On April 3, 2009 there was a protest outside the Montreal passport office at the Complex Guy Favreau to try and repatriate Canadian national Abusfian Abdelrazik.
Abdelrazik was born in the Sudan in 1962. In 1989 he was imprisoned for political reasons by the government of Omar al-Bashir (the same Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes in the Darfur region). He came to Canada as a refugee in 1991 and then was granted Canadian citizenship in 1995. In 2003 he returned to the Sudan to visit his sick mother at which point he entered into a nightmarish Kafkaesque netherworld where he was subjected to torture, more imprisonment and legal purgatory.
He found himself on the US no-fly list and the UN blacklist for people with connections to Al-Qaeda. How did he end up on these lists? Why did God punish Job (note: I mean within the narrative structure of the story since I’m an atheist)? The reasons for these sorts of things rarely seem clear or rational. Racism would seem to be one answer, but to give one the whole picture it's necessary to fill in a some of the details. Apparently he knew Ahmed Ressam, the attempted “Millennium Bomber” and the US State Department alleges that he’s a personal acquaintance of Osama Bin Laden. Did he know Ressam? He said he did. Did he know anything about Ressam’s activities. He says no, and there seems to be no evidence to suggest otherwise. Did he know Ossama Bin Laden? There seems to be no evidence to support this either. Also, knowing people doesn’t make one a criminal. But of course, Abdelrazik has never been charged with any crimes, by any governments anywhere. So it would seem that the American and Canadian governments are aware of this fact.
Yet under the behest of the US and Canadian governments he was taken into the custody of the Sudanese government (which as was stated above he had previously fled as a refugee) where he was tortured. He was also interrogated by the FBI, where he was told that he would never return to his home in Canada (where he has a family) if he didn’t admit to Al-Qaeda ties (firstly, if there was real evidence against him, shouldn’t the US government be able to prosecute him without a flimsy, coerced confession and secondly, doesn’t it seem remarkably unlikely that if he did testify against himself that he would be able to ever return home?). Furthermore, he is a Canadian citizen. Doesn’t this mean that he should have a right to return to his country in an emergency (or even for other reasons)? Canadian law and even the UN blacklist stipulates that people on it have a right to return to their country of citizenship. Also the US no-fly list only covers commercial airlines.
Even the government of Sudan (yes that’s right the same government of Sudan that imprisoned him… the same government of Sudan that everyone loves to hate for its human rights violations in Darfur) has said that it is unjust to imprison what it considers an innocent Abdelrazik. Furthermore the Sudan offered to fly him to Canada at its own expense, but this idea was rejected by the Canadian government.
However; the Canadian government has also said that it thinks Abdelrazik should be able to come home, but that it is prevented because he is on the UN list, which it is apparently very hard to get off. Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon (the same Lawrence Cannon whose carrier should have been destroyed by his handling of the Barriere Lake racism scandal) made this statement:
"It's my understanding that this individual is on the 1267 UN list, and it would seem to me that he would, first and foremost, have to be able to get himself off that list before... posing any other gesture or move on his part."
Of course Canada probably put him on that list in the first place, though they’re not willing to say one way or another. Also, that statement is bizarre since the UN regulation doesn’t prevent him from going home.
Most recently the Canadian government claimed that it could not issue emergency travel papers without a valid travel itinerary, i.e. a plane ticket. For a while it seemed that if he had a plane ticket, they would grant him travel papers. At the same time it said that anyone who bought him a plane ticket would be charged with committing crimes under various counter-terrorism laws. An airline was found that would ignore the US no-fly dictum and people bought him a ticket anyway. He was scheduled to return home on April 3rd, the date of the demonstration. But then he was not granted an emergency passport anyway. So he is still in the Sudan.
The cruelty of the Canadian government seems baffling. They clearly gain nothing by all of this, letting him return home would be effortless. Yet they go the extra step to make his already terrible situation worse. They do not merely say no, without reason; they do not merely violate his rights as a Canadian citizen. They taunt him, they give him false hope and then they take it away from him. Why? So that he knows that they are all-powerful – so that others know? Why give him the hope of travel papers with a plane ticket? The plane ticket becomes a horrible symbol. It is something so simple to get, yet in his situation, impossibly distant. Yet he gets it anyway, and then of course it vanishes. The message is “that was only a mirage to further break your spirit.” But what interest does the Canadian government have in Mr. Abdelrazik’s spirit?
Concurrent with all this the Canadian embassy in Khartoum has granted him asylum, which it makes clear it will only do temporarily. It will protect him, but only insofar as he is always aware that this protection can end abruptly as the Foreign Ministry’s caprices direct – when it will expel him back into the surrounding dangers – that it will guard him from immediate threats but not allow him to go home – to see his family and continue with his life. It will present itself as the only power that can give him hope, but which will perpetually withhold that hope from him.
In light of this, what is Mr. Abdelrazik’s citizenship worth to him? What is Canadian or International law worth to him? Nothing. It is meaningless. For him there seemingly are no rights. The law that acts on him is not a rational law extending from his citizenship in a nation that protects him. It is more like a state of nature, but not nature as modern, scientific minds might conceive, but as nature would be conceived by the denizens of Archaic Greece – ruled by the whims of petty gods and deities. There is no reason why he is elected for torment, which makes it all the worse and which makes it all the more horrifying for everyone. You can’t help but ask what made his citizenship less valuable than your own, what differentiated the quality of his from yours and at what point and under whose decision could you find yourself in a similar situation. As the rule of law is made worthless for him, seemingly it is made worthless for everyone.
The purpose of the demonstration then was to raise awareness of this situation. People, as I said before, gathered outside the passport office. After some chanting and talking we went inside to find, not unexpectedly, that the passport office was barricaded by security. The group of demonstrators demanded to be let in, in order to symbolically apply for passports in solidarity with Mr. Abdelrazik (as anyone who has ever read this document will be aware, being issued a passport – and thus being able to leave one’s country – is not a right but a privilege, which means of course that everyone is subject to the favor of the body that grants them when it comes to crossing borders). This carried on for a while with some of the demonstrators fruitlessly requesting to be let into the office.
Meanwhile, since the security had issued a lockdown a large line of people had grown up waiting to fill out passport applications for all the normal reasons. One man grew irate.
“I’ve been waiting since six this morning” he said. Someone mentioned that Mr. Abdelrazik had been waiting for six years.
“I don’t care about anyone else,” he said.
Not wanting to draw the ire of the public, the group made its way outside and quietly dispersed.
: this man ended the protest
: said he had been waiting since six
: that he wanted his passport
: that he didn't care about others