“Are we still a part of humanity?” - Selbstzeugnisse revisited

The German constitution has guaranteed politically persecuted people the right to asylum since 1949. With the signing of the Geneva Refugee Convention in 1951, West Germany also promised protection to all those whose life or freedom is threatened because of their race, religion, nationality or membership to a social group.¹ Although no federal government fully implemented this liberal right to asylum and the so-called “Asylkompromiss” (asylum compromise) in 1993 severely restricted the group of people entitled to asylum, the Federal Republic thus became a place of refuge.²

Until the 1970s, it was mainly people from Eastern European countries who applied for asylum, followed by an increasing number of people from Asia and Africa. What expectations did these people have of Germany as a host country? What did they experience in the often-lengthy process of assessing their asylum applications, during which they were housed and cared for in camps? How did they perceive the places and circumstances in which they arrived after their flight? What strategies did they themselves choose to problematize their situation?

The few contemporary historical works on asylum in Germany do not examine these questions from the perspective of asylum seekers themselves. Instead, the focus is on asylum policy and how asylum seekers were discussed in the German public sphere.³ This is in large part also due to the availability of sources. We can trace asylum policy, and the public debate based on publicly accessible newspapers, parliamentary debates and files.⁴ By contrast, only a few written testimonies from asylum seekers themselves have survived, and these tend to be scattered in the private archives of supporters or organizations. Two letters from the Algerian journalist Habiba Saidi dated February 7th and 8th 2000, which reveal her self-perception as a politically persecuted activist and asylum seeker on the one hand and her experience of everyday life in the asylum accommodation on the other, show that the more time-consuming search for such testimonies is nevertheless worthwhile.

Habiba Saidi came to Thuringia in the spring of 1999 and initially lived in an “Erstaufnahmelager” (initial reception camp) set up in former NVA barracks near Mühlhausen before being transferred to the Thuringian Forest in October 1999. In a former pre-military training camp near Tambach-Dietharz, she lived with her two grown-up sons in a 12-squaremeter room while she waited for a court decision in her asylum case along with around 600 other people.⁵ Her letters reveal little about her life as a French-speaking journalist in Algeria prior to her flight. Since 1991, the country had been torn apart by a civil war between the government and the Islamist movement FIS, which Saidi described as “terrorists” and which culminated in several massacres of the civilian population in 1997 and 1998, the years before her arrival in Germany.⁶ Because of her profession Saidi saw herself as a “main target of the terrorists” and had therefore taken the decision to flee.⁷

The camp near Tambach-Dietharz, in which Saidi wrote her letters, was known among asylum seekers as one of the most inhumane places of accommodation in Germany due to its remote location in the forest and the security architecture, which was reminiscent of a prison.⁸ Refugees lived there for several months, sometimes even years, behind a two-metre-high steel-pole fence secured with razor wires. They had no employment or learning opportunities and received inadequate medical care. Because the camp was located on a mountain five kilometres from the nearest town, local transport was scarce and hardly affordable for the refugees, it was difficult for the residents to help themselves or find support, making them feel help- and powerless. In 1997 and 1998, major protest movements emerged there, which fought for the installation of kitchens for self-catering.⁹

By the time Saidi arrived in Tambach, the self-organization had come to a standstill. Together with a new generation of politically active asylum seekers, she managed to re-establish contacts with former supporters. In March 2000, they jointly demanded in a petition to the Thuringian State Parliament that the camp near Tambach-Dietharz must be closed for good.¹⁰ The petition was accompanied by a series of demonstrations, visits to the state parliament and invitations to the press and politicians to the remote location.¹¹ Habiba Saidi wrote the two letters presented here in the context of this protest in February 2000. The activist Regina Andreßen from the State of Lower Saxony organized their German translation and distribution. Among the recipients was the Thüringer Flüchtlingsrat (Thuringian Refugee Council), which archived the letters, as did Andreßen. Only the translated version with handwritten annotations by Andreßen has survived at both locations. This illustrates the extent to which the opinions expressed by refugees were shaped by the mediation work of German supporters, who, by translating, copying and distributing the letters, made it possible for the texts to reach a wider German audience, but were thereby also able to intervene in the content and to emphasize whatever they found most important.¹²

Saidi formulated the first, two-page letter dating from February 7th 2000 in the “we”-form and thus made herself an advocate for the “Flüchtlinge des LGU Neues Haus” (Refugees of the LGU Neues Haus).¹³ She repeatedly refers to the humanity of asylum seekers as an universally valid value, which also has a legal basis in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is therefore enforceable. Her questions: “Are we still part of humanity? Do the laws and conventions still apply to us? “¹⁴ get to the heart of the two pillars on which her argument rests. Her letters stand out from the other protest letters written by asylum seekers in the camp because they do not stop at describing the difficult living conditions in the camp, but place the isolated situation, the restrictions on the freedom of movement and the inadequate health care within broader human rights discourses. Although Saidi does not argue with paragraphs in a strict sense and her letter is an activist, not a legal indictment, her language echoes the formulations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹⁵ Through her education and professional experience, despite the substantial shielding of information from the camp, she has a frame of reference to indict her treatment and an idea of how justice should be established. At the end of the first letter, she calls on “state organs” to verify the truth of her testimony, similar to a court case, in order to then “relieve her of her suffering”.¹⁶ Like the international human rights conventions, she addresses only the state as an actor and expects the enforcement of her rights from the same body that is responsible for the camp.

