KOSOVO CRISIS A PRETEXT FOR MILITARISATION OF REFUGEE MANAGEMENT
Since October, Swiss army personnel are being tasked with attending on asylum seekers in reception centres. The Swiss Federal Government justified the measure by reference to the alleged overload of civilian refugee reception structures resulting from the arrival of thousands of Albanians from Kosovo in Switzerland this year. Critics contend the Government has deliberately created an emergency situation in order to justify a long-planned militarisation of refugee management.
The use of the army for the reception and control of asylum seekers as an exceptional measure in the event of sudden "mass arrivals" of refugees has been authorised by law since the late 80s. This however is the first time such an emergency situation has been invoked by the federal government, even though the number of arrivals per month is clearly lower in 1998 than at certain periods in the early 90s when Switzerland was a target country of refugees from the former Yugoslavia.
Swiss refugee charities contend the Government deliberately refrained from extending civilian reception structures in time despite the predictable increase in arrivals of refugees from Kosovo. It created a pretext justifying the regular use of the army for the purposes of "refugee management". The army has come to stay, government critics fear.
Failure of prevailing policy of deterrence
The steady increase in arrivals of asylum seekers from Kosovo since late 1997 amounts to a harsh defeat for the Swiss government’s asylum policy which aimed at significantly reducing the influx of refugees through the implementation, in recent years, of ever more stringent measures of deterrence and forcible repatriation.
As late as July 1997, the Swiss Federal Minister of Police and Justice, Arnold Koller, and the Interior Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) signed a readmission agreement opening the way for the forcible repatriation of (mainly Kosovo-Albanian) Yugoslav nationals, whom the FRY earlier refused to take back. As the first armed clashes between the newly formed Kosovo-Albanian guerilla, UCK, and Serbian security forces occurred in 1997, Swiss authorities continued to repatriate Kosovo-Albanians to Yugoslavia. Often, the returnees were handed over to Serbian police already at Zurich airport and put on charter planes.
Soldiers at Swiss-Italian border
Reacting to the increasing arrivals of "illegal immigrants" - both Albanians and Turkish and Iraqi Kurds - at Switzerland’s southern border, the Federal Government decided in March 1998 to task 80 professional military servicemen with assisting the Customs’ Border Protection (Grenzwachtkorps) in controlling the Swiss-Italian border. In 1998, 175 of Switzerland’s 1,900 Border Protection officers were placed at the only 15 kilometre long border line at the town of Chiasso, which is considered a high risk zone of "illegal immigration". Nonetheless, from the beginning of 1998, the number of asylum applications in Switzerland rose massively. The expected number of applications for 1998 is 32,000, as against only 24,000 in 1997. Between January and mid-November 1998, more than 17,000 Kosovo-Albanians applied for asylum in Switzerland. The number of "illegal immigrants" arrested while trying to cross the border is steadily rising and is expected to reach a new peak of 7,000 this year.
New asylum law
In June, the Swiss Federal Parliament approved a new asylum law, as well as the immediate entry into force from 1 July of two of its most restrictive provisions by way of a federal emergency decree. In Switzerland, laws adopted by Parliament can be subsequently rejected by the people by a referendum vote. Pending such a referendum vote the law cannot enter into force. This delay does, however, not apply to measures adopted as federal emergency decrees. They are applied immediately and annulled only later in the event of rejection by a referendum vote.
The new asylum law introduces a number of restrictive measures aiming at speeding up asylum examination procedures, denying refugees granted temporary protection on grounds other than those stated by the 1951 Geneva Convention access to the asylum procedure, and facilitating the detention and swift removal of asylum seekers whose application has been turned down. Many of these measures were already being applied under emergency regulations and are now put on a permanent statutory basis by the new law.
The most stringent new restrictions can be found in the two provisions which are already being applied under the emergency decree:
XXad As a rule, asylum applications from aliens having entered the country "illegally" (e.g. without sufficient travel documents or via the "green border") can be turned down immediately without further examination, and the expulsion of the applicants concerned can be ordered immediately. They have only 24 hours to file a complaint adjourning the measure. Exceptions to the rule are possible only when there are strong reasons to believe that the person concerned is actually a victim of persecution as defined by the 1951 Geneva Convention.
XXad Offenders who cannot be deported can be held in closed internment centres.
Offers for private accommodation turned down
Two days after the approval of the new law and the emergency decree by Parliament, the Swiss government, reacting to growing public concern about the plight of the Kosovo-Albanians, announced a temporary halt on repatriations to Yugoslavia, but refrained from granting the refugees concerned temporary stay permits allowing them to seek employment, although this possibility is provided for by the law for people fleeing from violence. Fearing that measures of integration would hinder a swift repatriation of Kosovo-Albanians at the earliest possible occasion, the Government also turned down offers from the large Albanian community and Swiss voluntary organisations to accommodate refugees in private homes throughout the country. Instead, the asylum applicants were placed in isolated reception camps, as far away as possible from their relatives.
Not unexpectedly, the official refugee reception structures were soon no longer able to cope with the mass arrivals. Hundreds of asylum seekers quickly found themselves living on the streets for an average two weeks before being registered and placed in a reception camp, and charities began offering shelter to asylum seekers who were not being received in an official centre. The government still seemed to hope that these conditions of reception would have a dissuasive effect on refugees from Kosovo.
