The German border regime rests on three pillars. The first is a matter of foreign policy, namely the functionalization of Germany’s Eastern neighbors as door-keepers of the EU. The second pillar is the rearmament of the German Border Police, the "Bundesgrenzschutz" (BGS), which is a federal police force, backed up by increased and far-reaching powers. And finally we have the growing involvement of the border population into border-control. There is also a fourth party playing a role in this concept, but it is concerned only with those lucky people who managed to cross the border secretly. The administration of foreigners and the German legislation concerning asylum seekers and foreigners, is part of a system which is increasingly becoming a means of keeping out refugees and migrants, or freezing out those who are already here. To give you an idea of what German border-policy means I just want to give you a short explanation of the first two points before I come to the main topic, the involvement of the population into the persuit of "illegals" and border violators, or whatever you may choose to call them.

a. Using the neighbour-states as buffer states

Since the modification of the German Constitution in 1993 there is almost no chance left for refugees to apply for asylum in Germany. The so-called "Save Third Country Regulation" [German immigration regulation] makes it possible for the German administration to reject nearly every application for asylum immediately, because the asylum seeker traveled across one of the neighbor states. All the trouble of handling migration and refugee movements is delegated by Germany and the EU to their Eastern neighbors, which are given clear rules of good behavior in order to get admission to the EU one day. The paragon of this relationship of ordering and obeying is Poland. According to the German-Polish Agreement of May 7, 1993, Poland got 120 Million Deutsche Marks for building up its own border facilities, such as boats, helicopters and technical equipment, and also for creating a BGS-like border police and establishing its own asylum-procedure. Since then, there spread a dense net of detention prisons for foreigners. For example 1.5 Million DM flew into the restoration of the detention center in Leznowola, a guarded camp. Poland now has 25 detention centers for deportees. But not only the system of expelling rejected asylum seekers, or by the BGS, returning secret immigrants via detention, was copied from the German system. Also a firm system of readmission agreements was established with the neighboring countries in the East, so that something that could be called Domino deportation occurred. People who were rejected or sent back by the German BGS are transported, with often a very long stay in a detention camp, to one of the Eastern neighbors such as Belorus or Ukraine. In 1996 1,453 persons, nearly a third of the 4,848 border violators sent back by the BGS, were immediately expelled by Poland to a neighbor state or deported to their home country. Most of these domino deportations are carried out within a 48-hour period. On the 27th of June 1997 the trip from the German border to the Ukrainian border ended up with a serious accident in which two of the deportees died. The driver of the vehicle fell asleep after 14 hours non-stop driving. The new Polish asylum and foreigners laws of 1997 make it even more difficult to apply for asylum at all to prevent deportation. Poland is learning its lesson.
The same system operates between Hungary and Austria, the keen new member of the sacred EU. Other tools which may be used for the same purpose are the readmission agreements with a growing number of states, Germany signs, to make deportation easier and quicker. The first readmission-agreements were established between Poland in 1993, the Czech Republic in 1994, Romania in 1992 and Bulgaria in 1995. Secret immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria who are arrested at the border are immediately transported to the Berlin-Schönefeld airport and sent back to their stated countries of origin.
Germany can put pressure on countries like Poland that want to join the EU: only if they fulfill the security demands of Western Europe will they be admitted to that sublime assembly. For this reason they obey even some humiliating conditions of this stick and carrot policy. If everything is going well these EU aspirants will be favorably mentioned.

