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This is
a story about the trickery of time. Sometimes the
world changes on a dime, as it did on Sept. 11, and
with the transformation of the present, the past,
too, can suddenly take on a different hue. This, it
seems, is what happened to Ibrahim Parlak. Indeed,
it's tough to choose the tense in which to tell his
story. He runs -- or ran -- a Middle Eastern
restaurant. It's in Harbert, Mich., a small summer
resort town, an hour and a half by car from Chicago,
along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Parlak is a Kurd
from Turkey and had been in this country for 13
years when, on the morning of July 29 last year, he
was arrested by officers with the Department of
Homeland Security and taken into custody. He was
charged with crimes relating to his time in Turkey,
when he had been involved with a Kurdish separatist
group.
D.H.S. declared that he was -and consequently still
is -- a terrorist. A spokeswoman told the Associated
Press at the time of his arrest, ''We think that if
most people knew the details they would see him as
someone they wouldn't want living in their
community.'' Those details included the fact that
before immigrating to the U.S., he had illegally
crossed the Turkish border and, armed with an AK-47,
a pistol and a grenade, was involved in a firefight
in which two Turkish soldiers were killed. He was
compared to former Nazis who had hidden their pasts
to become U.S. citizens. A nearby newspaper in
LaPorte County, Ind., The Herald-Argus, ran the
headline ''Terrorist 22 Miles Away?'' A D.H.S.
prosecutor mentioned him in the same breath as Osama
bin Laden.
But the people around Parlak -- not just his close
friends but customers and former employees, business
competitors and neighbors -- saw things differently.
After Parlak's arrest, one of his closest friends,
Martin Dzuris, who had fled Communist Czechoslovakia
and who is now a loyal George W. Bush supporter,
built a Web site and organized a letter-writing
campaign to politicians. Parlak's tennis partner,
Marty Goldrick, a square-jawed, retired Whirlpool
executive, drove 120 miles to Lansing to lobby a
U.S. senator on Parlak's behalf, the first political
act he had ever undertaken. Jo Ann Jansky, a
tough-talking waitress who worked for Parlak when he
managed a truck stop, attached a plastic flag to her
car's antenna. It read: ''Free Ibrahim'' -- as did
signs that sprouted on front lawns like daisies. In
their windows, businesses taped posters with a
similar plea; they featured a picture of Parlak in
his chef's apron. To help cover Parlak's legal
costs, a competitor down the road sponsored a
fund-raiser, which brought in $25,000. (A friend
contributed $750, but told me he did it anonymously,
not because he was afraid to take a public stand,
but rather because he says that otherwise Parlak
would insist on repaying him.) A police officer in
town, David Duis, took a day off work to testify at
Parlak's bond hearing. ''If Ibrahim moved next to
me,'' he told me, ''I'd welcome it. He's just a
classy guy.''
Even people who knew him only peripherally offered
their support. A plumber who had done some work in
the restaurant stopped by and, holding back tears,
told Parlak's brother not to worry about the bill.
Carol Marin, a TV journalist who had dined at the
restaurant, wrote editorials in The Chicago
Sun-Times urging the government to drop the charges.
I was at the restaurant one afternoon when two
faculty members from a nearby university dropped off
a small contribution and a card. They explained that
their school had warned them about getting involved
and forbade them to associate the school in any way
with the case, so they left the card unsigned. One
friend commented that it was like a contemporary
version of the film ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' as
Parlak's small, everyday gestures had suddenly taken
on added significance. In the wake of 9/11, his
friends were fairly certain that they knew evil, and
in their minds Parlak wasn't it. Not even close.
How is it that two groups of individuals -- Parlak's
small-town friends and the U.S. government -- can
look at one man, at one case, at one situation and
come to such disparate conclusions? Are his friends
so close to him that they can't see what might have
been ugliness in his past? Or is the government so
intent on proving that it's tough on terrorism that
it has lost its moral bearing?
The Flight
On April 13, 1991, Ibrahim Parlak, who was 28 at the
time, arrived in the United States. He was on the
run, and so was both relieved and tired. He had
recently been released from a Turkish prison, and
the authorities there had been putting pressure on
him to rat out friends. Moreover, his family had
received death threats. So he fled. His father sold
a tractor and other farm equipment, and his sisters
sold some of their jewelry to raise the several
thousand dollars needed for plane tickets and a
false passport. Parlak remembers clearly something
his father told him before he left: ''You're old
enough and have been through enough to know what is
right and what is wrong. But no matter what you do,
don't stay in the front or the back, find a place in
the middle.'' By that he meant find a place of
comfort and safety.
Parlak told me he had planned his departure
carefully. The day before leaving, he went to a
Turkish barber and asked for ''an American
haircut,'' and he purchased new clothes, including a
leather jacket, so that he wouldn't attract
attention. Accompanying Parlak on the flight was a
Turkish businessman, whom Parlak had just met and
whose travel expenses he paid in exchange for
carrying newspaper clippings and other documents
that could help Parlak establish an asylum claim.
Parlak didn't want to transport the papers himself
for fear that he might be stopped and searched along
the way. He was also traveling on a false passport,
and so brought papers that could establish his real
identity.
In Chicago, the businessman took him to a city
college, where there was a language program for new
refugees. There they met Ruth Lambach, its director.
Lambach was immediately drawn to Parlak. ''I looked
at Ibrahim in my office,'' she recalls. ''I could
feel that he was on the edge of his life, that he
didn't have that many options. He had this amazing
warmth and fire in his eyes.'' Parlak is a slender,
handsome man, but it's his eyes that most people
comment on. They're deep-set and simultaneously sad
and sparkling. ''Dancing eyes,'' Lambach calls them.
