Hunt for Gypsy Symbolizes Germany’s Asylum Crisis : Foreigners: Neo-Nazis offer bounty for frightened mother, but others hide her from extremists and police.

COLOGNE, Germany —  A thousand posters bearing a photograph of a dark-haired foreigner were recently slapped on the kiosks and walls and lampposts of this ancient Rhineland city. “Reward!” they proclaimed. “For clues leading to the capture of the vagrant Nigyar Pampurova.”

In a bold campaign darkly reminiscent of Gestapo tactics, right-wing extremists have put a bounty on the head of an unwelcome Gypsy, a step that authorities fear may signal a new brand of vigilantism by “white-collar Nazis.”

Behind the posters and the 40,000 leaflets handed out on the street and stuffed into mailboxes is the story of how a young mother has come to symbolize the conflicting emotions of a nation haunted by its past and fearful for its future.

For even as neo-Nazis and immigration police hunt her, Nigyar Pampurova and her family are finding tremendous goodwill here. Thousands of people have demonstrated against her treatment. And a few Germans even drove to Macedonia and smuggled her back into Germany after she was deported last month. A network of ordinary citizens continues to hide the family of four Pampurovas at the risk of being prosecuted themselves.

In an interview, Pampurova spoke of her constant anxiety:

“My stomach hurts. My heart hurts,” she moaned as she hugged herself in the basement room where the family is currently hidden. “This is bad. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. We are always afraid.”

Prosecutor Johannes Wilhelm at the Cologne city attorney’s office expressed disapproval of the rightist campaign.

“It’s a matter for the proper authorities,” he said. “She is indeed guilty of defying the order to leave, but you can’t hunt a person down in this manner.”

Germany has been plagued by neo-Nazi and skinhead violence against asylum-seekers since unification two years ago. The radical right has also chalked up small but important victories in state and local elections. But this is believed to be the first time the extremists have put a price on a foreigner’s head, a move that recalls Gestapo roundups of Jews, Gypsies and other non-Aryans during the Holocaust.

A small right-wing party, the German League, initiated the campaign against the Pampurovas. It has not physically threatened them and insists that it is merely “trying to lend the city a little support” in finding the “bogus refugee, who was already deported once in accordance with the law.”

The tiny party, which has held two of 96 seats in the city government since elections in 1989, “has nothing against foreigners,” said its business manager Konrad Scheid. In a telephone interview, Scheid went on to denounce all Gypsies as “thieves and con artists” and warned that immigration or asylum could turn Germany into “a mishmash like America.”

Alleging that the league misused its office in City Hall to print and distribute the “wanted” posters, prosecutors cut off the party’s Telefax line and official telephone pending further investigation.

So far, no tips about the Pampurovas’ whereabouts have come into the German League, according to Scheid, but many people have called to curse the right-wingers and tell them they should be ashamed of themselves.

“We don’t have the people to conduct an active search for her out on the streets,” Scheid said, describing the campaign as “a symbolic thing.”

Most of the posters have been defaced or torn down, and authorities have seized a number of the fliers as well.

“They’re a bunch of white-collar Nazis,” said Kurt Holl, a schoolteacher coordinating the campaign to hide the Pampurovas and win asylum for them on humanitarian grounds.

He says he holds the city in contempt, too, for what he maintains is a more zealous enforcement of deportation orders than before.

“When they came for Nigyar on Feb. 6, they dragged her out of the house while her little girl screamed,” Holl said. “She was torn away from her two children and sent back to Macedonia without a cent, and the airport was 100 kilometers from her village. She had to walk and hitchhike in the bitter cold, and sleep outside.”

Her husband, Refik, and their two children were also asylum-seekers, but their applications were lagging behind Nigyar’s in the maze of German bureaucracy. Their applications, too, have since been rejected. Such delays are common: Officials estimate that the backlog of asylum cases numbers around 400,000.

All the publicity seems unlikely to win asylum for the Pampurovas, though, and Holl is not sure how long the family can keep moving from basement to basement. It has been moved six times in as many weeks.

Their underground network of benefactors spends about $600 a month on their care, the same amount as the “reward” the German League offered for Nigyar’s capture.

“They were given due process, and the court turned them down because they could not establish that the Roma were politically persecuted in Macedonia, and Macedonia is not considered a war zone,” said Gerhard Kappius, administrator of the city’s Foreigner Office, which handles asylum cases.

Making an exception now, even to send extremists a message, Kappius said, would be unfair to the hundreds of other illegals in Cologne slated for deportation.

Nigyar Pampurova, 31, is a Roma, a Gypsy from Macedonia who is just one of hundreds of thousands of illegals in a country overwhelmed by refugees from the former East Bloc, Southern Europe and the Third World. She came here with her husband and two small children in 1989 as ethnic and nationalist hatreds simmered in her Yugoslav homeland.

The German Bundestag is currently locked in debate in Bonn over the liberal asylum law that allowed the Pampurovas to live here for four years before their application, like 95% of all asylum cases, was rejected.

The Pampurovas’ weeks of self-imposed house arrest are taking a toll on everyone’s nerves now--parents, children and their latest hosts, a quiet, normally law-abiding couple who could face charges if caught sheltering them.

“We lost a night of sleep before deciding to take them in,” says the woman who put two mattresses in her basement recreation room and let the Pampurovas move in for awhile.

“What could happen to us if we’re caught?” the nervous hostess wonders aloud, before adding cynically, “Well, at least we know there are no concentration camps this time.”

The children are especially distressed.

At 4-years-old, Misa Pampurova is a bundle of giggly energy who cannot understand why she must stay inside and never look out the windows. She dissolves in tears at the sight of the back yard where she is forbidden to play. She was an infant when her family fled Macedonia; Germany has always been her home.

Her brother, Murtiza, 9, accepts his imprisonment with stoicism. He spends hours watching MTV and “Wheel of Fortune” on television. He dreams about going outside and riding a bicycle.

“I miss going to school and my friends,” he says in fluent German, “but we can’t go out. They’ll get us.”