Refuge from the Stones
Mohammed Syed says his sexuality puts his life in
danger back home and he prays that Canada will grant him sanctuary. Trouble
is, so many asylum seekers now are claiming to be gay when they’re not
Globe
and Mail, December 6, 2003
By Marina Jimenez
It’s not uncommon in Pakistan to see grown men
strolling through the streets and markets hand in hand. This is a gesture of
affection, not romance: These men live in a conservative Islamic society where
homosexuality is not only taboo but illegal, and sodomy punishable by
flogging. In some madrassas, the nation’s all-male religious schools, boys
are made to sleep with the lights on to guard against “particular
friendships.”
So, when word of Mohammed Syed’s adolescent gay love
affair spread through his neighbourhood in Rawalpindi, a bustling city of two
million next door to Islamabad, the capital, he feared for his safety.
He began to receive threatening phone calls, he says, and
one day, on his way home from school, he was attacked by three members of the
fundamentalist political party Jamat-I-Islamia. Before beating him, Mr. Syed
recalls, “They yelled ‘gandoo’, which is like ‘fag’ in Urdu.”
Now 27, he is a business student in Toronto, and recently
applied to stay in Canada as a refugee, claiming that forcing him to go home
is a guarantee of persecution.
This makes Mr. Syed a bit of a trendsetter. In the past
18 months, nearly 8,000 Pakistanis have sought asylum here; their homeland is
Canada’s leading source of refugee claimants. Although most complain of
religious persecution, suddenly a growing number of them declare that they
need protection because they are gay.
In fact, there is a rapidly rising number of
self-professed gay refugees from such unlikely places as Costa Rica, not
exactly a nation associated with repression.
Canada is renowned for its sexual tolerance, but many of
the same-sex newcomers have run into a problem: The authorities suspect that
many of them simply aren’t what they claim to be.
The sharp rise in the number of Pakistani claims is a
result of the crackdown in immigration laws south of the border after the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Last winter, after the United States introduced a law
requiring men from Muslim countries to register with immigration authorities,
a flood of Pakistanis packed up their furniture, sold their homes, businesses
and cars, and headed to the Canadian border to seek asylum. Entire
neighbourhoods uprooted and left such cities as New York and Chicago. Many
people didn’t have legal status in the States and feared that, after years
of living abroad, they would be deported to the deprivations of their
homeland.
This week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
cancelled the program, acknowledging that it had only minimal benefits in
terms of national security. But now the Pakistani expatriates are here, and
the thousands of cases are slowly making their way through the refugee system.
Many have argued they need protection because they would
face religious discrimination as members of a Shia minority in Sunni-dominated
Pakistan. Thus far, the Immigration and Refugee Board has heard 510 such
cases. But the acceptance rate for Pakistani claimants has been falling
dramatically—from 64 per cent in 2001 to 39 per cent for the first nine
months of this year.
In comparison, says Catherine Dauvergne, a law professor
at the University of British Columbia, from 1995 to 2000, the IRB issued at
least 137 written decisions on gay cases, accepting more than half—54 per
cent.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the nature of asylum
claims has begun to change in recent months. From January, 2002, to October,
2003, at least 43 applications have been made by Pakistanis who said they were
gay, and “I have had about a dozen in the last few months,” adds Max
Berger, the Toronto lawyer who represents Mr. Syed.
Many of his colleagues say they, too, are starting to see
the trend. “The nature of refugee law is that you have a core of genuine
cases,” Mr. Berger notes, “and then a cluster of copycat cases.”
The copycats may not realize that the IRB expects to see
proof and will ask them all manner of questions about their personal lives.
Panel members will want to know about their first gay sexual experience,
meeting places for gays in their home country, the history of homosexual
persecution and what kind of gay lifestyle they are now leading.
Mr. Syed says he can answer such questions. Well-dressed
with stylish glasses, black trousers and a collarless shirt, he remains
closeted within the Pakistani community, but he says he felt that he had to
tell his story. “It is daunting to go before the refugee board and have them
ask all kinds of embarrassing questions about your sex life. But I understand
they are testing my credibility.”
He developed an intimate relationship with another young
man in 1996, he says, and rumours soon spread that the pair were gay lovers.
After the attack on the way to school, he went to the police, who declined to
take action and suggested that he had brought the beating on himself. Three
months later, he was attacked again by two men wearing green turbans. They
trashed his apartment and threatened to kill him: “You are destroying the
atmosphere of Islam with your filthy activities,” they yelled.