b.The armament of the German border-police BGS

The number of officers and administration personnel has been greatly increased. There were 2,400 BGS officers in 1992, compared to today’s figure of about 5,800 border police officers, and for the near future there is a projected increase to 7,500 BGS personnel. These figures relate to Germany’s eastern borders only, which are said to be those with the highest density of guards in Europe or even the world. At the Polish and Czech borders (excluding the Bavarian-Czech border), there are on average 2.4 officers per kilometer. At the US-Mexican border there are only 0.18 officers per kilometer. Including the office staff of the BGS there are about 10,000 officers and employees working for the federal border police at the eastern borders. Additionally since 1993 there has been a border police support unit of about 1,200 employed officers. But there are even more officers working at this border, namely the customs officers and those of the ordinary state police forces. These figures may give you an impression of the manpower Germany is ready to commit to create a "watertight EU border". The governmental budget for the BGS increased from 1.3 billion DM in 1989 to over 3 billion DM in 1997.
All in all the BGS has about 30,000 officers (1992: 24,500) controlling what is called border protection and "inner security". I will come back to this expression later. We have to be aware, regarding the border, that it is no longer the borderline we were accustomed to, but is a zone extending 30 kilometers further into the country. In this security belt the BGS (and also customs) has the same powers as the state police and still more. They are allowed to check the papers of any person, without suspicion or any occurrence, at any time. They can watch houses, listen in on telephone lines, and raid any place declared a "dangerous place". The latest changes to the BGS laws extend those powers along bigger transit roads and to railway stations (the BGS is the railway police, too) and their surroundings.
The technical armament of the BGS, with the latest technology, adds to the high standard of border control that is established at the German eastern borders. I name just some of this hardcore equipment: There are, for example, carbon dioxide detectors that can detect people breathing inside any container; there are the latest infrared cameras and those to see at night, with just minimal light; and there are certainly patrol boats on the rivers Oder and Neiße; there are helicopters and more than 600 tracker dogs. (Incidentially, in Austria the army is engaged in guarding the border: young and inexperienced men doing their military service have to live in tents and deal with the arrests of "illegal" immigrants. Moreover, Austria employs ground radar at the borders).
Also there is a high-tech computer system, the SIS or Schengen Information System. In Germany alone there are 9,000 (in part mobile) terminals of this system. Germany has fed this gigantic system with the data of 321,301 "unwelcome" people out of the total 413,054. Germany links up all these computer-control systems to a border terminal system, which is in use with nearly 700 terminals at the eastern borders. Next step in this "progress" will be the finger-print directory EURODAC....but I don't want to go deeper into this, because all these technical tools can't compete with the "help" of the border population watching the borders.

c. The involvement of the population into border-security

We get most of our statistics and figures directly from the German border police. We extract them from the annual report of this institution. Other material is difficult to obtain. The respresentative of the BGS center in Frankfurt/Oder, in the state of Brandenburg, pointed out publicly that 50 percent of all the arrests of secret immigrants are due to tip-offs from the border population. The BGS representative of the town Rothenburg on the river Neiße, in the state of Saxony, even spoke of 70 to 80 percent of arrests being due to German informers living in the border region denouncing the trespassers. We were stunned by these figures and tried to get some more information on the role that ordinary people there play in border control, and how much importance the federal border police places on these volunteers, as well as to find out what kind of propaganda persuades people that it is right and necessary to denounce migrants and refugees.
In the media the picture of a flood of criminals waiting in the East to pour into the EU to rob, steal and murder, to destroy the social system, to take away the jobs of the righteous inhabitants and to bring in immeasurable amounts of what is called "organized criminality" penetrates the peoples' minds unfiltered, because there is hardly any critical, differentiating approaches to what flight and migration actually are. There are some particular kinds of border criminality, no doubt. The circumstances are too inviting, but the effect of the unbroken indoctrination of people (not only in the border region) is that for every single stolen car or bicycle, for every burglary and every violent attack on someone, the "foreigners", "die Ausländer", are blamed. Thus immigrants and refugees who have no other legal possibility to enter the country are stamped with the words "illegal immigrants" or "illegals". People consider that every secret border crosser is a criminal. After making this clear nobody feels the need to ask for more details about the people, their motivation to flee or migrate, their lives and fates. Furthermore, every secret immigrant is labeled with what was made out to be a criminal offence, namely trafficking. I could substantiate this official propaganda with innumerable press articles or ministerial announcements: Manfred Kanther became a hero for this way of putting people in fear. We will see how his successor Otto Schily will do in this field.

