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Now
On Friday evening, October 20, a traveling
academic confronted a regular ugly occurrence at JFK airport.
He was stopped at immigration by Homeland Security, shuttled
off without explanation into a stark waiting room, left there
for six hours with no food or water with other similarly trapped
travellers (including a little child who cried inconsolably),
was asked a few template questions - "have you ever been
a member of a terrorist organization?" - and finally was
marched away by two armed officers and put on a plane back to
South Africa, his 10-year visa summarily revoked. No explanation.
By the time he realized what was afoot and called the South African
embassy, at about 3 a.m., it was too late for them to do anything.
He arrived back in South Africa tired, tousled, and very pissed
off.
But, unusually, this visitor was in a position to make a serious
stink about it. Within hours, the South African government's
Department of Foreign Affairs was mobilized and the American
Embassy was offering embarrassed apologies. Within days, the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was also
mobilized. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called to
ask if they could make his experience a test case.
Denying US visas to visiting
academics is, of course, not uncommon these days. All over the
United States, in the Homeland Security era, university departments
and organizers of scientific and academic conferences have been
regularly startled, angered, frustrated and baffled as some new
colleague or visiting scholar is denied entry to the country.
Some of these unwanted souls have been luminaries, like Dr. Tariq
Ramadan, an international scholar of Islam and its interaction
with western cultures, who was named by Time one of the
100 most important innovators of the 21st century. Targeted as
objectionable by pro-Israeli networks, Dr. Ramadan was abruptly
denied a visa just two weeks before he was scheduled to assume
a senior appointment at the University of Notre Dame. (Amidst
the ensuing hullabaloo, he was promptly snapped up by Oxford).
Other rejectees are talented rising scholars, like Dr. Waskar
Ari from Bolivia, whose visa was denied just a month before he
was to take up his new position at the University of Nebraska.
Apparently, all work visas from Bolivia were cancelled some time
after the leftist President Morales was elected.
But Dr. Adam Habib is not some
mild-mannered professor-type, to whom Homeland Security (with
its routine disdain for intellectuals and their lily-livered
liberal universities) might casually flip the bird. Nor is he
simply well-known --although he is one of the best-known political
scientists and public intellectuals in South Africa, whose expulsion
from the US has sent shock waves through South Africa and triggered
a blitz of international media coverage. Nor is he a Muslim cleric,
Pakistani student, Venezuelan researcher, Palestinian brother-in-law,
or other traveller who might fear for the welfare of some vulnerable
family member or lack access to government contacts, and therefore
be sufficiently intimidated by Big Brother to confine his frustrations
to sympathetic friends in his living room.
Rather, Dr. Habib is Executive Director of the Democracy and
Governance Programme at the para-statal Human Sciences Research
Council (HSRC), the largest research institution in South Africa.
(Disclosure: I work in that programme.) He was going to the US
as part of an official delegation from the HSRC, led by its CEO
Olive Shisana, to consult with the World Bank and other terrorist
sympathizers. His chums are ministers and director generals of
various government agencies and their international equivalents.
In other words, he's a leading international figure in the study
and promotion of democracy in South Africa, in the African continent,
and globally. Very shady stuff, apparently, to Homeland Security.
Why was Dr. Habib caught in
Homeland Security's net? (They even let his wife in.) Officials
gave no explanation and they aren't required to give one. Even
the airport officers, who dealt apologetically with Dr. Habib
as they threw him out of the country, may not have known what
it was. Having visiting the US numerous times over the past decade
on his ten-year visa, Dr. Habib himself was entirely baffled.
Back home, speculations ran the gamut. His visit to Iran in 2004?
But that was part of an official HSRC exchange programme. A ban
on Muslim clerics? Dr. Habib is a practicing Muslim but not a
cleric. Racial profiling? Dr. Habib is not Arab, or Pak, or Persian,
or Afghan, or any other of Homeland Security's racial targets:
he's of Indian descent, as is some 2.5% of South Africa's population.
His name? Even the doughty Homeland Security can't automatically
shut out every traveler with last names like "Habib".
All of these reasons at once, perhaps?
Capping the opacity, after
weeks of inquiry the US government finally issued its own written
explanation: we have no record of Dr. Habib's expulsion. The
aura of 1984 congeals with a thump.
One speculation is that Homeland
Security, being so skilled at its job, has simply merged into
its own database the old apartheid-era South Africa database
of security threats, which includes notorious Islamo-fascists
like Nelson Mandela. This might explain a recent fiasco: when
the elderly Mr. Mandela last visited the US, in 2003, the US
security apparatus at first refused to let him in. "Once
a terrorist always a terrorist", came Homeland Security's
sniffy pronouncement about one of the world's political saints.
(Upon hammering by the South African government, the ban finally
reached the desk of Colin Powell, who overturned it in a flash.)
Since Dr. Habib was briefly detained by the South African apartheid
government back in the 1980s rather a mark of distinction
these days - his name may have popped up on the same list.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Mandela
and Dr. Habib are not alone. A number of South African travellers
have been turned back more recently, for reasons unexplained.
The Department of Foreign Affairs is vague about who and why:
the South African government had, mysteriously, not acted on
what is clearly a pattern regarding South African citizens. No
official complaints had been filed until Dr. Habib got home and
promptly called his startled government friends and colleagues,
the ministers of this and that, to ask what the hell.
Still, what is behind this
bizarre targeting of South Africans? What is the rationale? Merging
a list of "security risks" composed by South Africa's
apartheid government is hard to attribute to mere ignorance (for
which Americans are, of course, infamous). It is not even easily
blamed on the galloping incompetence that Homeland Security increasingly
displays. For apartheid South Africa was not just a repressive
regime universally detested and denounced for killing or torturing
those "security risks" struggling for democracy. It
evaporated entirely in 1994 and many of those former "security
risks" have entered South Africa's government leadership.
Even the US now extends them all diplomatic courtesies. So after
the embarrassing Mandela incident, why didn't Homeland Security
strike its forehead in self-recrimination and delete those entries?
It's a stretch, but not much
of one, to speculate that South Africa's freedom fighters still
manifest generically to the Bush administration today as a "risk",
lip service notwithstanding. For, as we know, the US has historically
been very suspicious of democracy. The entire US military mission
in the Middle East is, of course, framed by insipid "democratization"
rhetoric, but its regime-change projects are, at best, designed
to create weak governments that will trot nicely on the US leash,
absorbing local democratic pressures into ineffectual legislatures
and periodic electoral ceremonies that install compliant client
leaderships. We have ample evidence from US behaviour over the
past century or so notably in Central America in the 1980s
and most recently in Palestine and elsewhere that the last
thing the US government wants to see in its far-flung dominions
are grassroots democracy movements which succeed in producing
vigorous, progressive governments that can meaningfully take
the reins of security, trade and development policy.
So maybe South Africans like Dr. Habib are indeed a "security
risk" for the Bush administration and its schreibtischtater.
It's not just that he's an intellectual of formidable standing
who happens to be Muslim. What indeed might devolve, if South
Africa's example of democracy spreads? What if other beleaguered
peoples around the world start talking to these veterans of the
anti-apartheid struggle and inviting them to come visit?
Especially, what would happen
the horror if South African democracy theorists with
serious activist track records and names like "Habib"
started showing up in Israel-Palestine? Can't have people thinking
too much about the new South Africa in a place like that.
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