KOSOVA: Borderline casesViolence won sympathy for Europe's dispossessed, but xenophobia and disunited policies mean asylum seekers are still left in the cold, writes Deborah Hargreaves
Osmam Bilalli, a 40-year-old farmer from Kosova, sits in a small apartment in East Berlin's grey wasteland and reflects on his life as a refugee.
There is nothing for him to do, he says. "Absolutely nothing - no work, no right to work." Mr Bilalli has five children and their grandmother living with him in Germany while his wife and another child are still in Kosova. He shows pictures of his destroyed house. "If I could work and we were all together, I would stay here long enough to earn the money to build a new house in Kosova," he says.
Mr Bilalli's frustrations are echoed by Nermina Dzekic, a Bosnian Moslem who has been in Germany for seven years. "The Germans have done such a lot for us . . . but what depresses us is that we can't work . . . we sit here and watch television and wonder what life offers us." The Dzekic family has applied to go to America. "Otherwise we have no future. It will be at least 20 years before everything is peaceful again in Bosnia."
The plight of refugees such as Mr Bilalli and Mrs Dzekic has turned asylum policy into an emotive political issue. Harrowing television images of Kosovar Albanians being driven from their homes in the recent conflict with Serbia stirred public opinion, forcing many governments to make action on refugees a priority. But now the war is over, governments are worried by the backlash against immigrants in some countries. The recent success of Jörg Haider's rightwing Freedom party in the Austrian elections, where he campaigned on a strong xenophobic ticket, highlights how sensitive this issue has become.
Even without a backlash, the presence of refugees can lead to tensions between governments and local authorities, which have to house and feed asylum seekers on limited budgets.
Sir Jeremy Beecham, chairman of the Local Government Association in England and Wales, says: "Financial uncertainty makes it difficult for many authorities to commit as fully as they would like." Local government leaders in Kent - a flash point between residents and asylum seekers this summer - complain that the 5,000 refugees in the area are costing the local authority £14m ($23m) this year, and putting enormous pressure on staff and housing resources.
"The asylum seekers are here in these large numbers purely because they have to wait three or more years for the highly bureaucratic appeal system to take place. This is not a good use of public money," says Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Conservative leader of Kent County Council.
The conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s engulfed Europe in a wave of displaced people: 2 million refugees fled Bosnia as a result of the violence and a further 700,000 ethnic Albanians left Kosova. There are still more than 1 million Bosnians who have not returned.
But the explosion in the number of migrants entering the EU really started at the end of the cold war. As Communist governments fell and restrictions on migration were removed, many east Europeans abandoned their homes to seek a better future in the west. Asylum applications to EU countries more than doubled in the three years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1992, 692,419 people applied for asylum.
At the same time, the EU moved towards abolishing its internal border controls to allow its citizens to move freely within the union - the so-called Shengen agreement. This means that once immigrants arrive in the EU, they can move easily from one country to another, although the UK still has border controls. This policy has been accompanied by tighter controls on external EU borders.
As a result, the EU is now trying to hammer out a common asylum policy, with standard rules for dealing with applications. The common policy could also include financial assistance for countries that take more than their fair share of refugees and end the practice of "asylum shopping", where refugees move from one country to another seeking the most liberal regime in which to lodge their application.
"The issue is how we can make sure we have proper common procedures so that we are dealing with massive flows of immigration and asylum seekers across Europe," says Tony Blair, UK prime minister. "There is a general recognition we have to tackle these things together, while keeping control of our own borders."
As governments throughout the developed world tighten immigration procedures, asylum has become one of the principal means of entry into the EU. While many applicants are genuine refugees, many governments are concerned about "economic migrants", who are simply looking for a better life.
Part of the problem is that different countries use varying definitions to distinguish genuine asylum seekers. Many of these definitions are rooted in the political climate of the cold war and confer refugee status on those persecuted by the state, but not - as is more often the case today - by warlords or militias. Refugee groups say the definition of an asylum seeker laid down by the Geneva Convention is out of date. They would like to see it broadened. Governments prefer to stick to the narrower interpretation.
The muddle over asylum procedures greatly complicates the humanitarian work of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It says: "Asylum procedures in many countries, if not all countries, are in crisis, they are swamped, under pressure and often being revised, in many cases in different directions."
Partly in response, EU heads of state meeting in Tampere, Finland, this weekend, are taking the first steps towards a common asylum policy. The concern of the UNHCR is that this does not become the pretext for slamming the door on refugees.
"There is a clear tendency towards more restrictions everywhere," says Jean-Noel Wetterwald, a UNHCR representative in Germany. "The fear is that if you are more liberal than your neighbour, you will get all the refugees. That is why we are so concerned that the harmonisation process should not go to the lowest common denominator."
Ben Hall, research director at the Centre for European Reform, agrees. He says the uneven spread of refugees between EU countries risks increasing political tension. "It also leads to the danger of a 'Dutch auction' in which each member state tries to outbid its neighbours in imposing ever-tighter restrictions on refugees," he says.
Germany, for example, tightened its asylum laws in 1993, insisting that asylum seekers coming from a country not classified, as a source of political persecution would be returned there. That undoubtedly caused German refugee numbers to drop, while other countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland saw a sharp increase in their intake of refugees.
In per capita terms, the Netherlands and Switzerland bear the greatest pressure from asylum seekers, while Germany and the UK have dropped closer to the EU average. Last year, the Netherlands had 340 inhabitants to every asylum seeker, compared with 1,010 in the UK and an EU average of 1,310.
The disparity in the number of refugees taken by different countries in the EU has led some member countries, backed by the European Commission, to call for burden-sharing. That could mean allocating quotas of asylum seekers to individual countries, or pooling finances to deal with the problem. But this solution is opposed by the UK and Spain.
The issue of asylum will become more pressing over the next five years as the EU prepares to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech republic, whose long borders with Russia are difficult to police. This could lead to a new influx of immigrants. But although EU leaders meeting at Tampere are aware of the urgent nature of the problem, no one believes common asylum procedures will be adopted in the near future. For asylum seekers such as Mr Bilalli, this means more years of uncertainty, no home and no job.Reporting by Ralph Atkins and Quentin Peel in Berlin, Jimmy Burns in London, and David White in Madrid Saturday October 16 1999
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