Germans demand EU join to help Iraqi Christian refugees (1st Lead)

Apr 18, 2008, 11:31 GMT

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.