''Alert, curious, alive.'' Lambach offered to let
him stay on her couch for the night. He spent much
of the next year there, becoming good friends with
Lambach and her son. In those days, Lambach and
Parlak, who spoke no English, communicated in
German.
Rebellion and Capture
Parlak immediately applied for political asylum, and
two weeks after his arrival went downtown to the
immigration building where he was interviewed about
his claim. There are a number of critical moments in
Parlak's story, and this one has taken on added
significance, especially when looked back on through
the prism of today's reordered world. In 1980,
Congress passed legislation formalizing the asylum
process, in part to be in compliance with the
longstanding United Nations Convention on refugees
and in part to respond to the influx of Soviet
citizens fleeing Communist rule. Over time, the
process for asylum seekers has become more demanding
and systematic, but in 1991 it was a rather
straightforward one that relied heavily on the
intuition of the immigration officer. Asylum is
given to people who can show a reasonable likelihood
that if they were to return to their countries,
they'd be persecuted because of their religion,
race, nationality, social group or political
beliefs; it cannot, however, be given to people who
have persecuted others. Applicants must provide what
documentation and narrative they can to substantiate
their claims, though in the end, at least in 1991,
much of it came down to a matter of trust. The
immigration officer had to decide whether the
applicant's story was believable.
There is a place on the application where Parlak had
to list his residences of the last five years, the
most recent first. It reads like a haiku of his
experience:
Istanbul
Aksaray
Prison in Gaziantep
Mountains of Maras
P.K.K. Camp, Halvi, Lebanon
It's unclear whether Parlak told the asylum officer
about his childhood, since the notes from that
interview begin with high school. But Parlak grew up
on a farm with four brothers and five sisters; his
father grew wheat, cotton and watermelon. It was not
an easy time to be a Kurd in Turkey, especially for
someone as independent-minded as Parlak. In the
1970's, Turkey refused to recognize the Kurds as a
distinct ethnic group even though half the world's
Kurds -- an estimated 10 to 12 million -- lived in
the country.
The Kurds were concentrated in the mountainous
regions in the east and south, where few of their
villages had electricity or running water. It has
generally been Turkey's belief that the Kurds need
to assimilate and become Turks, in language, culture
and identity. In the 1970's and 1980's, the Kurdish
language was forbidden for official use. Schools
taught only in Turkish. Newspapers or television
could not use the Kurdish language. Parents could
not give their children Kurdish names. Kurdish songs
and books were banned. Parlak tells the story of the
time the military came through his village, and
while his father threw books into a fire, Parlak and
one of his brothers tried to salvage what they
could, burying them in a nearby field. When Parlak
was in first grade, a classmate reported to the
authorities that Parlak spoke Kurdish in his home.
When he got to school, his teacher hit him with a
wooden cane and then humiliated him by making him
stand by the blackboard all day.
Parlak's father sent him to the nearby city,
Gaziantep, for high school, and it's here that
Parlak's asylum testimony picks up. Parlak told the
immigration officer that it was in Gaziantep that he
became involved with the burgeoning Kurdish rights
movement, attending meetings and political protests.
At one rally, where he was distributing leaflets and
hanging posters, the police arrested him. He was
held for three months -- without ever appearing in
front of a judge -- before being released. He was
16. Realizing the danger of his involvement in
Kurdish affairs, Parlak left for the safety of
Germany, where he lived for the next seven years.
During that time, the mid-1980's, the Kurdish
Workers' Party, or P.K.K., emerged as the leading
force for Kurdish rights. It was a Marxist-Leninist
insurgent group (though with no ties to Moscow) that
advocated an independent Kurdish state and was led
by Abdullah Ocalan, who would eventually earn a
reputation for his zealotry and brutality (including
against P.K.K. members when he lost trust in them).
The P.K.K. conducted guerrilla raids in southeast
Turkey, killing soldiers and police officers as well
as civilians who sympathized with the Turkish
authorities. In Europe, Parlak became active in the
P.K.K.'s political arm and organized Kurdish
cultural festivals throughout the continent. They
had a dual purpose: to fuel a sense of Kurdish
identity as well as to raise money for P.K.K.
activities. Parlak used a pseudonym, Ayhan.
Parlak missed his family, and he carried around
their photographs, trying to memorize their faces so
that he wouldn't forget them. He couldn't call them
because his parents' village didn't have telephones.
After seven years in Europe, Parlak decided to
return home, with the assistance of the P.K.K. He
thought he could be more effective advocating
Kurdish rights in Turkey than he could from afar.
He told the immigration officer in Chicago that he
left Germany for eastern Lebanon, where he trained
at a P.K.K. camp for eight months and where he
learned skills to survive in the mountains. He led a
group of five Kurds, and with Syrian smugglers as
guides, crossed the border from Syria into Turkey. A
Turkish patrol discovered them, and a firefight
ensued. In recounting this story for the asylum
officer, Parlak -- with the businessman who
accompanied him translating -- told her: ''We were
shot at with automatic guns. Three of my friends
were injured, and we returned the gunfire.'' He
didn't mention that in the skirmish two Turkish
soldiers were killed. He did, however, submit a
Turkish newspaper article that recounted the
incident. The businessman translated the article and
left out mention of the soldiers' deaths. This
omission, which Parlak said he didn't know about at
the time, would become important to the government's
case against Parlak.
