Frontier Justice

by Andy Lamey

  The Singh decision was concerned only with one narrow right, and it does not prevent interdiction abroad or at sea and other injustices. Despite these limitations, the principles underlying Singh show how the rights of refugees can be enforced, and provides a model of what a more adequate list of asylum-seekers’ rights will someday look like. If the portable-procedural approach were adopted it would make the human rights to which asylum-seekers now appeal more similar to citizens’ rights. Arendt thought it was impossible to bridge the gap between these two understandings of rights in a world of sovereign states. The model of asylum-seekers rights outlined here, however, does not call a state’s prerogative to control its borders into question. Rather it seeks to extend to asylum-seekers three procedural entitlements that we take for granted when it comes to the rights of citizens, who enjoy all three safeguards defended here when they are accused of a crime. Were the portable-procedural model adopted, I believe it would represent our civilization’s best chance of reconciling the existence of sovereign states with the aspiration of human rights. That no state currently follows this model should remind us how far our world is from justice for refugees. Two centuries after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, human rights is still a radical creed.

  EIGHT

  THE LEGEND OF AHMED RESSAM

  PETER SHOWLER IS A SQUAT MAN with a ruddy complexion and a protruding jawline. Looking at him might call to mind an athletic director or a National Football League coach. His careful manner of speech, however, gives away his training in the law. In 1999 Showler was appointed head of the Immigration and Refugee Board, or IRB, the Canadian government agency that decides refugee claims. As chair of the national tribunal, Showler worked on the twelfth floor of a glass office tower in downtown Ottawa. One day in 2001 he was in his spacious corner suite overlooking the Gatineau Hills, discussing refugee issues with a visiting official, when his assistant appeared at the door and told him there was something on TV he needed to see.

  Showler didn’t keep a TV set in his office. Years earlier, another official at the board had authorized an expensive office refurnishing; the bill had been leaked to the press, creating a minor media scandal. Showler deliberately kept his furnishings spartan to avoid a similar fate. After his meeting wrapped up, therefore, Showler walked over to his executive director’s suite, which was on the other side of the building. When Showler arrived a group of staff members were standing around her TV, watching American Airlines Flights 11 and 175 fly into the World Trade Center. It was the morning of September 11, and as Showler recalls, he and his colleagues reacted to what they saw with “visceral shock and horror.”

  Several of Showler’s staff had friends or family in New York whose whereabouts were unknown. Others were made ill by what they were watching. Showler spent the next several hours pacifying distraught employees, some of whom had to be sent home for the day, and trying to keep on top of what was happening. The anxious mood inside the refugee board mirrored that of the Canadian government as a whole. As Showler says, “Ottawa was frozen in panic at the time. Nobody knew what was going on.”

  It would eventually become clear that Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers executed their plan from within the United States. In the nervous days following the attacks, however, rumours and false leads swirled everywhere. On September 13, Boston newspapers reported that investigators were examining whether the terrorists had entered the United States through Canada. “The cause of that rumour was that two of the terrorists actually started their flight from Bangor, Maine,” Showler says, referring to Atta and another hijacker who transferred onto American Flight 11 in Boston. “It was a means of surreptitious entry onto the flight without attracting attention. Because it was Bangor, Maine—well, for a lot of Americans, Maine is almost Canada.”

  The Boston papers had reported on a lead authorities were investigating. Follow-up stories that appeared elsewhere were not so restrained. “Foreign terrorists bent on wreaking havoc in the United States have found the path of least resistance into our country—Canada,” The New York Post told its half-million readers. “At least four suspects in last week’s attack on the World Trade Center crossed into the United States over our porous, 3,987-mile border with Canada.” Similar stories quickly appeared in both Canada and the United States under headlines such as “Canada: A Club Med for World Terrorists.”

