Germany's Police Beat Up Foreigners, Rights Groups Say

GERMAN POLICE are known to be tough, but critics say they are especially tough on Africans and other foreigners they believe are dealing drugs. Some have been beaten or subjected to mock executions.

HAMBURG, Germany - Joel Boateng is not a model citizen. He is a marijuana dealer, in Germany illegally, who may soon be sent back to Ghana.

The last time he was picked up for selling pot, he says police forced him to strip, then kicked him several times in the head and held a pistol to his head. A police officer pulled the trigger, he said, but the chamber was empty.

"It was bad; I bled a lot," said Boateng, 28. "They do things like this to foreigners involved with drugs. They say they are trying to clean the city of drugs, and they use that as an excuse to do the wrong thing."

Police have denied beating Boateng, and there are no witnesses to substantiate his story. But the treatment he describes fits a pattern of abuse of foreigners documented in an internal police investigation and two Amnesty International reports.

Several officers are being tried on charges of beating foreigners and falsifying evidence against them, and a small group of dissident police have publicly accused their colleagues of using racist tactics against foreigners.

"We have seen that foreigners are treated totally differently from the ordinary citizen, that they are beaten and subjected to mock executions," said Holger Jaenicke-Petersen, a Hamburg officer

who helped found the Federal Association of Critical Policewomen and Policemen. "For a long time this was a taboo topic surrounded by a code of silence."

He said that most of the 8,470 Hamburg police officers follow the law when dealing with criminal suspects, but a small group - between two percent and five percent - regularly violate the legal rights of foreigners.

"The main scandal is that police leaders and political leaders knew about this situation and covered it up," said Jaenicke-Petersen, who now teaches conflict resolution at the police training academy. "When we spoke out, we were rejected by most police as people who had dirtied our own group."

Hamburg police officials said that tough action is needed because the heroin and marijuana businesses are controlled by foreigners who prey on German addicts, but they deny that foreigners are abused.

The reports of violence against foreigners coincide with a sharp increase in the number of immigrants who have entered Germany in the last five years as border controls have eased across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

In the port city of Hamburg, the problem focuses mainly on Africans involved in the marijuana trade and Turks and Kurds selling heroin to a large population of German addicts.

In other major German cities, like Berlin, abuse allegations focus on the treatment suffered by Vietnamese and Turkish residents.

In Berlin recently, a policewoman was forced to admit that she had faked throat injuries so that she could testify that she had been choked by a foreigner during an altercation. Other officers knew she had lied on the witness stand but went along with her story.

Berlin politicians criticized the police action and said it revealed a deeper problem.

"It shows how policemen cover up for each other," said Norbert Schellberg, a member of the Berlin city parliament. "Steps have to be taken to create a climate that encourages police to come clean."

A rise in police abuses against foreigners has prompted Amnesty International, the London-based human-rights group, to investigate.

One case involved Benjamin Safak, a Turk, who was badly beaten by Frankfurt police. He was treated for a cut lip, a broken rib, a fractured cheekbone and other injuries after he was assaulted while in custody, the Amnesty report stated.

"In many cases there seems to be evidence of a racial motivation," said Michael Butler, an Amnesty researcher. "We see a clear pattern of mistreatment."

He said foreigners taken into custody as criminal suspects are routinely denied their rights under both German law and international law. In many cases they are not allowed to consult a lawyer, call their relatives or receive medical treatment, he said.

The problem is compounded because police officials are complacent about the problem and do not take citizen complaints seriously, he said.

Allegations of police abuse of foreigners are most common in Hamburg, where investigations into police misdeeds have led to the resignation of the state's interior minister. Local city-council members report more than 250 suspected cases of police brutality last year.

One dissident police officer, Uwe Chrobok, has come forward with detailed reports of routine, weekly beatings of non-Germans thought to be involved with drugs.

Chrobok has told investigators that suspects are forced to disrobe, sprayed with a disinfectant that is harmful to sensitive parts of the body, and subjected to mock executions.