‘Now everyone must go back immediately’.”
Roth, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, fears that, aside from the AfD and the BSW, some in the Union will demand this in the election campaign. This would be a source of concern for him. If peace were to return to Syria, there would be no obstacle to the return of people “who never really settled in with us”.
The majority of Syrians, however, are well integrated into society and the labor market, he added. He did not want to be too pessimistic, but the question was, “how will the Islamist-fundamentalist groups behave?” Roth said.
CDU Foreign Policy Spokesman Jürgen Hardt, on the other hand, was optimistic about the future of Syria. “Behind the uprising, in my information, do not stand primarily radical Islamists, but a heterogeneous group of oppositional and Kurdish forces,” he told the Spiegel. “That gives me hope that the new rulers will be able to build a state.” A central demand for the transitional government would be that there should be no settling of accounts with the backers of the Assad regime.
“It’s still too early to say where it’s headed,” he said, “but we expect the Syrian refugees in Germany to return to their country if it becomes stable.”
Daniel Thym, a migration law expert at the University of Konstanz, is demanding a temporary halt to all ongoing asylum procedures for Syrians as a consequence of the uprising. “The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) should temporarily suspend all ongoing asylum procedures for Syrians and not continue to process them,” he told the Welt. The situation is too volatile, and it would not be right to grant a protection status to new asylum seekers that would ensure a legal stay for them.
Until the situation in Syria clarifies, “the BAMF should focus on the many other pending asylum cases.” It would be helpful if the BAMF and the Federal Government communicated the temporary suspension of asylum procedures for Syrians in several languages and on various channels, sending a clear signal – just as the BAMF and the Federal Government did in the summer of 2015.
Thym said the development of the situation on the ground was completely open: “Will there be new battles between the loosely allied groups with different goals? Will a new half-functional government emerge, or will the Syrian state collapse like a ‘failed state’? What orientation would a half-functional government with an Islamist bent have, which would at least pose threats from that direction?