Parlak evaded capture, and a couple of weeks later,
he crossed into Turkey successfully, spending the
next six months hiding in the mountains by day and
traveling by night. Parlak has always maintained
that he was there doing political work, visiting
villages to talk about Kurdish rights and Kurdish
culture and to put families of prisoners in touch
with support groups in Europe. (Turkey has never
accused him of being involved in any combat outside
of the border skirmish.) On the afternoon of Oct.
29, 1988, as he sat in a small hole he had dug into
the side of a mountain eating a late lunch of
macaroni, he was surrounded by the local police and
Turkish soldiers. For a brief moment, Parlak
considered fighting his way out, but thought better
of it, and instead hastily tried -- unsuccessfully
-- to burn a journal and some photographs. Parlak
was arrested, and over the next four weeks was
continually tortured. He didn't go into details with
the asylum officer, though he told her that he still
had the scars.
Parlak was put on trial in the State Security
Courts, a separate judicial system the Turkish
government had established to try leftists and
Kurdish separatists. He was tried along with 57
other suspected militants; he faced the death
penalty for his association with the P.K.K. and for
his involvement in the deaths of the two soldiers
(though the court concluded he had not shot them).
But his sentence was reduced because he directed the
Turkish police to a buried munitions cache and
promised to end his involvement in Kurdish causes.
He was released after serving 16 months in prison.
This was not, however, what he told the asylum
officer. Rather, he told a half-truth: that he won
an early release because of bribes his family paid
to the police and the judge. His family did pay
something to the local police, Parlak says, but he
knew that wasn't the complete picture. Parlak now
feared the P.K.K., and so figured the fewer people
who knew about his turning over information, the
better. He also felt ashamed. ''I accepted a
bargain,'' he told me. ''I felt selfish.'' At his
asylum hearing, along with newspaper articles, his
discharge papers from prison and a recent internal
police memo that said he was wanted for questioning,
Parlak brought with him a report from Human Rights
Watch, which condemned Turkey for its mass political
trials and for its use of torture, which ''continued
unabated.''
At the end of her interview, the immigration officer
asked Parlak, ''What do you think would happen to
you if you returned to Turkey?''
''Everything,'' Parlak replied. ''I'd be lucky to be
alive after two to three weeks.''
Parlak was given working papers after the interview
and was granted asylum the following year. In doing
so, the U.S. government gave Parlak refuge,
assurance that it would protect him, that it would
ensure his safety, that in the words of Parlak's
father, it would give him ''a place in the middle.''
Parlak says he thought to himself: One part of my
life is behind me. I can start something new.
A Place of Comfort
Parlak slowly learned English, and took his first
job, as a room-service waiter at the Ritz-Carlton in
Chicago. In his first year here, on a blind date
arranged by Lambach, he met Michele Gazzolo, a
31-year-old graduate student who grew up in a
Chicago suburb. Gazzolo says she thought Parlak was
''resolute about everything he did or thought.''
When she asked him if he liked verse, he replied,
''I don't have time for poetry.'' Parlak told
Gazzolo about his time in Turkey and his involvement
with the Kurdish separatist movement, and on their
first date drew the outlines of Kurdistan on a
napkin. Kurdistan is the imagined future home of the
roughly 22 million Kurds who live in a contiguous
area that reaches into Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
''He impressed me as being a person who knew who he
was and what he cared about,'' Gazzolo recalls. The
two soon moved in together.
Parlak had trouble sleeping, and often in the middle
of the night he would go to the kitchen, turn on the
light and puff on a Winston cigarette. He was
haunted. Gazzolo tried to get him to talk; his
stories came out in bits and pieces. He told Gazzolo
that after he was arrested he was blindfolded and
placed in a box-size cage where the ceiling was too
low to stand upright. But he couldn't sit either,
since there was a layer of frigid water and
excrement on the floor. He spent more than a week in
this cage, and when he was able to fall asleep, in a
crouching position, guards would spray him with a
hose to wake him. His genitals, he told Gazzolo,
still ached from the jolts of electric shock
administered by interrogators. He once was tied to a
wall, and had a sandbag that hung by a rope
repeatedly knocked against his chest. He'd go days
without food, and when his captors gave him bread
they would smear it in excrement. He finally gave
information to the authorities when they threatened
to harm his father. Gazzolo tried to persuade Parlak
to get some help, but he refused. He wanted to put
it behind him, and he feared that talking about it
would only invigorate the memories.
Gazzolo's parents had a summer home in Harbert, and
occasionally, she would take Parlak there. He fell
in love with the area, especially the long, winding
sandy beaches, and relished the distance from the
big city, mostly because he wanted to keep his
distance from the Kurdish community. He still
worried that the P.K.K. might seek revenge on him
for turning over the munitions cache to the Turkish
government. He soon found a job managing a truck
stop. He had a reputation for working long hours,
sometimes three shifts in a row, and for being an
outstanding cook. Truckers would radio others about
Parlak's lentil soup. Jo Ann Jansky, the
tough-talking waitress, was struck by his
generosity. When Jansky lost her job, Parlak came by
her house a few days before Christmas and handed her
a check for $500. This, he told Jansky, was to buy
presents for her grandchildren.
Parlak very much wanted his own restaurant, and so,
in 1994, he opened Cafe Gulistan in a small,
low-slung building along the Red Arrow Highway, a
busy thoroughfare that runs along the lake. Gulistan
means ''land of roses''; it's how he and his friends
in Turkey referred to Kurdistan because they
couldn't refer to it by name. He planted rosebushes
in front of the restaurant and hollyhocks along the
side, and decorated the inside with Kurdish
artifacts and photographs of Kurdish children.
