Austria's Turkish community anxious for citizenship

VIENNA, Nov 19 (AFP): Alper Yilmaz has no doubt where his home is. "My homeland is Austria, Vienna," he says.

But with a far-right party sharing power and anti-immigration sentiment generally on the rise in Austria, Yilmaz - along with potentially thousands of other Austrians with Turkish roots - is worried he could be stripped of his citizenship.

Except in very special cases, Austria does not allow its citizens to hold dual nationality.

But the far-right and anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPOe) - junior partner in a ruling coalition with the centre-right Austrian People's Party (OeVP) -last year claimed to have received a list of Turkish voters which it said could contain tens of thousands of illegal dual nationals.

The affair drew comparisons to Britain's "Windrush" scandal, in which scores of British citizens of Caribbean origin were deported or detained because they had not collected the necessary paperwork proving their right be there.

Now many of the Austrians of Turkish origin whose names appear on the list could face a similar administrative nightmare.

Duygu Ozkan, a journalist for the Die Presse newspaper, said the dual nationality issue had become "virtually the only topic of conversation" for Austria's Turkish community.

Austria, like neighbouring Germany, invited thousands of Turkish citizens to come and work in the 1960s and 1970s, with many staying and putting down roots.

Turkish immigrants and their descendants now number around 270,000 out of the population of 8.7 million.

One of them is Cigdem Schiller, born in Austria 31 years ago to Turkish parents.

Schiller - who handed in her Turkish passport to become an Austrian citizen when she was a teenager in 2003 - said that because of her presence on the list, she received a letter from the authorities in February asking her to prove she doesn't illegally hold dual nationality.