Group deportation
June 8, 2009
It is the first time that the European Union agency for external border security, Frontex, is financing a group deportation.
One hundred and three women and men as well as one child were put on a plane to Hanoi on Monday evening.
Around 200 demonstrators had gathered beforehand at Berlin's Schoenefeld Airport to protests against the mass deportation. The case had attracted widespread public attention in recent days as many of the Vietnamese immigrants had been living in Germany for several years.
Human rights and refugee organizations had organised opposition to the deportation, warning that the immigrants could face reprisals if sent back to Vietnam.
"We are protesting primarily against the fact that we are deporting people to a country like Vietnam that violates human rights," said Wolfgang Lenk, a Green Party city counsellor who turned out to support the protest.
He warned that any form of mass deportation usually meant that individual cases were not considered with sufficient care.
Despite a large police presence two demonstrators managed to enter the airport and were briefly detained by police, officials said.
Most of Vietnamese had been living in Germany without residence permission, the 26 others had been living in Poland. The deportation operation was organised in cooperation between the German and Polish authorities.
For many of the Vietnamese, the trip home is the end of a long and difficult journey. Lured by the promises made by people smugglers of a better life, many of these would-be immigrants paid huge sums of money to get to Germany, only to submit an asylum application that in most cases was rejected.
Nevertheless, the number of new arrivals from the Asian country has been growing, not just in Germany, but also in neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic.
About 85,000 Vietnamese live legally in Germany; the number of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants is unknown. Unlike this most recent wave of arrivals, the Vietnamese who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s succeeded in establishing a life for themselves. Those in what was then West Germany were "boat people" fleeing from the Communist regime; those in East Germany arrived as guest workers.
ai/dpa/EPD/AFP
Editor: Chuck Penfold