On August 30, 1983, Cemal Kemal Altun threw himself from the sixth floor of the Berlin Higher Administrative Court during the second day of legal proceedings assessing his request for political asylum in West Germany. He was twenty-three years old. Seeking asylum following the 1980 military coup in Turkey and his involvement in left-wing student politics, Altun had initially been granted protection before the German Ministry of the Interior chose to inform the Turkish military, who wanted his arrest on false charges, of his presence in the country — a decision that was part of Germany’s wider support for the Turkish military government’s crackdown on leftist and Kurdish movements. Taken into custody pending extradition, Altun was kept in solitary confinement for thirteen months and had information withheld from him about his chances of maintaining asylum status (chances that were later declared to be high). Video footage of the legal proceedings shows him looking calm and watchful. The camera was still rolling when he jumped out the window.
Forty years later, Western political landscapes continue to be fractured and reconfigured around the politics of asylum and deportations, which are producing distinctive relations with far-right and authoritarian forms of power in new guises. In Germany, the government is reshaping its asylum policies with tougher rules. In the UK, the Home Secretary has announced the biggest overhaul of the migration model in the past fifty years, aimed at increasing the number of deportations. In the United States, Donald Trump is fulfilling his promise to enforce the “largest deportation operation in American history,” deporting over six hundred thousand people in his first year in office and stripping legal status from a further 1.6 million individuals.
Meanwhile, Turkey continues to serve as a destination for deported individuals from Europe, specifically under the terms of the 2016 EU-Turkey Deal, an agreement through which…
Auteur: Helen Mackreath
