Austria seemed to shift to the right earlier this month amid an election in its capital dominated by immigration issues, but civil society groups have started pushing back. They scored an initial success on Monday when hard-line Interior Minister Maria Fekter revoked the recent expulsion of twin Kosovo girls and said they could return. She had already promised to review deportation procedures for children last week.
The fate of 8-year-old Daniella and Dorentina Komani has focused the efforts of citizen groups and refugee aid organisations, which have been demonstrating and campaigning for a more humane treatment of migrants. After the sisters and their father were rounded up, detained and deported to Kosovo in early October, media outlets tracked them down and broadcast interviews with the shaken family, who had to leave their suicidal mother behind in a Vienna clinic.
"I miss the people, the toys," one of the big-eyed girls told public broadcaster ORF in an interview that highlighted the common fate of asylum seekers who are expelled after waiting for years for their claim to be processed. "School, and also the children in our class," her sister continued. "And mom," the first one added. Both spoke in the distinct Upper Austrian accent that they picked up since arriving in the country in 2004. They shared the fate of other well-integrated migrants who wait for years until the authorities finally tell them they are not recognised as refugees and have to leave.
Before their expulsion, the Komanis were looked after by a small initiative called Protect Friends, which was started by parents whose sons' 9-year-old football team-mate was sent back to the Kosovo with his family. "We protest against putting 9-year-olds into prison and shipping them out like animals," soccer dad Hans Joerg Ulreich told the daily Der Standard.
Citizens in Vienna and other towns staged various protests this year against deportations of individual migrants or families that they considered friends. Amid the public outcry over the twin girls' story, President Heinz Fischer finally issued a rare critical comment targeting the government, by saying last week that "children must not be put in prisons."
He also said he backed an online petition urging politicians to prevent such incidents in the future. As of Monday, 52,000 people had signed on. However, 188,000 Vienna citizens showed support for quite different policies on October 10, when they voted for the xenophobic Freedom Party in the city council polls. The party won 26 percent of the vote.
For years, Fekter and her centre-right People's Party had advocated tough immigration and asylum laws and procedures. But her party lost 5 percent of the votes in the Vienna election, which came just a few days after the Kosovo twins' drama had flickered across the nation's television screens.
"It's clear that the attempt to overtake the Freedom Party on the right was not successful," political scientist Reinhard Heinisch told the German Press Agency dpa. The Salzburg University professor said the coalition government of Social Democratic Party and People's Party will find it difficult to tackle immigration and foreigner integration issues as long as the police-oriented Interior Ministry remains in charge of them.
Heinisch and other commentators pointed out that Fekter's recent about-turns did not amount to a change in immigration policies. But the minister's decisions make a difference for Daniella and Dorentina, who were seen on television practising an apt traditional Austrian children's rhyme: "We can stay, we can go. We can do what we like, we can do what we like."