By JANOSCH DELCKER
The southern migratory route may be closed, but the eastern one is open.
EISENHÜTTENSTADT, Germany — Angela Merkel thought she had regained
control over Germany’s borders. Turns out the problem might have just
shifted.
The German chancellor’s
decision to open up the country to refugees led to wave after wave
arriving through the so-called Western Balkans route into the south of
Germany. That route’s now all-but closed but official statistics, and
local law enforcement, suggest Merkel now needs to look east, to the border
with Poland, where the number of illegal
crossings has skyrocketed. That is putting pressure on the police and raising
concerns about radical Islamists slipping through the cracks.
“The security situation at the
German–Polish border is serious,” said Ernst Walter, head of Germany’s federal
police union. “Day by day, there could be hundreds or thousands of illegal
border crossings into Germany from Poland, with potential terrorists among them
— and we simply have no idea about what’s happening.”
Many of those coming are
asylum seekers from Chechnya, a predominately Muslim republic where separatists
have fought several bloody wars against Russia, and some law enforcement
officials worry they don’t have enough resources to investigate the migrants’
backgrounds, given that there are not enough translators and that reliable
information from Chechnya and Russia can be hard to obtain.
Largely unreported on by the media or remarked on by
politicians, this migrant flow into Germany from the east has solidified over
the last year, with people traveling by train from Belarus and entering the
Schengen area in the Polish city of Terespol where they can file an
application for asylum.
“We have no idea if they
stay in Germany or if they travel on to other countries,” a federal police
official said. “We simply have no idea.”
Since the German border
with Poland is open under the Schengen agreement, there are no official
statistics on how many have crossed into the country this way. But nationwide,
the number of Russians seeking asylum in Germany grew six fold this year
alone, jumping from 307 in January to 1,835 in June, according to
Germany’s Federal Office for Migration.
A massive backlog means
it takes several months for asylum applications to be processed, so these
numbers suggest the number of Russian asylum seekers increased at the same time
as the spike in refugees from Syria and the wider Middle East.
More recent numbers from
the Brandenburg state interior ministry on asylum registrations, which
are processed within days of asylum seekers entering
the country, suggest that this trend continued into the summer of
2016.
Fleeing repression
Human rights activists
say a lack of political freedom and brutal repression of dissidents in Chechnya
is what’s driving the increase in migration. And while federal officials don’t
collect records of how many of the migrants say they come from the Chechen
republic, local officials say it’s the majority.
“Most of these people
declared in questionnaires that they came from the Caucasus, especially
Chechnya,” said Susann Fischer, a spokesperson at the Brandenburg state
interior ministry.
Frank Nürnberger, head
of the Brandenburg central registration office for foreigners, recalled a
similar surge in 2013. After a dip at the end of 2014, the number started
to rise again last year, he said.
“However, no one really
took notice because there were so many more refugees coming on the Western Balkans route,” said
Nürnberger, whose office in the city of Eisenhüttenstadt at the Polish border
is one of the main reception centers in Germany for Russian asylum seekers.
“The Chechens disappeared in that huge mass [even though] their numbers
continued to go up.”
Unlike Germany, Poland does
collect statistics on how many Chechens are seeking asylum. Of the almost 8,000
Russians who applied for asylum in Poland last year, 92 percent said they came
from Chechnya, according to the Polish interior ministry. So far this year,
more than 6,100 Russians have already applied for asylum, 94 percent of them
Chechen.
Many Chechens
enter Germany by car via a highway linking Warsaw and Berlin, named the
“Autobahn of Freedom” in honor of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Iron
Curtain.
“The majority travel on to
places like Belgium, France, Germany or Austria, which are seen to be more
secure and where there is already a sizable diaspora of Chechens,”
said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, project director for Russia and the North
Caucasus with the International Crisis Group.
Border controls between
Germany and Poland were abolished in 2007. But police can still check travelers
at or near the border, though such checks have effectively become
impossible due to staffing problems as many officers
were reallocated to the Austrian border or major airports, officials
said.
A senior police officer, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said that a 90-kilometer area near the German-Polish border was
often patrolled by two officers in one car.
A high-ranking German
security official dismissed that claim, blaming it on “exaggerated union
demands,” though he echoed concern about the migration flow across the
German–Polish border.
Back and forth
Under the EU’s Dublin
agreement, if German officials determine that someone seeking asylum in
Germany had entered Poland first — which is the case for most Chechens — the
migrants have to be sent back to Poland to complete the asylum application
process.
Such returns are often
pointless, said Nürnberger.
“To put it in simple
terms: People are being brought back to Poland and an hour later they can
literally walk back to Germany across the pedestrian bridge connecting Germany
and Poland in Frankfurt.”
Nürnberger
recalled the case of one Chechen who had threatened employees at a refugee
center when he was deported to Poland. Two days later, the Chechen was
back at the refugee center, being celebrated by some of his
countrymen. “Of course, this leads to frustration among our employees
here,” Nürnberger said.
The anecdote
encapsulates the dilemma faced by Merkel: While there is growing domestic
pressure for more security measures, stricter border controls within the
Schengen area could cost the country €10 billion a year.
More than 1 million people
arrived in Germany to seek asylum last year and the country used an
emergency clause in the Schengen treaty to introduce checks at its land border
with Austria in September. Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden and Norway also
introduced temporary border controls, which are currently limited
to a maximum of six months.
Recent polls show that support
for Merkel’s refugee policy has plummeted as the country has grown more fearful
of terrorism, following a string of attacks this summer, two of
which were committed by asylum seekers.
While there has not been
any terrorist attack in Germany committed by Chechens, German authorities
are concerned about Chechnya as a breeding ground for Islamist terrorists.
According to the interior
ministry in Brandenburg, security officials are monitoring 80 people in the
state suspected of sympathizing with Islamist terrorism. Many are from
the Northern Caucasus and support or sympathize with Islamic State, said
ministry spokesperson Susann Fischer.
“Islamic State is actively
recruiting ultra-radical Salafists from Chechnya,” said Sokirianskaia from
the International Crisis Group. But, she added, the regime in Chechnya brutally
cracks down on even non-violent Salafism, seeing it “as a symbol of
opposition.”
Accordingly, many Salafists
feel compelled to leave Chechnya. Most, however, choose destinations other than
Western Europe and instead settle in Muslim countries or, in the case of the
most radical, decide to fight in Syria, she said.
In late 2013, the state of
Brandenburg organized a workshop to inform state officials about potential
security threats in connection with the spike of Chechens entering the country.
“Maybe they didn’t share
everything they knew with us,” one participant said. “But it seemed like
they knew little to nothing about who is coming, what their reasons were, or
what the situation was like in Chechnya.”
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