Burundi family seeking calm may be deported

A BURUNDIAN couple who say they fled racist and neo-Nazi harassment in Germany are facing deportation back there because Irish authorities have refused to consider their asylum application.

The couple, Mr Joseph Ntidendereza and Ms Carinie Barwendere, and their three children, had their application turned down on appeal last week. They may become the first family deported under the Dublin Convention rules introduced last year, unless the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, allows them remain on humanitarian grounds.

The convention stipulates applications for asylum must be heard in the first EU state in which an applicant sets foot.

The Department refuses to comment on individual cases, but the deputy representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Peter van der Vaart, says Ireland should not implement the convention "in a rigid way" by returning every asylum-seeker who has come from Europe.

"She can also look at an asylum-seeker's individual case and do the determination of refugee status herself if the case so merits," he commented recently. So far this year more than 20 asylum-seekers have been deported from Ireland under the convention.

Mr Ntidendereza and Ms Barwendere have been living in Blackrock, Co Dublin, since they came to Ireland last December. They left Burundi for Germany in 1995, fleeing a horrific civil war which killed more than 150,000 people in the last five years.

Among the victims was Mr Ntidendereza's brother. "He was cut down in the street like a dog. They threw a grenade into the car, then finished off the job with knives".

As both were of mixed Hutu/ Tutsi origin, Mr Ntidendereza and Ms Barwendere were vulnerable to the extremists on both sides. Her aunt's house was burned down. A grenade was thrown under the bed of one of their children but failed to explode.

By 1995 Mr Ntidendereza had had enough. He decided to take his family to the supposed security of Germany, where he studied economics in the 1980s. "But times had changed and people had become very unfriendly," he says.

Their problems in their new home in a village near Frankfurt began when a neighbour wrongly accused Mr Ntidendereza of damaging his car. Unfortunately for the couple, their shaven-headed accuser was also a policeman.

"Other police came to question us in the middle of the night. Our neighbour fired water pistols and threw apples at our children and warned us to keep them indoors for their safety."

Then the couple got anonymous phone calls. Callers racially abused them and threatened a "Lubeck" (10 asylum-seekers died in a fire-bomb attack on a hostel in Lubeck in Germany). "It was torture," recalls Ms Barwendere. "We had already left one form of atrocious situation, and now we were in another." It was time to move again. She adds: "We were just looking for somewhere calm, where our children can grow up and be integrated in society."

This has come to pass. Lionel (8) is "enthusiastic and eager to learn" according to the principal of the local school he and sister Andrea (6) attend. He plays football in a nearby club. He is due to make his Holy Communion next weekend.

Their local priest says the family are "quiet, refined and peaceful people who have settled in their present life".

However, last week, they were told by the Department their appeal had been rejected. Mr Ntidendereza is convinced the Germans will send the family back to Burundi. "I would rather go to prison than return to Germany."

His misgivings may be soundly based: Germany already sends back a far higher proportion of Algerian asylum-seekers than either Ireland or the UK. For this reason, the Department refrains from applying the letter of the Dublin Convention to Algerians who arrive here from Germany and France to seek asylum.