With financial backing from his parents, Mr. Syed came to
Canada on a student visa and was amazed to find a thriving gay bar scene in
Toronto, and to learn that gays and lesbians can live together openly. When
his visa expired last year, friends told him about Canada’s refugee system.
“I don’t want to go home where I could be stoned,
blackmailed or face lashings,” he says. “Even people in my own family with
strong religious convictions would harm me if they discovered the truth.”
Mr. Berger considers Mr. Syed credible, but he has been
practising refugee law long enough to know that other claimants often try to
replicate legitimate stories to bolster their chances.
“It was the same with the Roma gypsies. At first they
came through the Czech Republic and had fairly high acceptance rates,” he
says. “Then they started coming through Hungary, where country conditions
aren’t as bad. And a lot were turned down.”
Similarly, Costa Rica now ranks No. 4 among Canada’s
source countries for refugee claimants, and people from the tiny tourist
country also have begun to request asylum on the basis of their sexual
orientation. In one infamous case, two Costa Ricans did so after showing up in
Montreal with their wives and children.
Such claims have been largely unsuccessful, and the
overall acceptance rate for Costa Ricans hovers between 2 and 4 per cent.
Their homeland is a constitutional democracy with an independent judiciary,
and it boasts a flourishing homosexual community. Not only are gays and
lesbians not persecuted by the government, they are catered to by
organizations, businesses and travel companies. Every year in San Jose, the
capital, there is a gay pride parade. And the Internet is filled with services
for gays, including Gaymocracia, to protect their rights.
In Pakistan, of course, the situation is quite different.
A gay subculture exists, but homosexual acts are described in the penal code
as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” and are punishable by
prison terms. Under Islamic Sharia law, those caught engaging in homosexual
acts may be stoned to death, although the edict is rarely enforced.
There are transvestite prostitutes (known as hijras) in
Lahore and Karachi, but homophobia is prevalent, according to the IRB’s file
on Pakistan, and the police may use the law to threaten people.
So credibility is the central issue for gay Pakistani
refugee claimants, and some recent decisions issued by the IRB reveals the
difficulty board members have in trying to assess these cases.
In August, 2003, panel member Lawrence Lang in Montreal
granted refugee status to a once-married 39-year-old hotel worker from Lahore
who testified that his father threatened to kill him after discovering an
illicit gay affair. He fled to New York City in August, 2001, but did not file
a refugee claim. Instead, he married a woman so he could obtain immigration
papers, but she withdrew her sponsorship, and last February he came to the
border crossing at Lacolle, Que. and sought asylum.
Mr. Lang said he believed the man was a homosexual and
yet still concluded that his failure to seek asylum in the United States
showed he was “more motivated by the prospect of working and staying in the
U.S. than seeking protection from going home.”
Defining homosexual behaviour can be difficult, Prof.
Dauvergne says, because it varies according to culture and social class. “A
young male prostitute in Bangladesh who sleeps with a different man every
night may not face persecution, but a middle-class gay couple who live
together may face unbearable discrimination.”
She has created a database to compare the gay cases in
Canada with those in Australia, where she has found about 20 written decisions
involving Pakistanis.
The gay issue is troublesome, but immigration critics
suggest that the recent flood of Pakistanis and the nearly 3,000 Costa Ricans
who have made claims in the past two years illustrate a larger problem within
the refugee-determination system.
Established in 1989, the IRB rules on whether people fit
the United Nations definition of a refugee: someone with a well-founded fear
of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a
particular social group or political opinion.
But the UN Convention on Refugees dates from 1951 and
some argue that it has outlived its usefulness. It was designed to deal with
the tide of people displaced in the aftermath of the Second World War, but
many of those seeking asylum today are fleeing poverty, not political
persecution. The top 10 refugee-producing countries now include Mexico,
Hungary, Turkey and Costa Rica, all better known more for their difficult
economic circumstances than civil unrest.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the IRB’s acceptance rate has
been cut in half from the 89 per cent recorded in 1989 when the top 10 sources
included civil-war-torn Central American countries as well as Somalia, Sri
Lanka, Iran and Lebanon.
Mr. Berger, who represents at least 400 Pakistanis, says
more and more of today’s claimants are economic migrants who cannot enter
Canada as immigrants because they lack the education, language skills and job
experience to qualify (applicants must score 67 out of a possible 100 points).
