By Miloud Lahmar Cherif
If you are a non-white man or a woman living in Germany, you have probably - at least once during your stay here - been asked by the police to show your personal documents without any obvious reasons behind that behavior. This act could take place anywhere in Germany, especially in the trains, train-stations and public spaces. You might have been also wondering why they did exactly choose YOU among tens or hundreds of white people to ask you for your personal documents. Often is the answer my color of skin, my clothing style, my language ..., everything that makes you look different than this nation.It is a feeling of injustice when you are the only one in the train compartment who is asked to show your ID, I feel disrespected, insulted, discriminated. I see the police as racist executors!
The police uses the power of law to justify the execution of racist controls, they use the fear that most refugees and migrants are carrying with them from their home countries, they use the unjustified and miserable silence of some us!
The policemen and -women will happily tell you that racism cannot be a crime in Germany, so you can't charge them for being racist at all. But on the other side - if you tell him or her “you are racist!” they will feel insulted and will run to the nearest court to let you be prosecuted for “insult” (Beleidigung). This is the broken logic that the system in Germany tries to play with us.
One of the many definitions of the Racial Profiling is as follow …“Any police-initiated action that relies on the race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads the police to a particular individual who has been identified as being, or having been, engaged in criminal activity.”. We are getting criminalized for being or looking different.
On the 07th September 2014 around 14:45h two federal policemen from Meiningen asked me in the train heading to Meiningen to show my ID document for NO REASON. I was the only one controlled because I was the only non-white in the compartment. When I asked them why they are asking for my ID, their answer was as follow “This our job and the law gave us the right to control...”. I told them that this behavior is no more tolerated by court decisions in Germany and gave them some examples where the court said that the policeman hasn't the right to control a person based on his skin color and if that happened than this is racist and no more a “legal control”. I used the Koblenz Court's Judgment as a reference.
I insisted to go to their police station at Meinigen train station to hand in complaint about these two policemen. I spent more than one hour in their station to do this complaint against the two of them. A month later I received a letter from the public prosecution office telling me that I'm accused of “insulting the two policemen” claiming I've told them “you're racist”. I knew that it wasn't more than a sneaky try from them to hit back against my complaint that I wrote with insisting intention of taking the two to the courts. This dirty game that the German policemen routinely play is about LIE. They have lie to justify their wrong behaviors by falsifying misrepresentation.
I am determined to face them in Arnstadt District Court on the 28th May 2015 at 10:00 to expose their lies to the public. I did NOT say what they are claiming. If I would have said it, I wasn't to deny it! Be the witness! Your solidarity is another key in this fight against racial profiling in Germany. Let them hear us!
Miloud Lahmar Cherif is of The VOICE Refugee Forum in Germany
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