  Fear that Canada might be implicated in the attacks was soon felt inside the refugee board, when Showler and his colleagues began to hear rumours that the hijackers not only had come through Canada but had come through the refugee system. As the names of Atta and the other attackers trickled out in the media, Showler had his staff search the board’s files to check whether any of them had ever made a refugee claim. Each search came back negative, but Showler remained on edge. There was still the possibility that they might have used false names, which would take longer to rule out. The hijackers, moreover, were not Showler’s only problem. Amid the stream of stories portraying Canada as a staging ground for September 11, one name kept reappearing: Ahmed Ressam.

  Ressam, also known as the Millennium Bomber, had made a Canadian refugee claim before plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport in 1999. His plan made headlines at the time of arrest, but in the days following September 11, it generated a fresh thunderclap of publicity. “What really made [Ressam] significant was 9/11,” Showler says. “When 9/11 happened, within three days you heard nothing but ‘Ahmed Ressam, Ahmed Ressam, Ahmed Ressam,’ both in the American and Canadian media.”

  Several days after the attacks, Showler assembled two files on Ahmed Ressam. One was a list of media talking points noting the key dates in his refugee claim. The other was an internal legal document tracking Ressam’s passage through the wider Canadian immigration system, of which the refugee board was only a part. After sitting down in his office to go over this material, Showler was brought up short. Ahmed Ressam’s journey through Canada’s refugee system was indeed a troubling affair. Yet as Showler turned the pages, he could see that there was a second Ressam scandal. Only this one, unlike the failed bomb plot, had not yet been stopped.

  Ahmed Ressam was born in 1967 in Bou Ismail, Algeria, a poor town on the Mediterranean Sea that offers its residents little in the way of prospects. As a boy he displayed an aptitude for numbers, and his family hoped that he would do well on the exams that guaranteed good students a university education. When he was sixteen, however, Ressam developed an ulcer. “We found him all the time holding his stomach,” a boyhood friend recalled. “We would ask him what’s wrong, and he would say that his stomach ached.” The teenage Ressam went to Paris for an operation and a long recovery. When he came home he had missed so much school he had to repeat a year. When he finally took the university exam but did poorly it proved to be the first of many things he would fail at.

  With university now unlikely, Ressam tried to join the police, only to be told he lacked the right qualifications. Eventually he settled into a menial job serving tea and lemonade at his father’s café. The town’s largest mosque was across the street, but Ressam never crossed its threshold. He and his friends were too interested in drinking wine, smoking hash and hitting on women at the local seaside nightclub. “He was a handsome young man. He was cool and had no problem finding the jeunes filles,” a friend of the family said. “Ahmed liked to dress himself well and go search for women. He had nothing to do with Islam.”

  Islam, however, would have something to do with Ressam. In the early 1990s Algeria experienced a moment of hope when it carried out the first round of an election that was among the freest in the history of the Arab world. The election, however, was marked by the strong performance of the Islamic Front for Salvation, a fundamentalist party. Members of the Front were known to patrol the streets with cudgels, enforcing their own version of Islamic law by attacking cafés that served alcohol and knocking cigarettes out of smokers’ hands. In Bou Ismail the Front issued death threats against the local imam, whom they considered insu
fficiently observant, forcing him to flee. On a national level, the party’s rise caused the socialist government to cancel the second round of voting scheduled for 1992. Islamic radicals armed themselves and took to the hills, vowing revenge. Algeria soon descended into civil war, the same conflict that triggered the formation of the International Parliament of Writers, and which would eventually see over 100,000 people killed.

  Algerians who survived the bloodshed faced a stark choice. If they stayed in Algeria they could support either an authoritarian military regime or an equally authoritarian Islamism. Ressam, like many, chose to leave the country. In 1992, when he was twenty-five, he bought a ticket for the ferry that ran from Algiers to Marseilles, France. He arrived with a thirty-day visa but stayed on illegally after it expired and drifted to Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean, where he found work picking grapes and painting at a tourist resort. His only real concern now was to evade Immigration authorities, but this proved to be beyond his abilities; he was arrested and scheduled for a deportation hearing. Rather than go home, Ressam bought a fake French passport and flew to Montreal, a city that had recently seen a dramatic increase in its Algerian population. France, the traditional home of Algerian expatriates, had tightened its visa requirements just as the civil war was intensifying, forcing Algerians who wanted to escape the bloodshed to look farther abroad.