The waiting list for interviews for applicants from China, Pakistan and other
countries is as long as three to five years. But anyone who can get here can
file a refugee claim.
“With the front door locked and bolted, no wonder
people are trying to enter through the back,” he says. “We should
recognize there is a core of genuine claims and a core of economic migrants
using the system to get in. They should be processed another way.”
Other immigration lawyers such as Lorne Waldman and
Sergio Karas agree. “I hope the incoming federal government will develop an
alternate process for people who have jobs here and whose labour is needed,”
Mr. Waldman says. “That way, they won’t be forced to resort to the refugee
system as a way in. It wastes time and money.”
The current refugee-determination system does not reflect
the realities of human migration in the 21st century, Mr. Karas says. “It
doesn’t address the needs of refugees who can’t leave their country to ask
for protection and it rewards those who pay smugglers to get them out. We need
a new system with non-political appointees who can deal more quickly with
legitimate refugees while separating out bogus claimants.”
It is particularly complex for Pakistani claimants,
because many of them lived illegally for years in the United States,
establishing successful businesses and raising families. Even if they did flee
political persecution initially, claimants are supposed to seek a haven in the
first country they reach, not wait several years and then head north to
Canada, which will no longer accept claims made at the border once a new
regulation called the Safe Third Country Agreement comes into effect.
Many of the Pakistanis say they did not bother seeking
U.S. asylum because authorities tolerated their presence in the underground
economy, where they toiled away in minimum-wage jobs at gas stations and
grocery stores.
“There was a big Shia community in New York, and I was
able to live there without a problem,” Intikhab Hassan Rizvi says. The
34-year-old medical technologist says he was persecuted in Islamabad because
of his Shia religious beliefs, and fled to New York with the help of an agent
after zealots from Sipah-e-Sahaba, an extremist political group, attacked him
in a mosque.
He would probably still be there working as a cashier in
a grocery store, if it hadn’t been for the 9/11 attacks. “Then everything
changed. Immigration started raiding houses and arresting people and we had
done nothing wrong,” he recalls.
“We worried we would be deported. All the Pakistanis
panicked. Thank God, we had Canada. Otherwise, I might be dead by now, if
I’d been sent back to Pakistan.”
Mr. Rizvi had no faith the United States would give him a
fair hearing. Last year’s overall acceptance rate was 37 per cent, including
57 per cent of the 560 asylum seekers from Pakistan. Now, he finds the IRB is
increasingly wary of granting protection to Shiites.
Sectarian attacks remain a problem in Pakistan, where
hundreds of Shiites have been killed in the past decade, but the government
has made serious efforts to curb religious violence, according to recent IRB
rulings. General Pervez Musharraf’s regime has banned several extremist
groups that target Shiites, including the Sipah-e-Sahaba, and has attempted to
reform madrassas, where many of the militants are trained.
“Unfortunately, in the world of today, where suicide
bombings have become commonplace, no country can perfectly protect its
citizens from terrorist attacks,” ruled Cliff Barry, an IRB member who
denied the claim of a young Shia Pakistani man in a Nov. 23 decision in
Toronto.
Mr. Rizvi insists that his case should be accepted. “I
had a very good job at Islamabad’s National Institute of Health. I lived in
government housing and had a car. Why would I leave it if I didn’t have
to?”
Like many of Pakistani claimants from the United States,
he speaks perfect English, has a university degree and an impressive work
history. He would make an ideal “new Canadian.” He is volunteering in a
Shia mosque here, and has applied for a job in Oakville, Ont., as a medical
technologist, although most employers do not want to hire him until he has
permanent status.
In another recent IRB case, a Shia military officer, his
wife and two children were found not to be refugees on the grounds of
religious persecution: “The claimants are economic migrants who, after
failing to obtain permanent resident status in the U.S., have sought to obtain
permanent residence status in Canada via the refugee system,” James Simeon
ruled in October.
While awaiting resolution of their cases, which can take
years, Pakistani claimants have revitalized a neighbourhood on Toronto’s
Gerrard Street known as “Little India Bazaar.” It is filled with halal
meat shops, curry restaurants with the Pakistani green and white flag flying
out front, Islamic book stores and corner shops selling phone cards, basmati
rice and spices. One man who used to drive a taxi in Chicago recently
converted a former Dunkin’ Donuts site into a restaurant called Ali Baba.
