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While the SPD-led Justice Ministry in #Germany is providing the political infrastructure to investigate crimes against humanity committed by agents of the #Assad regime, its sister party in #Denmark decides to repatriate Syrians back to Damascus. https://twitter.com/AlysiaAlexndra/status/1379719787044089859?s=20
This reckless decision not only contradicts the ideals of European social democracy & must be interpreted as a n appeasement policy towards right-wing populist resentment but is also exemplary of the thought patterns that can be found among many European policymakers.
@mattiastesfaye's statement that there would no longer be any danger to Syrians from Damascus derives from a widespread narrative on the Syrian tragedy, which frames this conflict as a civil war pitting a sovereign state against non-legitimate militants.
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/terror-genocide-and-%E2%80%9Cgenocratic%E2%80%9D-turn
https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/terror-genocide-and-%E2%80%9Cgenocratic%E2%80%9D-turn
Without saying it openly, the Danish Ministry of Integration's statement - "It's safe for you again" - means that the government in charge is firmly back in the fold and has averted all dangers that could harm those people in the future. https://twitter.com/MohamedHemish/status/1378286212914503681?s=20
According to this logic, the insecurity of Syrians is not defined by Assad's bloodthirsty regime, which physically destroys those subjects who resist colonization by the Assad-Self, but is based on armed resistance to this form of tyranny.
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/18627_Chapter_4.pdf
https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/18627_Chapter_4.pdf
This naturalization of an undercomplex binary between legitimate state violence and illegitimate non-state mobilization, which contaminates countless political analyses, is original to the War on Terror discourse that has kept a tight grip on Western societies since 9/11.
The disregard for any causality between authoritarianism and the brutalization of a society is exemplary of the ideological smoothing with which Danish social democrats try to decipher complex violent relationships in other political contexts.
https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/km-qap/UNDP-RBAP-Violent-Extremism-in-SE-Asia-case-study-State-of-Violence-2020.pdf
https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/km-qap/UNDP-RBAP-Violent-Extremism-in-SE-Asia-case-study-State-of-Violence-2020.pdf
For a liberal democratic country like Denmark, where the state is accountable to its citizens, where there are institutional checks&balances, & where the security forces are intended to protect its population, state responsibility for violence seems to be a cognitive challenge.
The illusion that the regime's external state is trying to present to the international community provides that apparent comfort zone with which Copenhagen tries to get rid of years of failed integration policies and political polarization in Western Europe.
The fact that Syrian refugees are generally described as traitors & that there are several reports of forced disappearance by returnees is of little interest to Copenhagen since it is not the voting people who have to pay the existential price. https://twitter.com/SashRu88/status/1212706075117596673?s=20
Even though the Danish government's decision indicates that there is no domestic discourse on the Syria conflict at all, these thought patterns are shared in other EU countries. Among others, in Germany.
It is worth taking a look at the current contradictions in German domestic policy on the Syrian conflict, which are openly revealed between the enforcement of a principle of international law and the discussion on deportation ban for criminal Syrians. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-identity-crisis-syria/a-56805301
The disagreement of the German Conference of Interior Ministers can be traced back to the dispute between the SPD-led interior ministries and their CDU/CSU-led counterparts. Simplified: CDU/CSU is in favor of deportation, SPD is against it. https://taz.de/Abschiebungen-nach-Syrien/!5750816/
Although the German law prohibits the deportation of individuals if they are under existential threat, a look at the debate sufficiently reveals the underlying security paradigm that allows for human rights policies as needed. https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article224192260/Extremismus-Abschiebungen-nach-Syrien-sind-ein-sicherheitspolitisches-Eigentor.html
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrman criticized the SPD-led Foreign Ministry for its situation report on the human rights situation in Syria for making it impossible to deport criminal Assad opponents to YPG/SDF or SNA areas. https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-12/asylpolitik-abschiebestopp-jahresende-auslaufen-innenministerkonferenz
Saxon Interior Minister Roland Wöller even sees the will of the people in the deportation of criminal Syrians. An anti-terror measure that is even framed by the Saxon prime minister in a fatalistic metaphor of a battle between barbarism and civilization. https://www.mdr.de/sachsen/dresden/dresden-radebeul/landtag-debatte-aktuelle-stunde-100.html
CDU MP Patrick Sensburg even proposes re-establishing ties with the lower levels of the Syrian regime & police on behalf of the fight against terror. A policy that is in strong contradiction to the condemnation of the regimes for crimes against humanity. https://www.dw.com/en/why-syrian-refugees-in-germany-fear-deportation/av-56233696
Terrorism is not attributed to multiple state failures but is a decausalized phenomenon described by semi-religious rhetoric. The subject identified as a terrorist can only be punished with extraordinary measures.
https://www.gsi.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_mitarbeiter/spencer/publ_spencer/jird_spencer_post_print.pdf
https://www.gsi.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_mitarbeiter/spencer/publ_spencer/jird_spencer_post_print.pdf
The resistance of those opposed to deportation is less intense than one might think. Many of the social-democratic interior ministers express understanding for an abstract desire among the population to send criminal Syrians to certain death. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/spd-innenminister-abschiebung-nach-syrien-ist-praktisch-nicht-moeglich-li.125322
Only Boris Pistorius (SPD) expresses his criticism in coherence with the enforcement of the principle of world law against Assad by asking the German government whether they really want to cooperate with this criminal regime. https://www.zeit.de/news/2020-12/11/pistorius-abschiebungen-nach-syrien-werden-nicht-leichter
The threshold of inhibition that the Danish SD have crossed with their decision is also being successively marginalized by German policy-makers. A process that cannot simply be excused with professional ignorance but is a gaping wound in the EU's ambitions for human rights.
Actually, the history of Denmark stands as an example of a country that resisted the systematic deportation policy of the Nazi occupation during WW2 by helping many Jews escape from the horrors of the Holocaust. https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/the-rescue-of-denmark-jews.html
It is the duty of the German Social Democrats to remind its sisters in Denmark of their ideals and to admonish them to refrain from implementing this inhuman policy. @HeikoMaas @spdbt @SPDEuropa @jusos should officially criticize this decision.
The case in Denmark is once again depressing evidence of how indifferent the EU has become to the violence in Syria. The visible replacement of state-organized violence by a return of the state of nature in the dungeons of Assad is enough to engage in a distortion of reality.
Once the violence in #Syria stops penetrating the minds of policy-makers and social democrats start advocating for organized repatriation with Assad, it's a sign that we haven't shown the faces of death in Assad's Syria often enough.