Parlak, in his reserved, unassuming manner, found a
community of friends. There was, for instance,
Goldrick, the retired Whirlpool executive. He,
Parlak and a local contractor took tennis lessons
together, and nearly every Sunday night would gather
for dinner at Cafe Gulistan, a ritual that they kept
for three years until Parlak's arrest. Goldrick
served as a Marine officer in Vietnam, and so he and
Parlak would exchange stories about survival in the
bush. ''I came to consider him a very good friend,''
Goldrick told me, ''one of the greatest human beings
I've had the good fortune to know.''
David Duis, who has been a local patrol officer for
18 years, recalls talking to Parlak when Cafe
Gulistan was burglarized. Restaurant burglaries,
Duis told me, are usually the work of an employee,
and so the first thing he asked of Parlak was to
interview the workers there. Parlak resisted. ''He
didn't want me to subject his employees to what he
thought would be some kind of interrogation,'' Duis
recalled. ''He treated his employees like family.''
The burglary turned out to have been done by
outsiders. Duis became a regular customer. After
9/11, his police unit was asked by the F.B.I. for
background on Parlak. Duis couldn't understand why
they'd be concerned about him.
In 1997, Parlak and Gazzolo had a daughter, Livia.
Though they have split up, they have remained good
friends, and Parlak has participated in their
daughter's upbringing. Livia helped her father in
the garden, and he taught her what each herb tasted
like so she could pick them for his cooking. He
called her maymun, Kurdish for ''little monkey.'' He
joined her school's parents' association, and when
she had trouble with her reading in first grade, he
worked with her every day on phonics and told her
that she was teaching him to read English better.
''The sun rises and sets on Livia,'' said a friend.
The Past, Redefined
Parlak's life began to unravel when he took the U.S.
citizenship test in 1999. Applying for citizenship
seemed like the natural thing to do. He said he felt
that the United States was where he belonged. His
friend Goldrick had been nudging him to become a
full-fledged American. ''I just thought this guy was
the epitome of the immigrant coming to America and
making good for himself,'' Goldrick told me. ''He
needed to be a citizen.'' So, on a July afternoon,
Parlak drove the 100 miles to Grand Rapids to take
his English language and history tests, both of
which he passed easily. Afterward, he was
interviewed by an I.N.S. worker, and she asked him
about his involvement with the P.K.K. She explained
that as of 1997, the State Department had listed the
P.K.K. as a terrorist group. He testily told her he
had detailed his affiliation in his asylum
application eight years earlier. ''Didn't you just
ask me about the meaning of Fourth of July?'' he
asked, referring to the U.S. history test he'd
taken. ''The Kurds fight for their freedom, and why
do they have to be punished?'' She told him that his
citizenship application would be delayed. A month
later, an I.N.S. representative sent a terse inquiry
to Interpol, asking for any information it might
have on Parlak.
For more than two years, Parlak awaited word on
whether his application for naturalization had been
approved. Then, in August 2001, his frustration
mounting, he filed a lawsuit against the I.N.S.; his
hope was to expedite the process. While awaiting
word from the I.N.S., Parlak heard instead from the
F.B.I., as the agency began taking a second look at
old asylum and immigration cases after the Sept. 11
attacks. He would meet periodically with a local
F.B.I. agent from nearby St. Joseph, and the two
would have coffee together. Wanting to cooperate
fully, Parlak handed out index cards to local
law-enforcement officials with his work and home
phone numbers on them.
By the end of 2001, Parlak received a formal denial
of his naturalization request. Then, in April 2002,
the I.N.S. filed charges against him for having lied
on his green-card application 10 years earlier. He
had answered no to two questions: one asked if he
had ever been arrested for anything, the other
inquired as to whether he had ever provided support
to a terrorist organization. He says he
misunderstood the questions because of his English,
which was rudimentary then. In any event, he had
previously disclosed his arrest and P.K.K.
affiliation on his asylum application a year
earlier.
While his immigration case dragged through the
courts, Parlak received a call on July 29 of last
year from the F.B.I. agent in St. Joseph, who
invited him over to his office. Parlak thought it
was to be a routine visit. Soon after he sat down to
talk, though, two special D.H.S. agents, who were
also seated in the room, rose from their chairs and
handcuffed him. Parlak was told he was under arrest.
The D.H.S. (the I.N.S. had been subsumed by this new
agency) charged Parlak with committing an aggravated
felony after his admission to the U.S. This charge
came out of an unusual turn of events. Shortly after
Parlak had been released from a Turkish prison in
1990, the prosecution there appealed the sentence.
The appeal sat unanswered in the court system until
early last year, when the State Security Court in
one of its last acts before it was disbanded (which
was a condition for Turkey's entry into the European
Union) resentenced Parlak, in absentia, to six
years. D.H.S., which says it didn't know of Parlak's
involvement in the two soldiers' deaths until 2002,
argues that this resentencing means he was convicted
of a felony while he was here, even though it was a
crime for which he had already served time.
But the government soon ratcheted up the charges and
accused Parlak of having engaged in terrorist
activity in Turkey. It suddenly became a very
different kind of case.
