http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2008/07/05/fake-anti-racists/
Fake Anti-Racists
Germany’s Left Party issues a call to protest asylum policies that their own chairman Oskar Lafontaine supports.
By Markus Ströhlein
The disinterested have to be mobilized for action. On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the effective abolition of the fundamental right to asylum, the executive committee of the Left Party issued a “call to action”. Members were urged “within the bounds of possibility” to “support” the demonstrations on the 5th of July in Berlin.
As a reason for the call, the executive committee of Die Linke mentions that in May of 1993, members of parliament from the CDU and CSU, the SPD and FDP resolved to effectively abolish the fundamental right to asylum. But the prehistory has been left out: it was thanks to the tireless propaganda work of the then-minister president of Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine, that the federal states governed by the SPD approved the measure in the Bundesrat (Germany’s upper parliamentary house).
Already as mayor of Saarbrücken, Lafontaine advocated detention camps and non-cash benefits for refugees. In 1990, when a pogrom mood arose in the town of Lebach in light of the presence of 1,400 Roma who had fled Romania, Lafontaine, as SPD candidate for chancellor, advocated a tougher course of action against “fake asylum seekers” and for a change in the asylum laws. His wish was granted in 1993.
That was a long time ago. Lafontaine can look back with satisfaction at the beginnings of a policy towards refugees to which he has remained committed. After “asylum seekers” had become almost numerically insignificant opponents, Lafontaine, in a March 2002 column for the tabloid Bild, demanded immigration limits for ethnic German repatriates. In the same column in the year 2004, he defended the proposal of then-interior minister for the SPD, Otto Schilly, to erect detention camps for refugees in North Africa.
What’s the reason for all that? “We cannot allow that many people become unemployed due to the problem of the immigration of foreign manpower being unregulated”, Lafontaine stated in an interview after his “Fremdarbeiter” speech in 2005. The national answer to the social question – this atavism is familiar in Germany. Lafontaine has internalized it, not only in regard to asylum policies.
The anti-racism of the Left Party, as manifested in the call to protest against asylum policies that the party chairman advocates and which are tolerated, accepted and supported by the party, stands revealed as a folkloristic declaration, recited for the sake of publicity. That certainly doesn’t really help the small number of refugees who still manage to make it into Germany despite the efforts of Lafontaine and others.