• by Pavol Stracansky (vienna)
• Monday, March 01, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Support for the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) in Austria has soared amid debate over controversial plans for the construction of a new centre to house asylum seekers.

The FPO, which has been accused of running virulent anti-immigrant election campaigns that stoke racial hatred, has seen support treble among voters in the Burgenland province in the east of the country where the centre is planned to be built.

The plans, which locals have vigorously protested against, come as hard line interior minister Maria Fekter puts forward a controversial move to detain asylum seekers for up to four weeks while a decision is made on whether Austria or another European state must deal with their application.

The plans have been criticised by rights groups which say they are perpetuating a common public portrayal of asylum seekers as criminals.

Heinz Patzelt, head of Amnesty International in Austria, told IPS: 'This completely reinforces the image of immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals.

'The only people who are kept in detention are criminals or suspected criminals and this is how they [asylum seekers] are going to be portrayed.

'The proposals are absurd, bizarre and even illegal.'

Rights groups have warned that far-right parties are manipulating immigration to win votes and stir racial hatred as it has become a central political theme in Austria in the last decade.

Austria opened its doors to immigrants in the 1960s when it launched a ‘gastarbeiter’ or guest-worker scheme, allowing migrants, many from Turkey and what was then Yugoslavia, to move to the country as demand for labour grew alongside the economy.

Many of those foreign labourers were expected to return to their homelands soon after, but a large number stayed back and later brought their families with them and immigrant communities began to spring up.

Another wave of immigration and asylum followed the fall of communism in 1989 and the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.

According to official figures, around 15,000 people applied for asylum in Austria last year. Authorities say that two-thirds of applications are from people who have arrived in Austria via another European Union (EU) country.

The waves of immigration have provoked growing debate since then and political observers say the FPO and Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO) have used the topics of immigration and asylum to make huge political gains.

They have run recent national and local election campaigns based around hard line anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. Together they won 29 percent of the vote at national elections in 2008.

And this has been reflected in the general public’s perception on immigrants. In polls last year, majority of people - as much as 63 percent in one study - said they believed rising crime numbers were connected to immigration.

Social Democratic (SPÖ) defence minister Norbert Darabos claimed in November that polls had shown that up to 86 percent of people in Burgenland and a similar figure in parts of neighbouring Lower Austria in the east of the country backed a continued military presence in the area to fight illegal immigration.

Army patrols were set up in eastern Austria after the extension of the EU’s border-check free Schengen Zone eastward in December 2007.

Critics also claim that while the FPO and BZO fuel racial hatred with their campaigns - FPO leader Heinz Christian-Strache said last month that the country was facing a 'security collapse' after figures showed that foreigners had committed the majority of burglaries in the capital Vienna last year - the coalition Social Democrat (SPO) and People’s Party (OVP) government’s approach to immigration is doing little to help integration either.

Minister Fekter has pointed to criminality among asylum applicants, made public statements on the 'gross misuse' of the asylum system in Austria, called for deportations of criminal asylum applicants to be speeded up and said that integration of existing migrants must take priority over new immigration. She has also called for immigrants to learn German.

Last month, the government agreed on an 'action plan' of introducing tighter rules for immigrants. Among them was a German test for any foreigner wanting to move to Austria -a condition rights groups said was too strict.

Critics say Fekter’s hard line approach, including the plans announced this month for compulsory one-month detention for asylum seekers, reinforces images of asylum seekers as frauds who start asylum procedures to get benefits and be allowed to stay in the country and then disappearing into the illegal grey economy.

'This reinforces the perception of asylum seekers as cheats who need to be kept locked up to stop them abusing the system,' Prof. Manfred Nowak, head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna, told IPS.

Fekter has said the new asylum centre was necessary because the country’s two other centres for asylum seekers - in Thalham, Upper Austria, and in Traiskirchen, Lower Austria - are overcrowded and that ruling political parties had agreed on its need as far back as 2008.

But local politicians in Burgenland province and councillors in Eberau, a town of 10,000 where the centre was to be built, immediately condemned the project, and locals said they were vehemently against it.

The FPO not only criticised the plans but demanded Fekter, instead of building a centre to house asylum seekers, speed up deportations.

And the party’s general secretary Harald Vilimsky told Austrian media that construction of a third asylum centre would only contribute to 'asylum fraud'. 'Most asylum seekers are fraudsters and criminals,' he claimed.

The Green Party, the only political party to back plans for the centre, said politicians had created 'fear and insecurity' among locals over the issue.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has since called on parties to tone down their political rhetoric in the debate and stop presenting asylum seekers as criminals.

Rights groups have also criticised Fekter’s calls for compulsory detention, warning that if enforced the measure could be a breach of human rights.

'The proposed plans would be illegal under Austrian law, breach human rights legislation and run completely against the idea of personal liberty,' Nowak told IPS.

Fekter though has defended the proposal and said she had only been reacting to 'apparently existing fears among people'.

Rights groups say the debate over the asylum centre and Fekter’s compulsory detention plans will play into the far-right parties’ hands and strengthen the public perception of immigrants as criminals and a threat to society.

'What all these proposals and statements do is they fuel xenophobia,' said Amnesty’s Patzelt.

'When parties, such as minister Fekter’s conservative People’s Party, try to limit support for far-right wing parties by using populist, ‘comic-strip’ statements and the agenda of the very right-wing parties whose support they are trying to limit, they are playing a very dangerous political game which never works and ends in disaster,' he added.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service