[Digression: I want to make clear the effects of this propaganda by taking a closer look on the myth of racketeers and traffickers: The picture that the media and official announcements draw of the trafficking of foreigners is the picture of especially unscrupulous and brutal criminals who exploit the poorest of the poor, that are bringing in drugs, weapons and criminal forces into the country, and that are likely to be a branch of the Russian, or some other Mafia. For this image of the traffick in foreigners, the incidents and accidents in which refugees and migrants die are useful. One of the most serious of these occurancies was the suffocation of 18 Tamil refugees in the back of a huge lorry. No doubt there are criminals involved in this business, there are women forced into prostitution or other people brought into a slave-like state of indenture. However, from our research and interviewing of refugees and migrants about their trafficking experiences, we found that the majority of all acts of trafficking in foreigners is responsibly planned within the format of a real and regular business. As long as it is useful to blame the traffickers, the refugees are welcome victims who were duped by false promises, deprived of all their families' scant money, and than forced into an extremely dangerous, illegal and exhausting trip to Western Europe, only to find themselves exposed to a racist society that does not welcome them - a misery. The fact is, however, that the trafficking agents work like other businessmen, they have to take care for their reputation, which could be spoilt by the deportation of too many of their former clients. The price that people have to pay to be brought to Germany from Sri Lanka ranges from 12,000 to 15,000 DM. The people decide to leave their home country to try to obtain money for their wider family, who often put together all available savings to buy a chance and a life perspective for at least one family member. Then they get in contact with the well known agent and the thing is negotiated. Then the trip which is mostly legally done, goes via Moscow, Kiew or Vilnius to Poland and to the Polish-German border. Often only the crossing of this border is against the law. To give you some perspective, there are statements from the German Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, from the nineteen seventies, in which the court holds it to be correct to help people crossing the German-German border and to take fees of up to 40,000 DM for this service. The traffickers were called "escape agents" then and it was a heroic deed to help one of the former GDR inhabitants, a classic case of a "refugee for economic reasons", to cross the border illegally. In the German income declaration forms of that time there was even a special column for the fees for escape agents, which could be deducted from tax. The vast majority of all professionally organized migrations or flights are a good deal, a real business and responsibly carried out. Often the communities themselves organize the "journeys" of their compatriots. Often the last step across the border is carried out by Polish, Czech or German scouts who know the landscape (in 1996 there were 387 traffickers arrested, of whom 226 were Polish, 77 German and 18 Czech citizens). One additional piece of information shows that the dependence on professional help grows in proportion to the distances people have to travel. People from Eastern Europe most often try to cross the border off their own bat. People from Asia, Africa or other distant countries need the help of traffickers. All in all, however, the proportion of people using traffickers to help them cross borders secretly does not exceed one quarter. (Figures for 1996: 10,586 people were arrested for illegal immigration at the German-Polish border; only 1,674 of whom traveled with help - that is 16 percent; 387 traffickers were arrested.) But at the very moment these victims of traffickers enter Germany or the EU they immediately turn out to be offenders and criminals, just as the propaganda requires.
At the end of July there was a tragic incident at the German-Czech border which could illustrate what’s going on at these borders of wealth. A small van was chased by the BGS near Freiberg in Saxony. After some time trying to escape the driver lost control, left the road, and crashed into a wall and a tree. Inside the van there were 28 people standing, seven of whom died and several others were seriously injured. These people came from Kosova, fleeing the war, and had no other way to get into Germany other than to climb into this modified van, to risk their lives to find asylum and to keep the transport fee as low as possible. It was not a pleasant idea of the trafficker to put so many people into his van, no doubt. But is he to blame for a situation were refugees were desperately seeking ways to make the journey? Is it the refugees fault that the overloaded vehicle was chased by the BGS? The Czechs only reacted to a request on cheap border crossing, but it is the German border policy that makes people act in such a risky way, to seek illegal ways of getting into Germany or Western Europe. Most of the people coming in secretly have no illusions concerning Asylum (96 percent of all asylum applications are rejected!). Most of them just want to get in, to earn some money to help their families get through the winter, or to live illegally right from the beginning.]
The BGS is doing its own advertising and propaganda in the border-region. They offer the so-called "citizens' telephone line for security". People can call the BGS from all over Germany on a charge-free service number all around the clock. In every newspaper near the border, on every single police car and phone box you can find this number encouraging people to report every suspicious movement in their surroundings. There is no significant growth of any kind of criminality near the border. On the contrary, in most of the towns and cities where we researched the rate of criminality is sinking, often in 10-percent steps each year.[I want to give you one of many examples: In 1997 the crime rate in the police district of Frankfurt/ Oder dropped, according to the official report, by 11 percent: in the city itself it went down by 16.3 percent; in Görlitz in Eastern Saxony we have a decrease of 27 percent]. The BGS not only emphasizes the importance of its presence because of the extremely high rate of crime for which enormous decrease it at the same time claims to be responsible. If the decreasing rates are presented to the public, the BGS preferably talks about the "subjective security sense" of the people that requires an increase in police density and control.

