Fallout from 9/11: on the inside front cover of the Canadian passport officials of other countries are requested "to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary." Lately however, a number of Canadian citizens have been harassed by U.S. authorities. (Citizenship).

In December 2002, supporters of Maher Arar held a vigil in front of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa: they were protesting Mr. Arar's treatment by U.S. immigration officials, who deported him to Syria during an airport stopover in New York. The protesters called the action "an insult to Canadian sovereignty," and wanted to know how it is that a Canadian citizen can be deported by U.S. authorities. Almost three months after his disappearance in September 2002, Mr. Arar was reportedly languishing in a Syrian jail, without charge or trial. The human rights group Amnesty International joined the campaign calling on the Canadian government to do more to protect Mr. Arar's rights, and on Syrian authorities to release him "unless he is charged with a recognized criminal offence."

Maher Afar became a Canadian citizen in 1991. He also has Syrian citizenship. He was on his way home to Canada after visiting family in Tunisia when he was pulled off his plane in New York. There, he underwent nine hours of interrogations (without the presence of a lawyer) by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The INS accused him of knowing suspected "terrorists" in Canada, which he denied. Without charging him with any crime, the INS then deported Mr. Arar to Lebanon. (There seems to be more to this case than has been so far made public. Apparently, Mr. Afar was friends with a man in Ottawa's Syrian community who was targeted by RCMP investigators as part of a post-9/11 intelligence operation. In any event, international human rights laws stipulate that the deportee must be returned to either his country of citizenship or origin of travel. In this case, Mr. Afar should have been deported to Canada or Switzerland, where his flight originated.)

The same month Mr. Arar's supporters protested his treatment, Faramarz Farahani spent five days in a California jail apparently because of his birthplace. A Canadian citizen born in Iran, Mr. Farahani was in the United States on a temporary visa, working as a database manager for a leading software firm in San Jose. No one had ever suggested that Mr. Farahani was a terrorist but the U.S. has a new policy now that has apparently been poorly publicized and is not understood by many, including immigration officials: all adult males born in Islamic countries who hold temporary U.S. visas are to re-register in Immigration and Naturalization Service offices.

Mr. Farahani went to his local INS office to see if Canadians were among those who had to comply with the new policy. After waiting several hours, he was told the deadline for Iranian-born immigrant workers had passed and that he would be detained until he could be processed. He was allowed to phone his family before being hand-cuffed and flown, under guard, to a detention centre in San Diego, 700 kilometres away. His employer and the Canadian consulate were working on his behalf and were told that bureaucratic bungling was behind the incident.

In another case in the summer of 2002, Shakir Baloch, a Pakistan-born doctor with Canadian citizenship, ran into trouble. He was returned to Canada from the U.S. after spending four months without charge in a maximum-security prison. He was not allowed to contact his wife in Toronto and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to honour a deportation order issued the day after his arrest. Except for one hour a day when he was allowed to exercise, Mr. Baloch was confined to his cell and kept in shackles.

Other Canadians of Middle Eastern descent have also faced special interrogations when crossing into the United States, despite Ottawa's vigorous protests. A Canadian teenager, Omar Khadr, is locked up at Camp X-Ray in Cuba after he was scooped up by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The Canadian-born teenager is the son of an Egyptian-Canadian charity worker who has been linked to al-Qaeda, the terrorist group. Mr. Khadr spent months in detention at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan before he was moved to Camp X-Ray in October 2002. According to U.S. accounts, Mr. Khadr is an al-Qaeda fighter who killed a U.S. medic with a grenade. However, the teen, who was 15 at the time, is not known to have been charged with any crime.

Such incidents have sparked a storm of Canadian protest. In November 2002, Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal said, "We are seeing the ugly face of America and it is simply unacceptable." U.S. security officials have clearly been picking on some Canadian citizens, those who appear to be of Middle Eastern birth and followers of the Muslim faith. Canadian citizens of European origin are facing no special scrutiny. Clearly, American authorities have decided that not all Canadians are equal.

(The U.S. government actions have prompted many Americans to say they are ashamed of what their country is doing.)

In response to many complaints, the U.S. government said it would no longer "automatically" fingerprint, photograph, and register Canadian visitors simply because they were born in one of the five predominantly Muslim countries on an antiterrorist target list. But whether or not Canadians are registered was left to the discretion of U.S. border authorities. So, Canadian travellers of Middle Eastern origin continue to be reluctant to leave the country, not because they objected to tighter U.S. security, but because some people were being treated in a harsher way than others. They're not convinced the change in policy will be acted upon.

In August 2002, Human Rights Watch, a private New York-based human-rights monitor, published a scathing report (see Websites at the end of this article). It said that U.S. authorities deliberately trampled constitutional rights after September 11 in a crackdown that saw immigrants jailed without cause, tried in secret, and, in some cases, physically abused. It accused the administration of President George W. Bush of displaying "a stunning disregard for the democratic principles of public transparency and accountability" in its response to the terrorist attacks.

