by Spiegel staff
The city of Hamburg continues to be rocked by protests over the treatment of thousands of asylum seekers. Both sides of the conflict have valid points — but as the argument rages on, the refugees struggle to get by.
Kojo Aboagye, a Ghanaian citizen, lives in a container in an industrial area on the outskirts of Hamburg. The doors of containers on the site have been broken open, and rats sit calmly in the middle of the street. Aboagye (not his real name) is married and has a son he hasn’t seen in two years.
When he talks about his odyssey, he does so with reluctance and hesitation, as if he alone were responsible for his fate. His journey took him halfway across Africa to the sea, in Libya. From there, he made the crossing to Europe in a rickety boat. After many detours, he ended up in Hamburg, where he now lives in the unheated shipping container, hiding from the police. The police in Hamburg are currently searching for people like Aboagye, who are referred to as “illegals,” people who have fled their native countries but must now fear deportation because they were denied asylum.
In deciding to have its police round up refugees, the City of Hamburg has raised a difficult question: By cracking down, is the city committing an injustice against humanity, or is it a sign that, finally, law and order are prevailing? There is no easy answer.
Flashpoint Hamburg
The situation has escalated more quickly in Hamburg than in other German cities. Some 4,500 refugees are living in the city illegally. The city-state’s senator of the interior has instructed the police to change their approach by making a concerted effort to determine the identities of the so-called illegals. Their fingerprints are taken, and they are questioned and summoned to hearings at the immigration office.
The mood has become so heated that, when a group of about 1,000 leftist protesters convened in front of the Rote Flora, a cultural center for radical leftists, last Tuesday evening, a few of them turned on the phalanx of police officers. The demonstrators, who were there in support of the refugees, threw rocks at the police and erected street barricades. A protest against the treatment of people like Kojo Aboagye, suddenly became a fight against the “system” and capitalism as a whole.
Aboagye shares his junkyard surroundings with a few acquaintances from Ghana. Before coming to Germany, they had all envisioned it as a northern European paradise. One of them now sleeps in the cab of a broken truck. They have furnished their surroundings with discarded furniture, and they cook their meals on a camping stove. “And this is our bathroom,” Aboagye says in English, pointing to a gasoline canister filled with water and, above it, a mirror wedged between two birch trees, held in place by four nails. “Like everything else, it isn’t quite up to German standards.” Aboagye turns to irony in his more hopeful moments, but most of the time he feels nothing but rage.
Categories: Africa, Europe and Australia, Germany, Ghana