TWO AFRICANS KILLED IN DEPORTATION ATTEMPTS
Last September, Semira Adamu, a 20 year old Nigerian woman was killed during her forcible deportation from Belgium. Escorting gendarmes forced her to bend down and pressed her face on a cushion. Twenty minutes later, Ms Adamu was dead. Ms Adamu's tragic fate triggered a wave of indignation, and throughout Europe, governments hurried to describe her death as a deplorable isolated incident. Yet, this May, two other Africans died as a result of police violence during their deportation from Austria and Germany. The forcible deportation of a third African, from Switzerland, failed thanks to the intervention of angry passengers.
Austria: the killing of Marcus Omofuma
On 1 May, Marcus Omofuma, a 25 year old man from Nigeria, was put on a Balkan-Air flight to Sofia by Austrian police in Vienna. Omofuma's deportation was ordered after his asylum application in Austria had been turned down last December. When Omofuma showed resistance on the plane and began screaming for help, the three escorting officers from the Federal Police Department decided to "shut his mouth". According to the police officers, the young man had been "so loud that air personnel demanded we gag him as a condition for his transport". The officers tied Omofuma to his seat with leather straps and taped his mouth and part of his nose with adhesive tape. About 20 minutes before arrival in Sofia, the officers noticed that Omofuma was "quiet", but refrained from removing the straps and tapes before the landing. At Sofia airport a doctor could only state that Marcus Omofuma had died. An autopsy carried out in Bulgaria later confirmed his death by suffocation.
Wrapped up "like a mummy"
Passengers who witnessed Omofuma's death were horrified by the behaviour of the three Austrian police. Fourty Dutch children and their teachers watched in terror, as the young African was struggling for his life. A Dutch teacher later stated police had tightly bandaged the young man's neck and most of his head. Vassil Iliev, a pilot and Balkan-Air flight-instructor, was among the passengers too. Iliev, who happened to be seated close to Omofuma, later told investigators the man was wrapped up with adhesive tape "like a mummy". "As a pilot, I have witnessed other deportations of Nigerians", Iliev said, "but I have never seen anything like this before". The Austrian police officers told him that Omofuma was a "drug dealer" (an allegation not confirmed by any evidence). During the flight, Iliev soon noted with concern that Omofuma was sweating heavily and had obvious respiration problems. Giving in to Iliev's insistent requests, the police officers repeatedly checked Omofuma's pulse rate. Each time they told Iliev: "he's alive". Shortly before the landing, Iliev noted that Ofofuma "looked like a dead man". "I told a police officer that the man needed a breath of air... The officer drove a finger under the tape covering the Nigerian's mouth, but drew it back right away, whereupon the tape shut again, since the mouth was so massively taped. Then the officer checked his pulse rate again and said: "he's alive"."
No resignations
In Austria, the killing of Marcus Omofuma triggered calls for the punishment of the three police escorts and the resignation of Interior Minister Karl Schlögl, the Home Affairs senior official responsible for refugee matters, Manfred Matzka (the man who wrote the contoversial EU strategy paper on asylum and immigration in last July), and the director general for public order, Michael Sika.
However, as opposed to Belgian Interior Minister Louis Tobback who resigned shortly after the death of Ms Adamu, Mr Schlögl managed to remain in office, together with his two senior officials. Indeed, a broad make-shift coalition flew to the support of the social-democratic Interior Minister. It ranged from the notoriously anti-foreigner and far-right "Freedom" party of Jörg Haider and the Vienna tabloid, Kronen-Zeitung , to a majority of social-democratic and conservative members of parliament, whose main concern was to protect their coalition government and to prove to the public that they could be just as tough on immigration as Mr Haider.
Gagging "not authorised but tolerated"
The gentlemen Schlögl, Matzka and Sika protested their innocence by claiming that they had been unaware of the wide-spread habit among Austrian police of taping the mouths of persons resisting their deportation. These claims were strongly questioned, among others, by the former Interior Minister Caspar Einem. A representative of the Italian carrier Alitalia told a Vienna newspaper that he had personally voiced his concern to Mr Matzka about the fact that police were often taping the mouths of deportees. Moreover, press reports quoted unidentified sources within the Interior Ministry as saying that the practice of closing the mouths of deportees with adhesive tape was "not authorised but tolerated".
Interior Minister Schlögl obstinately resisted the suspension from duty of the three police escorts pending a full investigation. This is all the more remarkable considering the fact that a 1995 report by the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) criticised the Austrian police for taping the mouths of deportees (see CL 48, p.6). Moreover the practice had been declared unlawful by an Austrian Court in 1996.
The three police officers were put off duty (with full salary) only upon the intervention of Federal Chancellor (Prime Minister) Viktor Klima. It was not until 21 May, that a disciplinary commission ordered their suspension and a salary reduction pending further investigation.
