|
November 22, 2003 Border 10: follow-up/fall-out Hi, everyone. After many months of leaving you all in peace, I'm back and grouchy as ever about US border restrictions. Hi, 05's - I haven't met any of you yet, but will hopefully catch up in February. I'm in Iran, working on my paperwork to re-enter the US, and am honestly worried on how I'm going to cope with some aspects of it. In a way, this is a wonderful opportunity for participant observation - I'm studying refugee youth, and my current feelings of insecurity and secondclass citizenship is a pale version of the reality my friends experience. So anyway, to follow up on some of my previous emails: Effects on US enrollment The Institute of international Education has reported that the growth rate of international students enrolling at US colleges this year is one tenth of last year's rate. The IIE points the finger at the US' new border rules. Special registration I've been receiving emails for the special registration (ie, fingerprinting, electronic tracking) of Iranian male nationals again. Special registration is supposed to be phased out by the end of this year, so I'm hoping this is the final death rattle of the program. Some of the people who were designated as special registrants on one entry to the US find that they are not designated on re-entry. According to Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, Director and Associate Dean for International Students at MIT, there doesn"t seem to be a pattern of any sort on this. Wrongfully deported Canadian released from jail If you remember, a Syria-born Canadian engineer was deported about a year ago during a transit stop in New York while en route to Montreal. Contrary to international law, he was deported to Syria rather than to Canada and Canadian consular officials were not informed in accordance with due process. He's now back with his family after 10 months in a Syrian jail. His story is appended.
That's it for today. It's my Dad's 60th birthday, and my stepmom is blaring Celine Dion as she cooks up a storm. I wish you all happy celebrations of life and family on your side of the world,
Sarah --begin article At home, Arar still haunted by anger and fear
By JEFF SALLOT OTTAWA -- Maher Arar drove his daughter to school the other day. This simple act, Mr. Arar says in his first newspaper interview since his release last month, "was a great moment for me. It means I am almost back to a normal life and I am taking my responsibility as a father. I am back from the grave." Life isn't really back to normal, Mr. Arar knows. And the 33-year-old software engineer wonders whether it ever will be. He suffers terrible nightmares about the 10 months he spent in solitary confinement in a Syrian prison. "This fear that I am going back is still with me. I feel it three or four times a day." His mind wanders. "He goes somewhere else in his head," his wife, Monia Mazigh, says. "It makes me angry sometimes. He does not listen." Mr. Arar finds it difficult to concentrate when people talk to him. He paces like a caged cat. He feels as though he can't trust anyone. "Sometimes I feel pins and needles in my head." His leg joints ache. His right hip is terribly bruised from sleeping on his side on the cold concrete floor of a cell in Damascus. He's being treated by doctors for physical and psychological wounds. He is unable to work. The family's savings are depleted and they are on social assistance. There are moments of such intense anger that he simply wants to hit the wall or leap up and down and scream. "I just want to do crazy things." He's unsure where he should direct most of his anger. Yes, the Syrians made him suffer. They beat him and kept him in a tiny, rat-infested cell for more than 10 months. In his nightmares he sees the face of one of his torturers. The man lunges at him with a knife, stabs him in the face, and shackles him and takes him back to Syria. And then Mr. Arar wakes up, frightened. He's angry at U.S. officials, who arrested him coming into New York's JFK airport, held him as a terrorist suspect for more than a week, and then in the middle of the night deported him to Syria. "The Syrians did the dirty work. The Americans kidnapped me and deprived me of my basic rights," Mr. Arar said. The Syrians, he said, may have tortured him during interrogation to get information for the United States. "It is very likely the Syrians wanted to please the Americans." Mr. Arar wants to know whether he should be angry with his own government. Did the RCMP or some other federal agency pass along rumours that led to his being placed on the U.S. border watch list as an al-Qaeda suspect? "I want to find out who did this to me. I need to know the truth." Mr. Arar is demanding a public inquiry to find out. In dark moments, Mr. Arar says, he is angry with himself for being so frightened that he was going to be tortured again that he did not tell Canadian consular officials sooner about the beatings and the horrid conditions of his confinement when they visited him at Syrian military intelligence headquarters. There were several consular visits over 10 months, monitored closely by the Syrian military. A colonel, one of his interrogators, insisted that Mr. Arar speak only Arabic. It was not until the seventh visit, Mr. Arar said, that he worked up enough courage to blurt out in English that he had been tortured and held in solitary confinement in a tiny basement cell. "I had nothing to lose. I was dying. It was a slow death. I was going crazy." He said he tried to drop hints about his conditions in the letters he was able to dictate to the Canadian diplomats for delivery to his wife. He talked about being lonely and dreaming about seeing faint light at the end of the tunnel in the hope Ms. Mazigh would deduce that he was in solitary confinement underground. Ms. Mazigh sent him letters and pictures of their children: Baraa, 6, a proud older sister with her arm around her baby brother, Houd, whose first birthday was celebrated without his father. Now 19-months old, Houd giggles as he toddles around the family's small Ottawa apartment holding his father's hand. Mr. Arar said he looked at the pictures constantly and memorized his wife's letters during the first few months in prison. But later he stopped reading the letters and he put the photos away. "It was too painful for me. I became selfish." It took all of his energy and concentration simply to survive, and thinking about his family might have pushed him over the edge, Mr. Arar explains. "I had to struggle just to get through every day. . . . Many times I thought of killing myself." Mr. Arar, a devout Sunni Muslim, said his faith in God sustained him. Apart from his wife's letters, the Koran was his only reading material. The light was so dim from the tiny hole in the cell's ceiling that he had to stand and stretch to be able to see the pages. He memorized long passages, but now he can't remember them. If he read aloud, the guards would harshly yell at him to keep quiet. He is unsure how many other inmates were in cells around him. But one day a group of prisoners in another section of the basement were reciting -- aloud and in unison -- a passage from the Koran. The guards dragged the men out of their cells and beat them into silence. He was never sure whether it was day or night. He marked the passage of time in weeks rather than days. Every Friday prisoners were allowed to bathe and thus he knew another week had passed. Three times a day he was allowed out of the cell to use a toilet. At night he had to urinate into a bottle. The first meal of the day was dry yogurt. Lunch was rice or bulgur. Dinner was a greasy slice of chicken and a small potato no larger than an egg. "The food was dirty." He estimates he lost 40 to 50 pounds. The winter months were very cold. He had only two blankets. There were days when he spent almost every waking moment stretched out on the floor with one blanket under him and one over him. Mr. Arar was released last month without ever being charged with anything. He said that even when he is healthy again he is worried that companies might not employ him because a cloud hangs over him. He has been away from his profession for more than a year, and catching up with the advances in his specialized area of computer science "will take a lot of time." Mr. Arar and Ms. Mazigh both say their partner has changed during the painful year of separation. And they like some of the changes. "He's very sensitive. He's more patient," Ms. Mazigh said. "She has become very strong. She is stronger than I am," Mr. Arar says. "And she loves me more." --end |