As the conflict in Kosovo escalated in the autumn, and refugees continued to pour into the country, the Swiss Government finally had to accept the fact that its policy of deterrence and forced repatriation had failed and suddenly announced a policy turnabout. On 20 October, Federal Police and Justice Minister Koller announced the creation of new reception camps, run with the assistance of military personnel.
The use of the army for border control, refugee reception and other public order tasks has been discussed for a long time in Switzerland. Since the mid-eighties, joint exercises of Swiss army units and civilian authorities were based on the "threat scenario" of a mass-influx of refugees entailing disturbances of public order ranging from political destabilisation by aliens to terrorist threats. Recently, the far-right SVP (Swiss People’s Party) called for the setting up of federal internment camps for "illegal" and otherwise "deviant" aliens, and in October, the conference of public prosecutors of the Cantons (federal States) joined the call for internment camps.
Large Albanian community attracts refugees
The presence of a large community of ethnic Albanians (both from Kosovo and from Albania) made Switzerland a prime target country for Albanian refugees in the 90s. Even before the war in former Yugoslavia, the Albanian community numbered 150,000 persons, most of whom had settled in Switzerland during the years of economic boom in the 60s and early 70s. A new wave of Albanians arrived starting in 1991 due to the war between Serbia and Croatia and the abolition of the autonomy statute of the province of Kosovo by the Serbian government. The largest mass influx was triggered by the beginning of the armed conflict in Kosovo in late 1997. At present, the ethnic Albanian population in Switzerland is believed to number close to 200,000.
EU deaf to Swiss demands for "burden sharing"
Switzerland’s attractiveness for asylum seekers is due to other factors too. The country lies at the centre of Western Europe’s main North-South transit routes, it continues to rank among the continent’s most prosperous States, and as a non-EU State, it cannot fully participate in the EU countries’ harmonised border control and anti-immigration policies. For example, Switzerland has long sought to join the EU Dublin Convention (determining the country responsible of examining an asylum application), but negotiations have been delayed by the EU which is demanding concessions by Switzerland in domains such as the free movement of persons and road and railway traffic. Accordingly, on 20 November, the EU countries politely rejected a Swiss proposal according to which Kosovo-Albanian refugees would have been collectively granted temporary protection in all Western European countries. Swiss demands for "burden sharing" went unheard too. In vein, Swiss diplomats emphasised the fact that Switzerland was the Western European country receiving the most refugees per capita. Indeed, 20 per cent of all Kosovo-Albanian refugees have sought asylum in Switzerland, compared with 40 per cent in Germany.
Swiss-Italian irritations
Swiss authorities are also unhappy with the inclination of certain neighbour States to refuse the readmission of third country nationals who entered Switzerland via their territory. Italy, for example, has hitherto accepted to take back only between one third and one half of the aliens Switzerland intended to return.
In April 1998, the Swiss Border Protection arrested 709 "illegal immigrants", of which 407 had entered the country via Italy, according to Swiss reading. But Italy readmitted only 151. Most of them were set free immediately upon return. As a consequence, Swiss Border Protection officers complain that they often arrest the same person two or three times. This year, a court in the Italian city of Como (near the Swiss border) found no need to sentence members of a criminal organisation who had smuggled migrants from Italy to Switzerland.
The evident lack of cooperation of Italian authorities is understandable considering Italy’s own problem in coping with mass arrivals of immigrants and refugees. In 1998, between one hundred and four hundred immigrants arrived at the Italian coast every day. In the wealthy northern province of Lombardia alone, the estimated number of illegal immigrants is 30,000 - 40,000.
Emergency measure or long-term militarisation?
In Switzerland, the new asylum law and the government’s decision to use the army for handling the continuous refugee influx has further fuelled a heated public dispute opposing advocates of a liberal asylum and immigration policy to hard-liners in the government and the right wing parties. Recently, opponents of the new asylum law and the emergency decree gathered the necessary 50,000 signatures for a referendum vote. While the referendum campaign is being supported by Amnesty International, the Swiss Social Democrat Party, and numerous humanitarian organisations, the umbrella organisation of the more official and established refugee aid organisations decided not to support the referendum, which most observers believe is very likely to be defeated.
At the same time, military and police experts are thinking out loud about transforming the Customs’ Border Protection into a federal force along the lines of the German BGS (Border Protection), which could also carry out certain police tasks on the federal level. The creation of such a federal police force, certain experts claim, could become a necessity in speeding up Swiss efforts to join the Schengen Convention and would unburden the army of some of its politically controversial tasks in the domain of internal security and public order. In view of the above, many critics of official Swiss asylum policies fear that the militarisation of Swiss refugee management is likely to continue, be it with or without the involvement of the army.
Sources: Archipel (European Civic Forum), No.56, Dec 1998, article by Yves Brütsch, Centre Social Protestant, Geneva; Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4.5.98, 6/7.6.98, 17.6.98, 29.6.98, 11.11.98; La Liberté, 21/22.11.98; our own sources