Luxembourg - As EU ministers prepared to discuss a
controversial plan to assist Iraqi Christians who have fled their
homeland, senior German officials said Friday other European Union
nations must take in proportionate numbers of the refugees.
Joerg Schoenbohm, interior minister of Brandenburg state, said
after consultations among the 16 German states near Berlin that the
invitation must be a joint EU project, not a German one.
They had asked federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble to
relay that stance to EU ministers meeting the same day in Luxembourg.
The refugees must be distributed to all the EU nations, he said.
Critics have charged that the plan to specifically help the minority,
which has lived in Iraq since before Islam and mainly speaks the
Aramaic language, would implicitly discriminate against Arabs.
'The EU nations must commit themselves to jointly accept the
refugees, so that it isn't Germany all by itself that takes in the
mass of the refugees, as happened with Yugoslavia,' said Schoenbohm.
He was referring to the tens of thousands of Bosnians who took
refuge in Germany from the Bosnian war in the mid-1990s.
Another centre-right minister, Volker Bouffier of Hesse, said,
'Back then, Germany took in more people than all the other European
nations combined.'
The current head of the European Union's council of interior
ministers gave a cold response earlier Friday to the German proposal.
'In general, I believe we must accept refugees and give asylum to
everybody, without preconditions of religion or if anybody is from
another race,' Slovenian Interior Minister Dragutin Mate said.
'That's a basic precept - I'm afraid that it will be very hard to
work in that way,' he said.
Last Sunday, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble spoke
out in favour of taking in a large contingent of the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi Christians who have fled to refugee camps in
Syria and Jordan.
Luxembourg Integration Minister Nicolas Schmit reacted without
enthusiasm to the proposal, saying that it would not be possible to
be 'selective.'
However, EU states should show 'solidarity' on the broader issue
of Iraqi refugees, he said. Non-governmental organizations including
Amnesty International have accused most EU member states of not doing
enough to help Iraqi refugees.
Ahead of the meeting, Amnesty's general secretary, Irene Khan,
told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that Germany should take in other
Iraqi refugees as well, not just Christian ones.
The Christians from Iraq complain that intimidation, murder and
abductions of Christians have continued, even as violence between
Arabic-speaking Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions has declined.
The Catholic and Lutheran churches have pressed for Germany, which
opposed the US invasion of Iraq, to take in 20,000 to 30,000.
German Foreign Ministry data suggests an original Iraqi Christian
population of 800,000 had halved by 2005 to 400,000.
Iraq's two main native Christian denominations are the independent
Church of the East under Patriarch Dinkha IV, and the Chaldean
Catholic Church under patriarch Emmanuel III Delly which is linked to
Catholicism.
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