Imtiaz Ahmad, whose claim has failed, runs the nearby
Lahore Biryani restaurant. “In Canada, everyone is treated well, even the
dogs and cats. I would like to stay here,” he says. “In Pakistan, there is
no sense of dignity or equality.”
Having appealed his decision on humanitarian and
compassionate grounds, he may have as long as three years to wait.
Prof. Dauvergne, who holds the Canada research chair in
migration law, says the refugee-determination system needs to be better
financed, if only so it can hear such appeals more rapidly and clear up its
backlog of 50,000 cases.
She considers it inevitable that “economic migrants”
will use the refugee system as a way in. “People are desperate and want to
improve their lives. Canada holds itself out as a great place to live. Even if
the success rate for your country is only 2 per cent, how do you know it
won’t be you who is accepted?”
But she also feels that every claimant, no matter what
the nationality or grounds for applying, deserves a full hearing. “If you
start refusing all claimants from certain countries, then you will miss
genuine cases.”
But Mohammed Syed seems much less tolerant of frivolous
or fraudulent claims. “It has been so difficult for me to live as a gay man.
I have been estranged from my family and I have really suffered. I can’t
imagine anyone pretending to be gay just to stay in Canada.”
Marina Jimenez is a senior feature writer with The Globe
and Mail.
Seeking asylum
Since the Immigration and Refugee Board was created in
1989, the rate of acceptance has steadily dropped. The nationalities of those
seeking a new home has also drifted.
Last year in the U.S. the acceptance rate was 36%. It’s
top source countries were: China (10,522); Mexico (8,977); Colombia (7,967);
Haiti (3,562); and India (1,714).
1989
Acceptance rate: 89%
Total refugee claimants: 9,488
Top five source countries:
1. Somalia
2. Sri Lanka
3. El Salvador
4. Iran
5. China
1990
Acceptance rate: 81%
Total refugee claimants: 17,771
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Somalia
3. China
4. El Salvador
5. Lebanon
1991
Acceptance rate: 73%
Total refugee claimants: 18,320
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Somalia
3. Lebanon
4. China
5. Iran
1992
Acceptance rate: 69%
Total refugee claimants: 18,247
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Somalia
3. Pakistan
4. Iran
5. China
1993
Acceptance rate: 55%
Total refugee claimants: 18,943
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Somalia
3. Israel
4. India
5. Iran
1994
Acceptance rate: 55%
Total refugee claimants: 11,632
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Somalia
3. Iran
4. India
5. Bangladesh
1995
Acceptance rate: 68%
Total refugee claimants: 13,909
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Iran
3. Somalia
4. Chile
5. India
1996
Acceptance rate: 42%
Total refugee claimants: 15,161
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Chile
3. Iran
4. India
5. Israel
1997
Acceptance rate: 51%
Total refugee claimants: 11,656
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Czech Republic
3. Iran
4. India
5. Pakistan
1998
Acceptance rate: 49%
Total refugee claimants: 12,080
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. Pakistan
3. China
4. Mexico
5. India
1999
Acceptance rate: 48%
Total refugee claimants: 14,976
Top five source countries:
1. Sri Lanka
2. China
3. Pakistan
4. Hungary
5. India
2000
Acceptance rate: 51%
Total refugee claimants: 16,750
Top five source countries:
1. Pakistan: 61% accepted
2. Sri Lanka
3. Hungary
4. China
5. Argentina
2001
Acceptance rate: 45%
Total refugee claimants: 23,036
Top five source countries:
1. Hungary
2. Pakistan: 64%
3. Sri Lanka
4. Zimbabwe
5.China
2002
Acceptance rate: 47%
Total refugee claimants: 19,999
Top five source countries:
1. Pakistan: 54%
2. China
3. Colombia
4. Mexico
5. Sri Lanka
2003
Acceptance rate: 45%
Total refugee claimants: 13,334
Top five source countries:
1. Pakistan: 39%
2. Mexico
3. Colombia
4. Costa Rica
5. China
SOURCES: IRB AND CITIZENSHIP AND US CITIZENSHIP AND
IMMIGRATION SERVICES
CORRECTION, December 9, 2003
A chart on refugee claims that ran with a Focus story on
Saturday contained an error. The total number of claimants listed for each
year from 1989-2003 represented only those from the top 10 source countries,
and not all countries. The acceptance rate for refugees also represented only
the top 10.
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