Terrorist activity as defined by Congress includes
the ''intent to endanger, directly or indirectly,
the safety of one or more individuals'' (other than
for mere personal monetary gain), and the government
argued that Parlak's presence at the shooting of the
two soldiers fell under this rubric. Parlak was also
charged with providing material support to a
terrorist organization, given his activities with
the P.K.K.'s political arm. There have never been
any allegations that Parlak is a threat to the
security of this country, or that he has been
involved with any kind of militant group since his
arrival here. Rather, as legislators reshaped the
definition of terrorism, first in 1990, then in
1996, and then again in 2001 -- in the aftermath of
9/11 -- Parlak's activities in Turkey took on a more
sinister coloring. What's more, with each broadening
of the definition by Congress, its application
became retroactive.
What Is Terrorism?
There has long been disagreement about what
constitutes a terrorist. Often the definition
depends on the historical context. In one case in
1990, immigration authorities gave asylum to a
member of the mujahedeen, a group that used
terrorist tactics against the Soviets in
Afghanistan. They said there was no lawful way for
him to change the government. In 1997, a member of
the Irish Republican Army who had served time for
bombing police barracks received asylum; the
immigration judge ruled that it was not a terrorist
act but a political offense because of the conflict
in Northern Ireland. In the late 80's, the African
National Congress was considered a terrorist group
by the Department of Defense, while the State
Department called it ''a legitimate voice'' in South
African affairs. In the past, there has been
disagreement over whether a state can be guilty of
using terrorist tactics, and in 1984 a member of
Savak, the shah of Iran's notoriously brutal secret
police, received political asylum.
The definition of terrorism in the U.S. has changed
over time, as terrorism has itself changed. In the
1980's, U.S. immigration law had no definition for
terrorism (though it explicitly banned admission of
members of the Palestine Liberation Organization).
The State Department thought of it as
''premeditated, politically motivated violence
perpetrated against noncombatant targets . . .
usually intended to influence an audience.'' In
1990, for purposes of immigration matters, Congress
came up with a definition that didn't explicitly
limit terrorism to attacks against civilians, and
while the law didn't take effect until after
Parlak's admission to the U.S., the government
argues it applies retroactively to his case. Then in
1996, after the bombings of the World Trade Center
and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City -- acts that seemed designed to take
as many lives as possible -- the government made it
a crime to provide any sort of material support,
including food and housing, to a terrorist
organization. Congress also directed the State
Department to publish a list of organizations it
deemed to be terrorist groups; it included the P.K.K.
Finally, in the U.S. Patriot Act, Congress used
broader language so that now a terrorist
organization included any two or more individuals
involved in what it deemed terrorist acts. It was
also retroactive to past situations like Parlak's.
''The problem now is that if you broaden it so much,
you can pin the label on anyone you don't like,''
said Louise Richardson, a scholar of terrorist
movements and now the executive dean of the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. ''The P.K.K.,
while guilty of certain atrocities, were more in
line with a guerrilla group insofar as they had a
broad base of support in the Kurdish community. And
the Kurdish community was so discriminated
against.''
The P.K.K. nonetheless has been involved in some
rather ugly and savage activity. It not only
attacked the Turkish police and military but also
went after civilians, including Turkish teachers in
Kurdish communities, and even fellow Kurds --
especially landlords and the village guards -- who
wouldn't take a stand for a separate Kurdish state.
The State Department's Country Reports on Human
Rights Practices for the late 1980's -- the period
when Parlak re-entered Turkey -- chronicled various
attacks on civilians by the P.K.K., including on
women and children. While the State Department often
referred to the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization,
it also employed the terms ''insurgency,''
''guerrillas'' and ''separatist organization.'' (In
newspaper articles about the P.K.K. from that same
period, they're described as ''Kurdish guerrillas,''
''Kurdish insurgents'' and ''Kurdish separatists.'')
This isn't to suggest that the P.K.K. didn't attack
civilians, but rather that there was ambiguity about
how we viewed a militant organization that appeared
to have some legitimate complaints. Indeed, a State
Department official told me that until the
mid-1990's, Turkey never felt that the U.S.
condemned the P.K.K. strongly enough.
''There's such a fuzzy line between civil war,
insurgency and terrorism,'' says Peter W. Singer of
the Brookings Institution. ''To be blunt about it, a
lot of people use Justice Potter Stewart's notion
about pornography: I know it when I see it.''
Since 9/11, it has become a much less fluid term,
and like the way we saw the Communist threat in
anyone who opposed us during the cold war, we now
see terrorism in any group that employs
unconventional tactics of warfare. But most
important, the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon have colored our view of history.
''Today, we're looking for terrorism everywhere,''
Singer says. ''It's the lens through which we view
the world. The bar has been lowered. . . . It's
going to shift the way we look at things in the
past.''
It's also instructive to revisit 1991, the year
Parlak was admitted to the U.S., to understand the
prism of that time. There was much going on in the
world that made us more tolerant and ready to
embrace someone with his background. Two years
earlier the Berlin Wall fell, a grand symbolic
moment signaling an openness and orderliness the
world hadn't experienced in a long while. And there
was much worldwide sympathy for the Kurds. In the
late 80's, Saddam Hussein gassed Kurdish villages
and carried out mass executions, killing some
100,000. Then around the time of Parlak's arrival,
after the gulf war, roughly half a million Iraqi
Kurds decamped for the safety of Turkey, but tens of
thousands were stranded at the border. There was a
world outcry first at Iraq, then at Turkey, for
their treatment of the Kurds. Certainly, these
events shaped the way we viewed someone like Parlak
back in 1991.
