Die neuen Staatsfeinde. Wie die Helfer syrischer Kriegsflüchtlinge in Deutschland kriminalisiert werden by Stefan Buchen (review)

In 2012 as the war in Syria intensified, Ibrahim, a Syrian citizen living in Ahlen, Germany, telephoned his worried brother, Omar, and encouraged him to flee with his wife and two children. The family reached the Turkish coast in September and hid from police for two days before attempting a nocturnal sea crossing that killed Omar's wife and two children. A devastated Ibrahim flew to Izmir to identify the bodies and comfort his brother, now sitting in Turkish prison. Three months later, back in Germany, Ibrahim awoke to guns in his face held by masked and heavily armed members of German Special Operations (GSG-9), who broke into his family's apartment with battering rams at dawn and led him away in handcuffs. The telephone conversations had been captured as part of a fifteen-month dragnet operation; his crime was supposedly organizing the trafficking of his own family members. Although eventually exonerated, he was imprisoned for two weeks of interrogation and forced to relive the trauma of loss not as a victim but as a culprit. Branded as a criminal by his neighbors, he and his family moved to a new apartment in shame.

Stefan Buchen's book Die neuen Staatsfeinde, subtitled How the Helpers of Syrian Refugees of War are Criminalized in Germany, offers Ibrahim's story as one of a series of interconnected Kafkaesque episodes from the recent German history of ever more stringent border control. A critical journalist for ARD's Panorama newsmagazine, Buchen has himself been the object of special attention from American and German intelligence agencies. His book works from an extraordinary base of evidence comprising not only interviews but also the complete records of a year-and-a-half-long antitrafficking investigation, code named "Cash," culminating in an "Action Day" on January 29, 2013 when Ibrahim's home was invaded and he was charged along with 59 others.

Buchen gained access to the extensive police files, including statements, interrogations, phone calls, and records of a state expenditure which he claims runs into the millions of euros (20). In a frankly partisan tone, Buchen provides pen portraits of the primary suspects in the case and the borderline absurd mismatch between their actions and their alleged crimes. In the process, he provides what he calls "the chronicle of a scandal" (143): a devastating indictment of the everyday hypocrisy and extraordinary misuse of public resources involved in the German war on those seeking to help their Syrian relatives to flee from danger to safety.

Buchen uses the case of Syria to illuminate the particular discourse of security in Germany since September 11, 2001. The official German move has been, first, to bundle the war on illegal migration into the war on terror and, second, to propagate what Buchen calls the simplifying "moralistic trick" that "we must fight traffickers to protect refugees" (131). The conflation of terrorism and migration can be seen in the closely connected founding of the Joint Analysis and Strategy Center on Illegal Migration (GASIM) in 2006 in Potsdam, two years after the Joint Counter-Terrorism Centre (GTAZ) opened in Berlin with a specific mandate to "combat Islamic terrorism" (71). The blanket vilification of "traffickers" (Schleuser)—a change in language from the old term of "smuggler" (Schlepper)—raises the crime of trafficking close to that of murder and entails an undifferentiated condemnation that leaves very little space either for cases of family connection or for the exigencies of war. Buchen points out correctly that in official and public discourse, "the figure of the unscrupulous trafficker exists uncontested" (18). Traffickers become "the new enemies of the state," violators of human rights, and, for conservatives, "the motors of overforeignization" (Überfremdung, 150).

It is precisely because Germany's asylum policy remains one of the world's most liberal that the authorities refrain from using the terms war or conflict when describing alleged acts of trafficking. It is...