In the second letter, written just one day later, Saidi abandons the role of general advocate and instead describes her own experiences in the asylum procedure in Mühlhausen and Tambach very personally and from her first-person perspective. She retains strong reference to the human rights discourse. She denounces the lack of procedural transparency and describes in striking terms her isolation and humiliation as a professional, well-read, previously well-travelled, older woman in the camp. Unlike in the first letter, she no longer describes the refugees as a uniform group united in suffering, but also names the problems of living together in cramped conditions.

“Who would like to imagine being in my place one day: Leaving your room at three in the morning, walking down a long hallway whose large doors are open, feeling the icy draft, and meeting with drunken teenagers pumped up with drugs. What does one do with human dignity? “¹⁷

Habiba Saidi creates a new “we” between herself and the readers, whom she imagines in her place in the confrontation with other refugees. She provides an insight into the problems of mass accommodation based on subjective and physical feelings, which is not reflected in the official files or in other protest letters, which, like her first letter, postulate a community of suffering among asylum seekers. The different speaker positions in her two letters thus also illustrate the difficulty of political self-organization of asylum seekers, which moves between major differences within the group and the shared experience of isolation and structural discrimination in the asylum procedure.

Given the personal insight and first-person perspective, the second letter can be more clearly assigned to the genre of self-testimony than the first. However, I argue that Saidi’s letter, which argues collectively, should also be included in this category and that the idea of an individual giving testimony of himself alone, an idea inscribed in the concept of self-testimony, should be questioned. Understanding and describing the self as autonomous rather than as part of a group or a larger context ultimately has a particular tradition founded in the European Enlightenment. The vast majority of the written testimonies of asylum seekers from Thuringia describe the structural discrimination experienced as a collective in the “we” and yet fulfil the function of opening up the experiences, hopes and concerns of asylum seekers that are not visible in administrative sources.

Around three years after Saidi wrote her letters, the camp near Tambach-Dietharz was closed. The refugees’ protest contributed to this decision, but the decisive factor was the end of the contract between the state of Thuringia and the company running the accommodation. It is uncertain whether and where Saidi found out about the closure. As of July 2002, no written traces of her can be found in the activist archives.

The passages discussed here show the great value of Saidi’s letters as one of the few sources from asylum seekers themselves. Beyond the specific context, they help to understand what life experiences arise from persecution beyond the original situation of violence when persecuted people flee and find themselves in the asylum structures of other states.

Translation: Nils Bergmann

References

UNHCR, Abkommen über die Rechtsstellung der Flüchtlinge vom 28. Juli 1951, Article 1, A2.
Patrice Poutrus, Umkämpftes Asyl, Berlin 2019.
Cf. ibid.; Ulrich Herbert, Die Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland. Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge, Munich 2001.; Ursula Münch, Asylpolitik in Deutschland. Akteure, Interessen, Strategien, in: Stefan Luft and Peter Schimany (eds.), 20 Jahre Asylkompromiss. Bilanz und Perspektiven, Bielefeld 2014, p. 69–86.
Christian Reck, Die Asyldebatte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1987 bis 1993, Dissertation, Tübingen 2022, p. 26.
Habiba Saidi, 2nd letter, private archive Regina Andreßen, 08.02.2000.
Ibid.; Miriam R. Lowi, Algeria 1992–2002. Anatomy of a Civil War, in: Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (eds.), Understanding Civil War (Volume 1: Africa), Washington 2005, p. 221–246.
Saidi, 2nd Letter.
Simon Baumann, José Mbongo-Mingi, Bachiri Salifou, Wir haben eine Stimme, in: JungdemokratInnen, Junge Linke (eds.), Kein Mensch ist illegal. Handbuch gegen Abschottung, Selektion & Überwachung, Berlin 1998, p. 104–113, here p. 110.
For an insight into the (protest)-history of the “Neues Haus” camp near Tambach-Dietharz, see www.camp-tambach.de.
Das Komitee der AsylbewerberInnen in Georgenthal unterstützt vom Verein Menschlichkeit e.V., Wir fordern die Schließung der Asylunterkunft Tambach-Dietharz (Georgenthal) (petition), Archiv Flüchtlingsrat Thüringen, 29.02.2000.
See, among others Oliver Bauer, Isolation macht Ausländer fertig. Schließung vom Neuen Haus gefordert, in: Thüringer Landeszeitung, March 3rd 2000, n.p..; Vor-Ort Termin am Neuen Haus. Lobby für bessere Unterbringung der Asylbewerber sehr dünn, in: Thüringer Allgemeine, March 29th 2000, n.p..; Keine Schließung nötig. PDS-Visite in umstrittenen Asylbewerberheim, in: Südthüringer Zeitung, March 30th 2000, p. 3.
Cf. on power hierarchies between asylum seekers and their supporters: Osaren Igbinoba, Die Fessel, die uns gefangen hält, in: Neues Deutschland, August 28th 2009, n.p..
Habiba Saidi, 1st letter, Private Archive Regina Andreßen, February 7th 2000.
Ibid.
Cf. United Nations, Resolution 217 A (III) of the General Assembly of December 10th 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: ‘http://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/Language.aspx?LangID=ger’, accessed 23.07.2023.
Saidi, 1st letter.
Saidi, 2nd letter.

Downloads

Briefe Habiba Saidis vom 07. und 08.02.2000 / Privatarchiv Regina Andreßen

Emilia Henkel, M.A., is a PhD-Candidate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena on the development of the asylum infrastructure in East Germany from 1990 onwards and is interested in ways of linking contemporary history research at the university with the places and people outside the university that are associated with it.