Jailed and Confused
I visited Parlak this past October at the Calhoun
County jail in Battle Creek, where there's a wing
set aside for immigrants awaiting possible
deportation. He has been held without bond because
of the terrorism allegations. We sat across from
each other in a small, windowless,
white-cinder-block room, and Parlak spent much of
our time together leaning over the table, his
attention fully on the moment, his eyes, as Lambach
had suggested, ''dancing.'' They brighten when he
laughs, but even then there's a solemnity about
them. (When he spoke of his torture in Turkey, he
averted my gaze altogether.) We spent four hours
together, but this was, it turns out, the last visit
D.H.S. would allow reporters.
Parlak, who's now 42, looked thin, his wiry
shoulders apparent through his orange jail garb; he
told me he had lost 10 pounds since his arrest. I
asked how he was doing. ''It's not how I expected to
spend my summer,'' he said, forcing a smile.
He told me that shortly after he was arrested and
taken here, he decided to request deportation rather
than proceed with a hearing. He didn't have any
fight in him, he told me. He was too angry, too
bewildered and too disoriented. Being incarcerated
had revived memories of his time in Turkish prisons.
''It's just like watching old movies,'' he told me.
''You put your head on the pillow, and they come.''
Then he heard what his friends were doing on his
behalf, about the fund-raiser, about people stopping
by the restaurant to donate money, about neighbors
who hadn't lost faith. And he thought of his
daughter, Livia.
Lambach, the first American to befriend him, sent
him 36 postcards, all scenes from Monet's garden,
because she knew he loved flowers. Goldrick visited
Parlak in jail and got so choked up that he found it
hard to have a conversation. Through the glass
partition, Parlak told Goldrick he was having a hard
time with the radical Muslims in the jail. He would
argue with them about America, and they would deride
him for not joining their gripe sessions about the
country. (An Iraqi who was in the jail with Parlak
told me that Parlak was a calming influence there,
that many of the immigrants came to him for advice.)
Two of his sisters -- one of whom he hasn't seen in
20 years -- came to the U.S., one from Switzerland,
the other from Germany. And every Monday night, 20
to 40 friends of Parlak's gather at Cafe Gulistan
for a potluck, and Parlak calls to speak with them.
When I saw him, he clearly seemed boosted if not
emboldened by the support. ''I'm not any less
American than the judge,'' he said. ''I'm not any
less American than the prosecutors. The America here
is not the America I know.''
Parlak talked openly and in great detail about his
time as a Kurdish separatist, about crossing the
border, about being armed, about the firefight,
about his six months hiding in the mountains. There
wasn't any effort to hide his place in the Kurdish
movement. Regarding his arrest here, he seemed more
perplexed than anything else. Periodically he would
say to me: ''Why? I've been asking myself that
question over and over.''
Parlak had a pile of papers in front of him, many of
them legal documents. On the top were a few pages of
notes he had jotted for himself, some in English but
much in Kurdish. He told me that he can't sleep for
more than two to three hours at a time, so he'll
often record what he can remember of the events 16
years ago. The hardest thing, though, was being away
from his 7-year-old daughter, with whom he had had
only one contact visit, but who comes to see him
almost every Thursday morning at the jail. They talk
through a glass partition. At one point, using
toothpaste, he glued photographs of Livia to a sheet
of cardboard, but the guards told him he had to take
it down. ''The only thing I could tell her,'' he
said, ''is that I didn't do anything wrong. That
it's a mistake. That we'll fix it.''
A Defiant Hearing
On a gloomy, rainy Monday morning this past
December, Parlak, whose hair had grayed considerably
after four months in detention, was escorted by
federal agents, one of them toting an automatic,
into the building that houses Detroit's immigration
court. Parlak's wrists were tethered to a manacle
around his waist.
His friends, each of whom wore a sticker with a
photograph of a red rose, waited for him outside the
courtroom, and when he appeared, burst into
applause. Livia wore a T-shirt that read: ''Free My
Dad.'' People squeezed onto the nine wooden benches
of the compact courtroom; two of the benches were
filled with reporters from small newspapers that
serve the area around Parlak's hometown, as well
reporters from The Chicago Tribune and
''Nightline.'' Goldrick spent the first day in a
blue poncho with the words ''Free Ibrahim'' on the
back, parading in front of the building, holding
aloft his ''Free Ibrahim'' lawn sign.
The prosecutor was Mark Jebson, 37, a rapid-fire
speaker with the straight-backed bearing of a
marine. He has spent most of his career working for
immigration, first for the I.N.S. and then for the
D.H.S. By contrast, Parlak's legal team was
unusually large -- seven in all; there was room for
only three of them at the defense table, so the
others crammed into the front bench. They included
two attorneys from the Chicago office of a large
corporate law firm that had agreed to take the case
pro bono. (One of them, David Foster, was Gazzolo's
cousin, who had known Parlak for many years.) A
D.H.S. official later commented to me, ''That kind
of goes against the perception of David going
against Goliath.''
The attorney who spent the most time visiting Parlak
in jail, and who would be the one to question him in
court, was a demure, soft-spoken woman, Anne
Buckleitner. Buckleitner, who is in private practice
in Grand Rapids, first heard about Parlak's case
when she read a local newspaper article about his
arrest and remembers thinking to herself, He was in
trouble now for what he'd already opened up about?
This can't be right. There's got to be more to this
story.
