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By Schüler:innengruppe Cologne
On 21.1. In 1998, the traveling church asylum began in downtown Cologne. Kurdish refugees occupied the Antonite church there. For two years, 500 Kurdish refugees, often families, were protected from deportation by church congregations throughout North Rhine-Westphalia. The campaign “no human is illegal” organized the asylum together with the refugees and the communities and carried out numerous, often spectacular actions.
One of them was a boat trip on the Rhine from Cologne to Düsseldorf. On 24.04. In 1998, over 200 refugees and 100 supporters cast off from a quay on the Rhine promenade in Cologne. The ship was decorated with banners, music groups provided additional attention. It was a protest of the “illegalized”, i.e. the people who were forced into illegality by German asylum legislation.
Seven camera teams (including the Kurdish station Med-TV) and numerous radio and newspaper journalists (including Turkish reporters, e.g. from the daily newspaper Cumhürriyet) accompanied the refugees. The reporters received a detailed press kit with all the documents, which were also to be handed over to the Ministry of the Interior in Düsseldorf. “We show up!” – under this slogan the Kurdish “illegalized” showed their face, their name and their places of origin in Turkey.
In Düsseldorf, the participants spoke with the Minister of the Interior and representatives of the state parliamentary groups and presented them with their demand for a collective right to stay.
The flight of Kurds to Germany was caused by their oppression in Turkey: from the ban on speaking their mother tongue to the ban on political and cultural activity as Kurds to countless arrests, torture and extralegal state murder actions, the Turkish government’s attempts to silence the Kurds ranged.
The traveling church asylum ended after more than two years with so-called individual case reviews: almost all of those who had participated in the action were able to stay in Germany.
For further reading:
Ulli Schauen and Yildiz Deniz (1998): Tests of Strength – People in the Itinerant Church Asylum. In: Vimeo
Andreas Spreck (1999): Ein Jahr Wanderkirchenasyl. In: Grassroots Revolution
Kenan Engin (2020): 100 Years of Kurdish Immigration to Germany. In: Miganzin