The fact is that for nearly every criminal deed foreigners are blamed. People even talk of the fear of moving around at night because of violent foreigners everywhere: this fear is especially absurd because the only people who are in danger of being attacked in this region are the foreigners, the non-German-looking people themselves. [but I don’t want to go deeper into the growing danger of neo-Nazi groups that control whole cities in Eastern Germany, and play an important role in what could be called a racist atmosphere in the border region - we heard about that in the report from students yesterday].
The result of this politics of fear is that the BGS can really reckon with the voluntary and busy help of the people living near the border, without handing out rewards. In times of unemployment rates of around 20 percent, the BGS is also an interesting and popular employer. I mentioned the numbers before but there is another important fact that adds to the popularity of the BGS: in the time of the Cold War the BGS was a paramilitary unit which existed to combat a potential communist invader. Now this unit has changed into a highly flexible and integrated police force, which has got nearer and nearer to the people all the time. What shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain was felt to be something like an occupying force, is now an important part of everyday life: many of the officers of the BGS live near their place of work, or are even come from the border population itself, often having experienced a long term of unemployment. The border-police as an employer plays an important role in its promotion. [It will be interesting to see how things will work out there after Poland’s admission to the EU, which will make all this security obsolete].
But there are several other phenomena that contribute to our thesis of an involvement of citizens into border-control by social technology. Everywhere near the border there are civic action groups popping up that have their own private border guards. With self-created uniforms, torches, binoculars, clubs, and often even with gas arms, adult people are patrolling and standing guard near the border during nighttime. We became aware of this development after the scandalized racist harassment of a young boy on his way home at ten at night in Forst on the river Neiße. He was stopped by these self- appointed border guards with others and checked, because he was black. The BGS was called, and the young people had to wait for half an hour for their arrival before they were released. After the mother of one of the kids complained about this incident it became evident that the BGS and the police work together closely and confidentially. The BGS denied this cooperation when the whole thing became a real scandal. Now these civic border guards are involved in a program for the home secretary of Brandenburg, which is called "security guard" and consists of private people guarding their neighborhoods. They have no weapons and are to call the police if there is a suspicion or incident. Such security guards now exist in about 50 villages in Brandenburg.

Also on an official level there are what we call denouncing coalitions established between state offices such as the labor office and the social welfare, who work together closely in an informal manner to find illegal workers or persons without a legal status, and also between such non-governmental institutions as guilds and chambers of commerce. The BGS in Pirna for example met with representatives of the Taxi Guild of Saxony, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Dresden, politicians from border communes and the county and the colleagues from the state police. They came to an agreement as to how to work together to stop illegal immigration. The results of this meeting were made public. The background of this meeting in 1997 was an unheard-of wave of trials against taxi drivers in the county of Zittau-Libau in the border triangle of Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany in Eastern Saxony. What happened here was the reverse of the example of involvement of the border- population in border control. Through the courts heavy sanctions are imposed on people who don’t wish to act as deputy sherrifs of the border police. There must be some agreements also between the three powers in order to improve border-security. The courts there in Zittau and Görlitz are playing an important role in creating an atmosphere of terror near the border. Since 1996 there have been several sentences passed against taxi drivers, of not less than one year, without suspension, who were accused of bringing illegal immigrants into the country! The circumstances of the trials are scandalous, not only because none of the drivers brought anybody across the border, but because the prosecutors are only working with vague evidence which is always interpreted to the detriment of the accused taxi drivers. Currently there are investigations in progress against 22 of a total of 73 taxi drivers in that county. The first defendant, sentenced to 1 year in prison without suspension, and whose appeals all failed, has been in jail for two weeks now.

