“The visit lasts two hours and not a minute more. You decide how to spend your time. The press officer of the Berlin Refugee Office, Monika Hebbinghaus, does not feel at ease when refugees approach the group of journalists. Although he tries to convey normalcy, he can barely hide the fact that it bothers him that people housed in this refugee center at the former Tegel airport stop the group of journalists to tell their stories.
It’s mid-October. The sun’s rays lose their strength as autumn progresses in the northern suburbs of Berlin. Winter is approaching and with it cold, darkness and the most difficult months for the Tegel reception center. About 5,000 people live here. The majority are Ukrainians, benefiting from a special status granted by the German government after the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022. Thanks to this, they obtained a residence permit without having to go through the corresponding bureaucratic process. But this permit does not guarantee being able to find an apartment in a city where the real estate market is one of the tightest in Germany and Europe.
There are also asylum seekers from other countries. The majority come from Turkey, Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam and Moldova, according to official figures from the Berlin authorities. The managers of this improvised reception center in what was the main airport of the German capital – closed in November 2020 after the inauguration of the Willy Brandt international airport – are today organizing a press visit by a team of German international television Deutsche Welle and. for elDiario.es. They want to improve the image of Germany’s largest refugee reception center. Tegel accumulates too many negative headlines in the German and foreign press.
“A place that should not exist”, headlines the weekly The Spiegel a long chronicle, published last September, on the precarious living conditions of people housed around terminal C of the old airport. “The days here are long. There is nothing to do even if there is much to resolve” is one of the sentences that best sums up the text. The column highlights the management of the reception center, the lack of transparency of contracts and their public financing, and especially through the protagonists of the place: the refugees.
Criticism and appreciation
Deutsche Welle’s camera and microphone quickly attract the attention of residents. Many watch with curiosity. Others come to speak directly in their language. A Ukrainian woman with a cane begins speaking to the camera lens in Russian, without waiting for anyone to ask her. He complains about the lack of adequate medical care. She has been in Tegel for 18 months, with no prospect of being moved to another accommodation. He said he arrived with two children, one of whom was disabled. The press officer of the Refugee Office is first interested in their situation and ends up interrupting the conversation by arguing that the visit must be brought forward.
But people here want to talk. “The conditions are very bad. We can not do anything with it. The food is bad. “I lost weight, my ribs are visible,” says the young Ukrainian Berdnyk Aleksander, a few meters further on, at the gates of what was once the Terminal C building where the old check-in windows are now used. for check-in at the airport. new arrivals. Berdnyk has been in Tegel for 10 months. He claims that no one gives him a job, that he can’t learn German, that they live without prospects, that they don’t even allow him to cook.
“My husband and I suffered a fire. All my belongings were burned. No one promised to help us. They just closed the doors and blamed the victims,” says Aleksandra, a 22-year-old Ukrainian from Crimea, inside the collective dining room, between impersonal gray cabinets housing dozens of numbered lockers. Aleksandra talks about the most serious incident known so far in Tegel: last March, a fire destroyed one of the giant tents that served as a dormitory for 300 people. No one died or was injured. It was a miracle, admit the Berlin media. It was also a sign that something was wrong in Tegel.
It’s not just complaints from young people. Many older people, with health and mobility problems, are unhappy with the conditions in which they live. They seem the most helpless of all. Some don’t even bother to protest. They watch with a mixture of despair and boredom as the journalists that officials parade around the premises.
There are also those who take the opportunity to thank the press for Germany’s welcome. “Here, I can earn 10 times more than in Ukraine and I have the opportunity to flourish,” declares a young Ukrainian, under the disapproving glances and strong criticism of a group of compatriots older than him who do not not share his story.
Emergency solution
The Tegel Refugee Reception Center opened shortly after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Initially, it served as a registration point for Ukrainian refugees who were then directed to reception centers, social housing or other types of accommodation spread across Germany.
But what was intended to be a temporary emergency solution became permanent accommodation with a capacity of up to 8,000 places due to uncertainty over accommodation needs in the months and years to come. The fact that the improvised solution has become permanent is the main criticism of critics of the Tegel refugee center.
Kathie Lehmann is one of the members of the Tegel Assembly, an assembly of organizations and activists who denounce the situation of refugees but also the conditions of reception center employees. Some members of this assembly worked there and were fired for denouncing the poor conditions internally or publicly, or for trying to advise the refugees themselves.
Today they are organizing a party with music, food and children’s games for the residents of Tegel, at the other end of the old airport. They want to provide a safe escape space for people housed in Terminal C. “There are catastrophic hygienic conditions, disease outbreaks, people continue to live in a four square meter space,” says Lehmann. “We are talking about an airport, a completely paved space where the stores are located, which seems to be an absolutely improvised solution. There are many security guards who, of course, do not have good working conditions either. “Everyone is very dissatisfied and just doesn’t know what’s going to happen to them. »
The Berlin Refugee Agency is asking for understanding regarding the challenge of housing so many people. “Our legal mandate is to house everyone. Obviously, the more people there are, the more we are forced to lower standards. This is what we see here in Tegel. This is not a normal situation. This is due to the number of people arriving in a relatively short time,” argues Ms. Hebbinghaus, responsible today for guiding us through the esplanade transformed into a camp.
Lack of transparency
The Tegel refugee center has an annual budget of more than 400 million euros, making it the best funded in the country. The German Red Cross runs the camp with this money, which also pays for, among other things, the rental of the space, catering and a private company responsible for security of the perimeter and interior of the place.
Social organizations with experience welcoming refugees consider that this budget should provide much better conditions. “We don’t know where all this money is going. If we use the budget of 400 million to accommodate 5,000 people, we are talking about an individual cost of between 240 and 300 euros per day. With this money, the Berlin government could provide luxury apartments for refugees,” explains Emily Barnickel, a social worker at the NGO Berlin Refugee Council, with a certain sarcasm.
Reports of poor conditions, combined with a huge budget, support accusations of a lack of transparency in the use of public money and suspicions about the profit margin of private companies offering the services of the Tegel refugee center.
Throughout Germany, suspicions are growing over the private management of refugee reception centers. ARD public television and newspaper South German Zeitung recently published an investigation into the British company Serco. Specializing in border control, military services and security, Serco has won public contracts in different regions of Germany to manage refugee reception centers.
Leaked documents from within the company show a profit margin of more than 50% in some cases, which would explain the terrible conditions in which refugees live in these centers. This also raises doubts about the tenders for the award of contracts and suspicions about possible personal interests of the political leaders concerned.
Despite all the criticism received by Tegel, the mayor-governor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, of the conservative CDU party, does not dare rule out an increase in the number of places in the refugee center. Wegner has governed since April last year with the SPD Social Democrats in the so-called “grand coalition”. The Greens, now in opposition, are very tough on the situation in Tegel. Green regional MP Jian Omar, born in Syrian Kurdistan and granted political asylum in Germany after arriving on a student visa in 2005, is one of the center’s most critical voices. In an interview with the weekly The SpiegelOmar sums up the situation with a warning: “Tegel is a powder keg that can explode at any moment. »