A campaign of racist defamation
In late May, Mr Haider's "Freedom" party published a full-page add in a number of newspapers, calling on the government to clamp down on "Nigerian drug dealers in Vienna" and to "arrest the murderers of our children". The heading of the add read: "Powerless against thousands of Nigerians". The very next day, the police seized about a hundred alleged "Nigerian drug dealers" in a raid in Vienna. In preparing the raid, the police, for the first time, made use of a new law authorising phone tapping and video and audio surveillance of private rooms (the so-called "Major eavesdropping-attack": grosser Lauschangriff ). However, according defence lawyers, the raid was based on very poor substantial evidence.
Most press comments concurred in labelling both the add and the police operation as a gross attempt to divert the public from the killing of Omofuma by slandering the Nigerian community. African community workers said the raid aimed to create an association between drug offenders and Nigerian political activists.
10,422 deportations in one year
In 1998, the Austrian Foreigner Police (Fremdenpolizei) turned away 25,532 persons caught at crossing the border without the necessary travel documents and carried out 10,422 deportations. According to the Foreigner Police, 10 percent try to resist their deportation and are therefore deported under police escort.
For the time being, the death of Marcus Omofuma has not lead to any changes benefiting the rights of deportees. In an early move, the Interior Ministry announced that, from now on, motorcycle helmets instead of adhesive tape will be used for silencing "refractory" deportees. When human rights organisations rejected this method as unsafe too, an irritated Mr Schlögl made it clear that the authorities would continue to use physical coercion to enforce deportations. As a last resort, the Minister said, authorities could give up deporting persons individually on regular flights and hire special charter planes for collective deportations instead. The advantage of such a solution from the authorities' point of view is evident: on charter planes, carrying only deportees and their escorts, the police would not have to reckon with disturbing witness accounts of "overemotional" passengers.
Sources: Der Standard, 5.5.99; 10.5.99, 12.5.99, 19.5.99; Die Presse, 12.5.99; Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12.5.99; Kurier, 25.5.99; Press release UNITED, 5.5.99; reports from our correspondent Willi Stelzhammer, Verein ZUSAMMEN, Vienna, May-June 99.Death during deportation from Germany
A 30 year old man from Sudan, Aamir Ageeb, died during his deportation from Germany, on 30 May. Escorting officers from the Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Police) said the man turned violent, when he was brought on the plane in Frankfurt. The officers clamped a motorcycle helmet on Ageeb's head and tied him to his seat, in order to "stop him from lashing out and biting". They claim they "pressed down" his head during take-off. When they later tried to raise Ageeb from his unnatural head-down position, he showed no sign of life. Three doctors on board of the Lufthansa plane were unable to reanimate him. "The deadly results of an inhumane policy towards asylum seekers", commented Heiko Kauffmann, spokesman of the German refugee aid group Pro Asyl . And another spokesman of the organisation, Karl Kopp, hinted at "a racist context". "We have the impression that the darker a person's skin, the lower the [authorities'] threshold to use force". Indeed, one striking similarity between many deaths during deportation from Western Europe in recent years is that all of the victims have been black.
The public debate in Austria over the death of Marcus Omofuma had not gone unnoticed in Germany and German Interior Minister Otto Schily had already announced plans for an overhaul of German deportation methods. After the death of Aamir Ageeb, he ordered a temporary halt on forcible deportations. However, the two border police who accompanied Aamir Ageeb have not even been suspended from duty pending an inquiry. Calls for Interior Minister Schily's resignation have been muted, and unlike Belgium and Austria, the issue is not front -page news.
In 1998, 42,883 people were deported from Germany by plane.
Sources: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 31.5.99; Christian Science Monitor, 11.6.99; Inter Press Service, 2.6.99.Switzerland: passengers prevent deportation
An attempt by Swiss authorities to forcibly deport a 23 year old man from Congo (former Zaire) failed spectacularly. On 9 May Zurich police put the man on a plane to Kinshasa, with his hands and feet tied up and his mouth taped. Since the man kept quiet at the beginning of the journey, his two police escorts removed the tape from his mouth. But after a while, the man began yelling and they tied him up again. Yet, the man's screams had alerted some of the passengers. According to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung , at a stop-over in Yaoundé, "between 20 and 30 black Africans" forced the two Swiss policemen to remove the ties from their countryman, after tearing down a curtain separating the deportee from the rest of the passengers and thoroughly beating up the policemen. Both police suffered injuries.
The accompanying police officers understood that a continuation of the flight "with the same passengers" was out of question. The Congolese was brought back to Switzerland, where he was immediately set free, since the maximum authorised period of detention pending deportation had already expired.
According to a spokesman for the Zurich police, 34 percent of all aliens denied entry at the Swiss border at present come from Nigeria, Cameroun and Congo. He said police escorts had to resort to massive physical coercion only in 2 percent of all deportations and stressed no lessons could be drawn from the incident, except maybe, that, in this specific case, the accompanying policemen had been "too humane".
Source: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 28.5.99.