  When Ressam arrived in Montreal in February of 1994, the situation in Algeria was highly repressive. Yet Ressam himself had never been persecuted. As he would later admit, his primary motive in moving to Canada was to “improve my life in general.” When he landed at Mirabel Airport he had a cover story prepared, according to which he was a French citizen with a different name. Upon reaching the front of the immigration line, Ressam held out his passport with the glued-in photograph and inwardly held his breath. Customs officers immediately pulled him into a small room where they looked at his passport through a microscope and passed it under ultraviolet light. The glue and ink used to doctor it began to glow.

  “Is this a fake?” an Immigration officer asked. After Ressam admitted that it was, he was detained, at which point he said he wanted to file a refugee claim. His passport exposed as a forgery, he dropped his story about being a French citizen and filled out an immigration form, accurately listing his name, nationality, date of birth, marital status, lack of religious affiliation and French proficiency. He also included the address of the YMCA where he would stay after leaving the airport. On a separate form he indicated his grounds for claiming asylum. It contained a tissue of lies. Ressam made up a story about being falsely accused of selling weapons to a childhood friend before being arrested and coerced. “I was tortured with ribbons, soap, chlorinated water, a system of scales and even the drawer of an office desk,” he wrote in one imaginative passage.

  Ressam was given a hearing date for his asylum claim, five weeks hence, and released. As of yet he had no connection to terrorism, and was just another asylum claimant with a made-up story living on welfare down at the Y. Perhaps it was because he knew his story would be found out that Ressam did not show up for his refugee hearing. (When his lawyer called and angrily asked, “Where the hell were you?” Ressam claimed he forgot.) His failure to appear meant that he now had to demonstrate some compelling reason for his absence, such as a car accident on the way to the hearing, to prevent his claim from being automatically rejected. He was scheduled for a so-called abandonment hearing at which he could explain himself, but he put little effort into assembling a credible case. As in Algeria, Ressam’s main interests after arriving in Canada revolved around meeting women in nightclubs. It was hard to look good on what welfare provided, however, so he soon turned to petty crime.

  In August of 1994 Ressam tried to steal a security guard’s wallet at a shopping mall. That resulted in an arrest, but the charges were dropped. Five months later an Eaton’s store detective watched Ressam and an accomplice make a clumsy attempt at stealing an Armani suit. Ressam’s friend managed to get rid of the stolen merchandise before being stopped by police, but the less adroit Ressam was caught with another suit stolen from the Bay. At his criminal trial Ressam claimed the bag he was carrying belonged to his friend, but the justice ridiculed his story. Ressam was fined $100 and placed on two years’ probation. This was typical of his time in Montreal, during which theft, along with fifteen months of welfare payments, was his main means of supporting himself. Ressam would steal purses on his own, or snatch luggage from downtown hotels while working with different Algerian accomplices. He would rummage through their contents for money or credit cards. If they held passports, he knew where to sell them.

  By the time of his sentencing for shoplifting, Ressam had a bigger problem than his scrapes with the law. A month earlier, in May of 1995, his refugee claim had been rejected. In a disastrous ruling for Ressam, the government declared that he abandoned his claim by not attending his hearing. As a result, he was now scheduled for a third and final hearing, which would concern the details of his deportation. When he once again failed to appear he was arrested, detained and given a deportation date.

  Ressam’s lawyer, however, pointed out that his refugee file was being reviewed by a federal judge. Canada’s asylum system at the time did not allow for appeals in the normal sense of the term, as mistaken facts could not be corrected, but claimants could seek a review of how the law was applied in their case. Ressam’s lawyer had sought this kind of review, and Ressam could not be deported until it was concluded. After his August arrest, therefore, Ressam was released on the condition that he present himself to Immigration officials once a month, while everyone waited for the outcome of his legal review.