The arguement of the prosecutors is as follows: It is not necessary to actually cross the border with illegal immigrants, but just to pick them up near the border and to bring them out of the 30-kilometer zone of responsibility of the BGS, for example to the next bigger city such as Bautzen, Dresden or even Berlin. It should be the taxi drivers duty not only to recognize who is a foreigner without status, but also to deny the service and/or denounce the clients to the BGS. The above mentioned meeting between BGS, and among others, the taxi drivers guild included the provision of a notice for the driving colleagues with some hints as to what they should do. Having picked up some suspicious strangers they should either control the papers themselves - which is against the law, though this seems to be suspended for border-security - or call the BGS by means of a code-word. Many taxi drivers from all over Germany protested against what this means for the future. They are not willing or allowed to control their customers. They are obliged by law to transport every person regardless of who they are. Now they should, for the purposes of the border police, suspect every persons who does not look like a German compatriot of being an illegal foreigner. There have been protests in Görlitz during the first trial. I witnessed one trial in early 98, where at the question of how a taxi driver was supposed to recognize the illegal border crosser, the prosecutor shouted: "These people were dressed in a typical Eastern European manner." This shows, how a stranger is constructed by (social) discriminatory or even racist rules that refer only to the phenotypic appearance. Please believe me, that these trials which I myself witnessed were absolutely ridiculous in what could be called fairness of justice, or with regard to a high principle like "in dubio pro reo", and similarly with appeals. What they are trying to do is to make an example of all those who refuse to play the game of border control. These taxi drivers now are put in jail, their driving licenses and their taxi licenses are retracted. In short, the defendants, most of them perfectly well-behaving heads of families, without any police record, are ruined forever. And for what? For having transported illegal foreigners: this act - done accidentally or on purpose - is made a criminal offence, which is out of proportion to the actual damage they have done. Two weeks ago, in the latest case, there was one taxi driver sentenced to more than one year in prison without suspension, which is a real mystery, because nobody knows who he carried. Simply because his colleague was stopped while transporting one foreigner on the same route, it was assumed that he must have had illegals on board too, resulting in a prison sentence. These scandalous verdicts prove that this is no independent judiciary but a willing helper in favor of the of Inner Security and border control.
The resulting atmosphere near the border makes it possible for occurrences like the following, without anybody sounding public alarm on the atrocity. A group of twelve people from Kosova crossed the border secretly on the night of the 15th of May this year. A resident informed the BGS. The Federal border guard stopped the trespassers at 11.30 p.m. All of them were arrested, except one young Kosovo Albanian who managed to escape the arrest. What happened then is unbelievable: For more than four hours a search operation consisting of the BGS, the state police, the customs and the local fire brigades, equipped with cars, dogs, helicopters, lighting and manpower was chasing that poor refugee. After hours the hunted man tried to break free by swimming across a near-by canal, just next to the bridge where BGS officers were posted, and in his exhaustion he drowned and died. Please always keep in mind what actually his crime was: This refugee was only crossing the border illegally. And what is shocking also, is that this incredible tragedy was mentioned in no newspaper (but a local one). And this is everyday life at Germany’s borders and demonstrates the alarming lack of humanly dignified behavior that we have.

We have documented the sad list of victims of the German border regime and foreigners' policy: 88 refugees died at the borders, 67 at the Eastern borders alone; 54 detainees committed suicide because of their impending deportation, at least 95 were seriously injured by trying to do so; 4 refugees died during deportation, 33 deportees were injured; 4 people were killed in their home countries after deportation, at least 86 were arrested, maltreated or even tortured by military or police officers in their country of origin, 11 of those deported disappeared without trace.
Now I want to come to an end and formulate two thesis drawn from this evidence:
Thesis 1: Police, officials and politicians of the "inner security" faction use the border region as a kind of laboratory. They want to get information as to how far they can go; to what extent the population is prepared to provide hints on suspicious movements in their surroundings free of charge, and if the politics of threat works against all those who don’t want to contribute to this security concept. The extension of special powers from the border security belt into the country, the transit roads the inner cities, railway-stations and "dangerous places" is a first step to the establishment of a similar system over the entire country. Many state police forces (Bavaria, Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg and Saxony) have the same power as the BGS already. In Berlin there were four cases of taxi drivers who were accused of bringing in foreigners. Just imagine, in Berlin! Also the growing interest in concepts like the "zero tolerance" idea of that New York police chief, the increasing number of civic security guards, prevention councils and other forms of community policing indicate this development.

Thesis 2: The German border police make use of the racial prejudices of the people to encourage them, where it seems useful, for their concept of involving border-residents into border-control. I hope that I could demonstrate this with this report.

e-mail:moneynations@access.ch