From 1989 to 1999, Buckleitner worked for the F.B.I.
at its Washington headquarters, the last five of
them as an assistant general counsel specializing in
counterintelligence and counterterrorism. (She and
her law partner, John Smietanka, who also served in
the U.S. attorney general's office during the Reagan
and first Bush administrations, have taken on
Parlak's case at a reduced fee.) Buckleitner
remembers the debates she and her F.B.I. colleagues
would have over what constitutes a terrorist
organization, especially because they saw the
emergence of radical Islamic fundamentalists who had
no connection to a country or a discernible cause.
Buckleitner wondered if the government might have
reason to believe that Parlak posed a security
threat, but she became satisfied -- through her
meetings with him and through her own investigation
-- that that wasn't the case. ''Government people
often times lose a perspective of the power and the
impact that their actions have,'' she told me.
''When you have shifting goal posts, I don't know
how Ibrahim could anticipate what would be important
to the government.''
The hearing lasted two days, and it was Parlak's
testimony that occupied most of the time. Parlak,
who had had little sleep, looked on edge. He wore an
ill-fitting green suit and, because he hadn't been
given time to shave at the jail, had a day's worth
of growth. He appeared nervous, and often sat on his
hands, his body leaning forward, as if he couldn't
decide how best to appear, deferential or assertive.
One friend noticed that his English, usually quite
good, was more halting and choppy than usual. His
exchanges with Jebson, the prosecutor, were
combative. Indeed, Parlak's demeanor was at times
defiant, which made his answers seem elusive. At one
point, Jebson asked Parlak about the pseudonym he
used while in Germany.
''Was that your code name?'' Jebson asked.
''Could be,'' Parlak replied. Jebson approached him.
''It is or it isn't,'' he demanded.
''It was.''
Toward the end of the hearing, Jebson asked Parlak
if he still supported the P.K.K.
"As long as they stay with the Kurdish issue," he
said. "I want the Kurds to be free to speak their
language, to experience the culture. If the P.K.K.
encourages that, then we're on the same page. I
don't agree with their military tactics. I agree
with their ideals." In subsequent conversations,
Parlak has made it clear that his fire for Kurdish
rights has not diminished.
Jebson contended that Parlak's asylum application
"was full of lies," and in his conclusion argued
that "if he had told the truth, we never would have
granted him asylum." During the two-day hearing,
Jebson presented some material that Parlak had not
disclosed when he entered the U.S., including the
fact that right before crossing the border into
Turkey he had a farewell meeting with the P.K.K.
leader Ocalan, that he was the commander of the five
men and that a grenade fell from his pack when he
fled. The bulk of Jebson's argument rested on the
contention that Parlak had hidden his involvement in
the deaths of the two soldiers. Parlak continues to
maintain that he always believed the newspaper
article had been fully translated.
For Jebson, it seemed clear: Parlak had a violent
past. He had tried to re-enter Turkey carrying an
AK-47, a pistol and a grenade, prepared to do
battle. When Jebson asked why he was armed, Parlak
replied: "Because I was in danger. The Turkish
government considered me an enemy, and I considered
them an enemy." Jebson appeared irritated by the
efforts of Parlak's lawyers to make his activities
seem benign. While they wanted to establish that
Parlak was not part of the P.K.K.'s military arm,
they sometimes soft-pedaled the evidence. At one
point, they argued unconvincingly that the P.K.K.
camp where Parlak spent time could also be
considered a refugee camp for the elderly and
children. Plain and simple, Parlak was armed and
involved in illegal activity in Turkey. About that
there seems no doubt.
Indeed, in the end, what's most striking is not how
far apart the two sides are, but how much they agree
on. Jebson confirmed that assessment. "Mr. Parlak
admitted almost everything I questioned him on," he
told me after the hearing. Parlak by his own
admission had been associated with the P.K.K. He had
told the asylum officer that he attended a P.K.K.
camp in Lebanon, and that he was a member of the
P.K.K.'s political arm. (The government does claim,
though, that there was little distinction between
the political and military wings of the
organization.)
Parlak had spoken of crossing the border into Turkey
illegally and in court acknowledged the death of the
two Turkish soldiers. The government doesn't dispute
that Parlak himself didn't shoot the soldiers.
Parlak spoke of his torture, and of his ultimate
conviction and prison sentence. None of that is in
dispute. Rather, it seems, what is in question is
how we view his activities now, through the prism of
a post-9/11 world.
"Mr. Parlak," Jebson said in his concluding remarks,
"is literally the complete terrorist package. . . .
There are many governments in this world that would
claim Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter. He's not
a freedom fighter. He's a terrorist. Parlak is not a
freedom fighter. He's a terrorist."
But is he? Was he? Parlak and his lawyers argue that
he never committed any violent acts against
civilians, that he was in fact convicted in Turkey
not for being a terrorist but rather for his
activities advocating an independent Kurdish state.
They also argue that, to use their words, he has
been "road tested," that in his 14 years here he has
shown himself to be an ideal citizen. Until changes
in the immigration laws in 1996, if you'd been in
this country for seven years, proved yourself to be
of good moral character and had a family who
depended on you, it was enough to avoid deportation.
"I think the way he was treated speaks for itself,"
Buckleitner said, referring to the asylum office.
"They had comfort with what they knew and let him
in."
At his hearing, Parlak testified to his torture in a
closed courtroom with only the attorneys and the
D.H.S. guards present. It was, one of his lawyers
said, a highly emotional session. Immediately
afterward Parlak was allowed a break, and the
plainclothes officer guarding him allowed him a
visit with his daughter in a room off the hallway.
