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US: Freedom Fighters Need Not Apply
15.12.2008
By Anna Husarska
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December
15, 2008
U.S., — At a hearing in April, Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was asked about
an Iraqi Kurd who had served as an interpreter for
Marines in Iraq for nearly four years but had been
branded "a member of a terrorist organization" and
denied permanent residence in the United States
because of his past membership in the Kurdish
Democratic Party. Chertoff responded: "With respect
to Mr. Ahmad,www.ekurd.net
the translator, I waived
the objection to his getting a green card yesterday,
so we're out of Alice in Wonderland."
As it so happened, 10 days before Vermont Sen.
Patrick Leahy asked Chertoff this question, the
story of Saman Kareem Ahmad -- an extreme but hardly
isolated instance of the Department of Homeland
Security ruling that former freedom fighters are in
fact terrorists -- had been told in a front-page
story in this newspaper.
The timing was not lost on Leahy, who asked Chertoff:
"Is each of these cases going to require a major
story in The Washington Post or . . . a
congressional hearing before they get resolved?"
Unfortunately, they may. |
Saman Kareem Ahmad, (L), served with then-Capt.
Trent A. Gibson. Gibson backs Ahmad's application
for permanent U.S. residence |
For several years, many
genuine refugees and asylum seekers have been
blacklisted by the USA Patriot Act's overly broad
definition of a "terrorist organization," a domestic
determination with global consequences. In fiscal
2007, about 15,000 refugees were ruled ineligible to
enter the United States on grounds related to
terrorism, according to International Rescue
Committee estimates. Publicity has led to exceptions
being made for some refugees and some grounds for
rejection being waived, but the problem is far from
resolved.
While traveling for the International Rescue
Committee last month, I encountered an Iraqi Shiite
whose two brothers answered President George H.W.
Bush's 1991 call to rise up against Saddam Hussein.
Both were killed. Despite his family's sacrifices on
behalf of U.S. efforts to establish democracy in
Iraq, this man was not admitted to the United States
because of information in his file suggesting
(erroneously) that he, too, participated in the
uprising. After DHS interviewers deemed him a
"member of a terrorist organization," he was
resettled to Sweden.
The problem is not just that freedom fighters cannot
gain access to the United States. Denials of
permanent residence are wrecking the lives of people
who have been living in this country for years, many
of whom were granted refugee status precisely
because they were freedom fighters. In September,www.ekurd.net
U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services said it had denied nearly 700
of these green card applications this year because
of this bar.
The denials have included that of a Burmese lawyer
who had smuggled anti-government brochures into
Burma from Thailand; an Afghan owner of a muffler
shop in Flushing, N.Y., who fought on the side of
the mujaheddin; and an Afghan man who -- just like
the CIA -- assisted the mujaheddin by supplying it
with clothes, food, medicine and money.
Thomas Ragland, a lawyer for Ahmad, has another
Kurdish Iraqi client who served as an interpreter
for U.S. troops and is accused of being a member of
the same supposedly "terrorist" Kurdish Democratic
Party -- whose representatives now sit in the Iraqi
parliament in Baghdad. Because this man worked with
support teams for U.S. Army intelligence and his
family is still in Iraq, he is afraid to have his
name published. His former American employers have
sent letters of support, Ragland told me, but have
said nothing publicly. This man lives in an abyss,
afraid to speak out and unable to make a life in
either Iraq or the United States.
Such treatment, of course, provokes bitterness. When
Kun Garbang, a Sudanese refugee who came to the
United States with his wife and children in 2001,
applied for a green card recently, he was told by
the DHS: "Due to your being a current member and
representative of [the Sudan People's Liberation
Movement] you are inadmissible." Garbang went to a
library in Sioux Falls,www.ekurd.net
S.D., and wrote to the
DHS, in almost perfect English, that before his two
sons joined the Marines, they "asked my permission.
This is what I told them:"
" 'Children, there was a time that all the world
said no to you including your own country but the
United States gave us a shelter. We have to defend
this country and it is our responsibility.' "
One of Garbang's sons has served in Iraq for more
than two years. "Terrorists," Garbang wrote, "do not
send their children to fight for the United States."
The writer is a senior policy adviser at the
International Rescue Committee.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
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