NEWS ANALYSIS : Accord on Refugees May Cut German Rightist Violence

An agreement between Germany’s mainstream political parties on how to limit the influx of foreign asylum seekers into the country has the earmarks of an important breakthrough in the fight to reduce the level of right-wing extremism.

The accord, which was reached just before midnight Sunday following more than 50 hours of intense, sometimes bitter negotiations spread over two weekends, will effectively end a virtual open-door policy for anyone declaring political asylum in Germany.

That policy has led to a flood of foreigners entering the country and a backlash of resentment, tension and violence from young Germans that this year alone has claimed at least 17 lives and raised fears about a resurgence of a neo-Nazism in Germany.

Under terms of the deal, the fundamental right to political asylum will be retained in Article 16 of the German constitution. But anyone applying via another European Community country or from other nations deemed to be safe from political persecution would be refused entry.

The agreement also ends the right of asylum seekers to remain in Germany while courts review a government rejection of their application. This right now enables asylum seekers with little chance of ultimate success to remain in the country for years.

War refugees would be permitted to enter the country for a limited period but would not be granted political asylum; a quota of 200,000 per year would be placed for the first time on the number of ethnic Germans returning from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Draft legislation needed to amend the constitution is expected to be placed before Parliament early next year.

While human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the German-based Pro-Asyl, condemned the all-party agreement as a capitulation to street violence and a defeat for the rule of law, many political observers here considered it an important, positive development. They argue that it marks a significant step toward coming to grips with the single biggest issue now fueling the wave of right-wing violence.

Frustration over the government’s failure to limit the influx of asylum seekers has not just spurred violence-prone, right-wing youths to attack foreigners. It also has generated an unsettling, tacit support for the violence among a number of Germans who have come to see it as a regrettable yet necessary consequence of official inaction.

This support has already been measured at the ballot box, where two extreme-right-wing parties entered state legislatures in elections last spring for the first time.

Although the results of Sunday’s accord will take months to work through the system to a point where the number of asylum seekers in the country begins to shrink, the country’s more moderate political leaders can at least claim they now have a way forward.

Because of this, there is a chance the agreement will restore a badly needed degree of credibility to Germany’s mainstream parties; they are widely perceived to have seriously bungled both the challenge of unification and the asylum-seekers issue.

The extent to which these politicians have lost public confidence on the asylum-seekers question was visible at a mass demonstration against right-wing extremism last month in Berlin, where leading government figures were attacked and jeered by protesters.

“It’s a good, reasonable solution that I’m convinced . . . will lead to a noticeable easing of the problem in 1993,” Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters said.

Opposition Social Democrats Chairman Bjoern Engholm described it as a “package solution . . . containing the answers to all the essential questions.”

Germany’s liberal asylum law, long seen as both a cornerstone of post-World War II German democracy and a symbol of its tolerance, turned into a nightmare with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Growing numbers of people from Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Third World have used it as a way to enter one of the world’s richest countries in hopes of getting a share of its affluence.

Almost 750,000 foreigners have applied for political asylum in Germany since the fall of European communism, and more than 400,000 remain here, many of them lodged in hostels and barracks, awaiting a ruling on their cases.

Government statements that up to 95% of all asylum claims are eventually found to be bogus, coupled with the social and economic tensions resulting from unification, have made asylum seekers the focal point of the right-wing attacks.