A while back Germany was talking about taking in 30,000 Iraqi Iraqi refugees. Now Deutsche-Welle reports on plans to accept up to 2,500 of them “in the framework of a European Union agreement.”
We posted several times on Germany’s plans, beginning last March. The churches began by pushing for 30,000. Naturally, some people thought it was unfair to specify Christians. We thought it was sensible, since that’s who is the most persecuted, Germany is (or was) a Christian country, and why shouldn’t churches ask for Christians? Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to approve.
Then Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki visited Merkel and told her he wants the refugees back in Iraq. We’re all for resettling the refugees back home. But Maliki has not been straightforward about the Christians, or he has been living in a fantasy. The Christian communities are being utterly destroyed, unless something has happened since I last read about the situation. But Merkel seemed to be rethinking taking a lot of refugees.
Also, the UN is involved.
[The plan for 2,500 refugees] comes on the same day as the UN’s Special Commissioner for Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, expressed his concern about the situation of Iraqi Christians in Iraq in talks with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. De Mistura said a further exodus had to be stopped and called upon Germany and other EU countries to urge Baghdad to give more protection to the minority grouping.
Urge, shmurge. Baghdad hasn’t done anything for the Christians and doesn’t know what to do. Unless they get their own militias and training, they’ll all be killed off or driven out. Urging Baghdad to do something is about as effective as urging Ahmadinejad to give up his nukes. (I’d love to be proven wrong.)
The article is interesting for something else — how differently Germany treats refugees from the way we treat them. First of all, they have to get acculturated.
Hessen’s Interior Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) stressed that the process foresaw long-term resettlement of the refugees and that they would be expected to take part in a three-month integration course, which would also involve language teaching.
Then, unlike refugees here, who are permanent residents once they arrive,
Berlin’s Interior Minister Ehrhart Koerting (SPD) said the refugees would initially be given three-year residence permits. These could be renewed and lead eventually to German citizenship.
Why don’t we do that? Kind of probationary residence. If they don’t behave and start to become Americans, out they go. Think of the trouble that would prevent.
At the end of the article is something that’s new to me. (I admit I haven’t been following the Iraqi refugee issue as closely as I should have.) The last I heard the UN was talking as if millions of Iraqi refugees needed resettlement. Now:
Stefan Teloeken, a spokesman for UNHCR Germany, said a small fraction of the two million refugees sheltering in countries neighboring Iraq were neither able to return home nor to integrate into their host countries.
“For these people we have to find third countries,” he said on Thursday. “There is a program set up to this end and we hope that many countries will join this program.
I guess I missed the part where the UN realized Iraq really is being pacified and most of the refugees will be able to go home. Well, hallelujah.