German foreign minister says Sarkozy ‘misunderstood’ Merkel

Guido Westerwelle says clearing illegal camps would be in ‘contradiction with the German constitution’.

Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s foreign minister, has said claims by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, that Germany was planning to clear illegal camps was a “misunderstanding”.

“The Chancellor said publicly and also told me how the conversation [with Sarkozy] went. She did not make any announcement of that kind. That would be in contradiction with the German constitution. I assume that there was a misunderstanding,” Westerwelle said yesterday evening.

Germany is planning to return 14,900 refugees to Kosovo, most of whom are Roma. In April, Germany and Kosovo signed an agreement on return of the refugees to Kosovo. Most of the refugees live in rented accommodation in Germany but face difficulties in the job market. Those who have found jobs and are able to survive without government assistance are, in principle, allowed to stay.

“No mass deportations are planned,” Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s interior minister, said after he signed the agreement with Bajram Rexhepi, his Kosovo counterpart. De Maizière said that start-up aid and other assistance will be made available to people who decide to return voluntarily. Those who do not sign up for such programmes will eventually be deported.

It is not clear, however, if Sarkozy was referring to this programme.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, warned last month that the countries of western European should stop forcibly returning Roma to Kosovo since they face discrimination there. “The majority of those who are sent back are leaving Kosovo again and trying to reach other parts of Europe,” he said.

Thorbjørn Jagland, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, is to meet Pierre Lellouche, France’s secretary of state for Europe, today to discuss the Roma issue.

More than 100,000 people fled Kosovo for Germany in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was engulfed in a series of bloody wars. Kosovo’s Roma faced retaliation by ethnic Albanians after Serbian security forces were driven out of the province by NATO forces in 1999. Many of them had participated in looting and other crimes against Albanians during Serbia’s brutal counter-insurgency operations in 1998-99.

Most ethnic Roma fleeing Kosovo for western Europe – Austria, Sweden and Switzerland were the other main recipient countries – received some kind of temporary status, but only rarely have they been recognised as refugees under international law. Most ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs eventually returned, leaving the Roma as the largest community from Kosovo in Germany. The German government says that almost 115,000 people returned to Kosovo between 1999 and 2009; around one-fifth of them were deported.

Most of Kosovo’s Roma traditionally speak Serbian rather than Albanian, the language of Kosovo’s majority, but they are also discriminated against by Kosovo’s ethnic Serbs. UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, estimates that about half the Roma who face deportation from Germany to Kosovo are children, most of them born and raised in Germany. The fact that many of these children only speak the Roma language is a further impediment to their integration in Kosovo.

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