He left the door open. At one point, Buckleitner
passed by. She noticed Livia in her father's lap and
the guard sitting in a corner reading a newspaper.
"Something about that scene, coming on the heels of
that testimony, just overwhelmed me," Buckleitner
said. "The guard seemed real comfortable with him. I
have to think that the guards were also affected by
his deportment and his testimony." Buckleitner told
she me she got teary-eyed, and still can't fathom
why the government is so determined to prosecute
this case. "Maybe," she suggested, "it's because
they've been dealt so many blows on the criminal
side, and so they're just digging in their heels."
It is the question that everyone familiar with this
saga asks: Why? Is this a political payoff to
Turkey, whose assistance in the Middle East we rely
on? Unlikely. The State Department had no
involvement in this case, and an officer at the
Turkish Embassy told me that while Turkey was
satisfied that the U.S. had gone after Parlak,
Turkish authorities had not made a decision whether
to even allow him back into Turkey. (Oddly enough,
the U.S. government has in recent years tried to get
Turkey to expand its offer of limited amnesty to
P.K.K. members; since the 1999 capture of Ocalan,
P.K.K. activities have diminished considerably.) Are
there suspicions that Parlak might still be active
in any kind of nefarious activity since his arrival
here? There's been no suggestion of that. It may be
as simple as this: since 9/11, the government has
clamped down on immigration cases (57 percent more
people were deported last year than in the year
2000), and we now see threats where we didn't
before. From D.H.S.'s perspective, they're simply
following the letter of the law.
"There's a lot of people on his side who really feel
that he's helpless victim of government oppression,"
said Robin Baker, the director of detention and
removal for a D.H.S. branch based in Detroit.
"Frankly, if people wanted an individual who's
admitted to being a member of a terrorist
organization and who's been held responsible for the
murders of two people to live in their neighborhood,
then they should contact our elected representatives
and ask them to change the law because all we're
doing is enforcing the law."
Even if you presume, as the government does, that
Parlak once engaged in terrorist activity, is he
still a terrorist? I spoke with Henri Barkey, an
expert on Turkey who served on the policy-planning
staff at the U.S. State Department in the late 90's.
"If we're going to brand a terrorist forever and go
after them until the cows come home, we'll never win
this thing," he said of the country's war on
terrorism. "If there's no redemption, we'll either
have to jail them forever or kill them."
After the hearing, in a phone conversation from
jail, Parlak told me that a year and a half before
his arrest, the F.B.I. approached him with a vague
proposal to infiltrate the P.K.K. somewhere in the
Middle East. Parlak declined the offer. When asked
about this, the F.B.I. refused comment and asked
that I speak to the D.H.S. A spokesman there said,
"Nobody will disclose that a conversation
materialized." Privately, a D.H.S. official said
that he had been told that the F.B.I. had pitched
Parlak, though he didn't know the details. What does
it say that at one point one arm of the U.S.
government felt confident enough in Parlak's
integrity to think that he could re-enter the
Kurdish separatist movement and turn over valuable
information? It's further evidence, I suppose, that
we see what we want to see.
The Court Rules
On Dec. 29, Elizabeth A. Hacker, a U.S. immigration
judge, issued a scathing 59-page decision, ordering
Parlak deported to Turkey. She wrote that she didn't
find Parlak credible because of "his evasive
demeanor" at the hearing. She agreed with the
prosecution on virtually every point. She wrote that
Parlak's "actions as a restaurateur, father and
resident of Harbert are not the subject of this
hearing." She continued: he "is accountable for the
actions he took prior to entry into the United
States and the actions in obtaining his status under
the immigration laws before this Court." Parlak's
attorneys are appealing, first to the Board of
Immigration Appeals, and then if necessary to the
federal courts.
Meanwhile, Parlak worries that if sent back to
Turkey he would be a target of the authorities and
of the P.K.K., which he says he believes views him
as a traitor to their cause. (Despite his new
sentence, he doesn't have to serve any more prison
time because he has already fulfilled one-fifth of
it, which was all that was required by the Turkish
court.) If Turkey — which long ago revoked Parlak's
citizenship — refuses him entry, then it's unclear
what will happen. It's highly unusual for a deportee
to be sent to a third country. Theoretically, he
could be detained indefinitely, if it was believed
he posed a danger to the community. Otherwise, he
could be temporarily released under supervision. A
D.H.S. spokesman told me, "Ibrahim Parlak will never
walk these streets again."
Shortly after the decision, I spoke with Parlak's
neighbors. I thought that given the forcefulness of
the judge's decision, some of them might now think
differently about their friend. Goldrick conceded to
me that he had been worried that maybe the
government had something on Parlak that would
suggest he was engaged in villainous activity here.
"I thought, I'll kill you if you haven't been honest
with us," he told me. But in the end it was as he
had known it to be. "You better go and round up all
those people who fought the apartheid government in
South Africa," he told me, sounding even more
agitated than when I'd spoken to him a couple of
months earlier. He's in Florida for the winter, and
told me that when he returns to Michigan, he intends
to continue lobbying his local politicians.
David Duis, the local police officer who testified
at an earlier hearing, told me that he plans to
visit Parlak in jail. "There's a big difference
between law and justice," he said. "The law says
some things can be done, and justice is what's the
right thing to do. I think in this situation, the
law may say we can deport him, but I don't think
it's justice."
Alex Kotlowitz is a regular contributor to the
magazine and the author of ''There Are No Children
Here'' and ''Never a City So Real.''
www.nytimes.com
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