  The wait lasted six months. Finally, in February of 1996, two years after his arrival in Canada, the justice upheld the rejection of Ressam’s refugee application. Immigration officials now had a green light to carry out his deportation. Yet they failed to do so. As we will see, there were several reasons why, but the most immediate one was the Immigration Department’s lack of resources. At the time, Canada devoted an even smaller budget to executing deportation orders than it does now, and Immigration officials had to choose which removals to prioritize. Failed refugee claimants with shoplifting convictions were low on the list. “They’re not our top priority, that’s for sure,” an Immigration spokeswoman said of Ressam in 1999. “We make sure that people who are considered dangerous or [serious] criminals get out first.” Ressam thus lingered in Canada in the legal equivalent of limbo. He continued dutifully reporting to Immigration every month, and they just as dutifully continued working on other deportations that struck them as more pressing.

  Ressam’s economic prospects now were even bleaker than they had been in Algeria. There at least he could work in his father’s café. In Canada, by contrast, no restaurant could legally hire him after his refugee claim was rejected. Having his claim rejected also saw his welfare payments cut off. With no income and nothing left to lose when it came to his immigration status, Ressam had little incentive not to keep breaking the law. He eventually committed thirty or forty crimes altogether, a spree that saw him arrested on two further occasions. They included an October 1996 charge for pickpocketing, which netted him a $500 fine and more probation, but still no movement on his deportation.

  It was now eight months after his final brush with the refugee system. Ressam was a petty criminal eking out a marginal existence while Immigration officers worked their way through the many deportation orders that, unlike his, seemed important. If Ahmed Ressam failed to amount to much in the eyes of Immigration officials, it was in keeping with the rest of his time in Canada, during which he had failed at everything. He had failed to pass himself off as a French traveller at the airport. Failed to lodge a successful refugee claim. Failed to avoid arrest as a thief and an illegal immigrant. To outside observers he was not so much a fearsome figure as a pathetic one.

  There was still one area, however, where Ressam could excel. Even though he had little inter
est in religion, shortly after his arrival in Montreal he began attending mosque as a way to meet other North Africans. Ressam frequented Assuna Annabawiyah, a combined mosque and bookstore that operated out of a downtown storefront and attracted fifteen hundred worshippers, predominantly Algerians, for Friday prayers. It was through Assuna that Ressam met the accomplices with whom he committed his string of petty crimes. And it was through the same Assuna contacts that he met two individuals who would have a fateful impact on his life.

  The first of these was a fellow Algerian named Fateh Kamel. Kamel was the person who bought the passports and other documents that Ressam and his friends filched. Unlike Ressam, Kamel had made a successful life in Canada. After immigrating from Algeria in 1987, he married a Canadian woman and opened a craft store. Whereas Ressam had no valid travel documents and so could not leave Canada, Kamel was a jetsetter who often flew off to Europe and the Middle East. Kamel told people his frequent travel was for business, but that was untrue. The real reason was his extremist political views. By the time he met Ressam in the mid-1990s, Kamel was a veteran of Afghanistan and Bosnia, and a fixer for a diffuse network of Islamist terrorist groups. Italian intelligence agents once recorded Kamel boasting about his dedication to the cause: “I do not fear death … because the jihad is the jihad, and to kill is easy for me.”

  The second transformative figure in Ressam’s life was Abderraouf Hannachi, an immigrant from Tunisia in his forties. Like Kamel, he was both a Canadian citizen and an extremist who had trained at a military camp in Afghanistan, in Hannachi’s case one operated by Osama bin Laden. At the Assuna mosque Hannachi was the muezzin, the official who calls worshippers in for prayers, which is a position of respect among mainstream Muslims. The people who really looked up to Hannachi, however, were the tiny cluster of local Arabs who shared his violent ideology. Among Kamel and other Islamists, Hannachi’s status as an associate of al-Qaeda gave him a special cachet.