the most part, fleeing poverty, not political persecution. Processing applications now takes at least a year and often longer. Deporting unsuccessful applicants will cost the government about 5 billion marks ($3.3 billion) this year, the spokesman said.

The camps will centralize the administrative work and “make it easier for the police to protect” the refugees, the spokesman said. “We are not building new concentration camps,” he added. “It would be utter nonsense to compare this to that.”

Hundreds of foreigners, including refugee children, have been attacked recently by young gangs of neo-Nazis and other racists, who complain that they take jobs and housing away from German citizens.

Although German media reports previously have indicated that the gangs have been most active in the eastern states that used to make up Communist East Germany, statistics published Thursday suggest otherwise. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble reported that 48 of 72 arson attacks on homes for asylum-seekers over the last two months occurred in western Germany.

The surge of xenophobic violence prompted the Bonn politicians to hammer out a quick consensus rather than lumber through a debate that had been planned in the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament.

“Shortening the (asylum) process is the most reasonable solution for all,” said Bjoern Engholm, leader of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats. He called the agreement “an important breakthrough.”

But the agreement marked a political setback for Kohl, who had favored constitutional changes that would toughen Germany’s liberal rules for political asylum. Kohl’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats, broke ranks and joined the Social Democrats in opposing a constitutional change. The current rules were drafted after World War II in an attempt to atone for Nazi Germany’s persecution of foreigners.

“It goes beyond the Geneva Convention,” said the Interior Ministry spokesman. “No one is trying to shut the door to the politically persecuted, and humanitarian cases are separate from this altogether.”

Authorities say that the youths now hunting down and attacking refugees typically range in age from 15 to 20 and have no political ideology or leadership. They often torch refugee homes with gasoline bombs, although bullets were fired in at least one attack. The violence has left an African man dead and dozens of foreigners injured, including two Lebanese children who were seriously burned.

“This new proposal today will have the staying power of a Yugoslav cease-fire,” Herbert Leuninger of the Pro-Asyl refugee organization said in a telephone interview. “Putting these people in camps will be aiding and abetting arson. The camps themselves will be a convenient target to attack. Then we’ll end up putting barbed-wire around them. We already have a pogrom-type mood that’s the worst since the Nazi era.”

Tens of thousands of Germans have taken to the streets to protest the racist violence, and many have kept vigil outside the cheap hotels and apartment houses where asylum-seekers currently are housed to protect the families from attack.

“The camps are a bad idea, because of basic human rights and because of our past,” Manfred Stenner of the Frankfurt-based Peace Cooperative Network said in a telephone interview. “It’s a European problem. The anti-foreigner problem is just as bad in France as it is here, but we have to be more sensitive to it because of our past and our special responsibility to learn from history.”

Racial hatred cannot be overcome if the foreigners are segregated and Germans do not have an opportunity to know them as neighbors or classmates, Stenner said.

Each camp would hold a maximum of 500 people for up to six weeks. About 90 camps would be required. Some cities, such as Munich, already have been forced to house asylum-seekers in tents because of a lack of other shelter.