Perhaps more people will follow the example of Muzaffar Iqbal, a Canadian who was born in Pakistan. Mr. Iqbal is a chemist and leading Islamic scholar who lives in Edmonton. He refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed by U.S. immigration officials and will not sign a registry before entering the United States. Mr. Iqbal made that decision recently when he was on his way to a scientific conference in Washington. He was detained by U.S. immigration officials for eight hours at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. As a result he is denied entry to the U.S. despite assurances from Foreign Minister Bill Graham that Canadians would not be subjected to additional scrutiny on the basis of place of birth. This was not the first time Mr. Iqbal had run into problems. In October 2002, he was stopped when he tried to fly from Edmonton to Denver. That time the U.S. officials knew him, so they let him through. In December 2002, he tried again in the belief that the border-crossing problems of Canadian citizens had been solved.

"(The U.S. registration system) is a complete code of apartheid based on race, religion, and country of origin," Mr. Iqbal says.

By mid-December 2002, about 200 Canadians had launched protests with the Department of Foreign Affairs for what they considered unfair treatment by American immigration officials.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick said a friend of hers who travels regularly to the U.S. said she no longer wanted to visit a country that would treat Rohinton Mistry in the racist, rude, and humiliating manner, which led to his cancelling half of his 2002 U.S. book tour (see sidebar). Ms. Mallick suggests perhaps we should all say no to U.S. travel to protest. She reminds us of the case of Rosa Parks, an American black woman who, in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man: Ms. Mallick described that as "`a small decision (that) led to a revolution. "Research the case of Rosa Parks.

2. In November 2002, Ricky Chadda was arrested in San Diego. The Canadian doctor was born and raised in Halifax and studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal before heading south of the border in 1996. This was the third time he had been detained by U.S. authorities in an apparent case of mistaken identity: his name matched a listing in a computer database for a man wanted for car theft. Do a follow-up report on what eventually happened to Dr. Chadda and whether or not he has any legal recourse.

FACT FILE

In September 2002, Amal Khailtash, a Canadian computer-chip engineer who was born in Tehran, missed his flight to San Francisco when U.S. immigration officials took him aside for questioning and fingerprinting.

FACT FILE

Anti-immigrant sentiment runs so high in parts of Europe that it's almost impossible in Austria, Germany, and Belgium for Muslim and Arab immigrants to obtain citizenship.

FACT FILE

In September 2002, the Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a travel advisory, saying Canadians born in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, or Syria could be subjected to increased attention (in the form of interrogation, photographing, and fingerprinting) from U.S. authorities. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen were later added to the list.

Websites

Amnesty International (Maher Afar)--http://www.amnesty.ca/library/news/ Arar02.htm

Human Rights Watch Report--http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/us911/Index.htm#TopOfPage

RELATED ARTICLE: Book promotion turns nasty.

Authors' book promotion tours are pretty gruelling affairs even when things run smoothly. They're an exhausting succession of travel, interviews, and book signings that many endure only because it's part of the contract with their publishers. There are high-lights of course, but the schedule can be brutal. For Rohinton Mistry, one of Canada's most celebrated authors, the experience became so obnoxious that he cancelled the second half of a U.S. book tour in November 2002.

Mr. Mistry, an Indian-born Canadian, said he and his wife faced "unbearable" humiliation as a result of racial profiling at American airports. Initially, they took the increased airport scrutiny in their stride, recognizing that it was a natural reaction to the fear of terrorism. But eventually, they became fed up with being stopped repeatedly and being on the receiving end of rude and degrading treatment: one bookseller in the U.S., who declared the situation outrageous, said she was ashamed of her country.

RELATED ARTICLE: Beware of gasoline and promotions.

Michel Jalbert went across the U.S. border to fill up his truck with gas, something he has done hundreds of times before. Only, this time he found himself in jail for five weeks. Mr. Jalbert lives in the border town of Pohenegamook, Quebec, where the locals have crossed the border for years to buy their gas, without reporting to U.S. Customs. The gas station straddles the border between Quebec and Maine, with its driveway in Canada and its pumps in the United States. The U.S. Customs post is a kilometre away from town and a senior U.S. Customs Service official wrote in 1990 that customers could buy gas without reporting at the post. But this time, the border patrol agent found a hunting rifle in Mr. Jalbert's truck (moose hunting season started the next day), and a criminal record in his computer (at 19 he had been fined $200 for breaking and entering when he smashed a school's windows). That landed Michel Jalbert in jail.

Another Canadian, James Sabzali, has run afoul of the Americans. Mr. Sabzali sold some water purification equipment to Cuba and was convicted in the U.S. of "Trading with the Enemy." But, Mr. Sabzali is a Canadian and made the sale while living in Canada breaking no Canadian law while doing so. From 1992 to 1996, Mr. Sabzali lived in Hamilton, Ontario, frequently travelling to Cuba to sell goods on behalf of the international subsidiary of an American firm, Bro-Tech Corp. Not only were the sales legal under Canadian law, Canada's Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act restricts Canadians from honouring the U.S. embargo in dealings with Cuba. Where Mr. Sabzali went wrong was in accepting a promotion to the company's Philadelphia-area head office in 1996. Once he moved south, he was under U.S. jurisdiction, and four years later he was charged with trading with the "enemy" and with conspiracy. In April 2002, Mr. Sabzali and two senior executives at the company were convicted of the charges.