dck
加入时间: 2004/04/02
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作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Escaping a Painful Past To Find a Shaky Future
Iraqi Man Who Fled Hussein's Regime Awaits Fate After Failed Asylum Bid
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; B01
Hussein Hayal al Zaidi says he spent nearly four years in jail in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, once in a 13-by-13-foot cell with 20 other men. His captors blindfolded him and pummeled his eyes, detaching one of his retinas. He has scars on his ankles, feet and hands from where they strung him up with ropes and beat him. His genitalia bear the marks of electric shock burns.
He was sentenced to death in 1999 for participating in an anti-Hussein riot, al Zaidi said. An uncle paid $7,000 to smuggle him out of jail and out of Iraq. He was flown from Syria to Moscow to Cuba to Ecuador before arriving at an airport in Newark, disoriented and ill. He asked for asylum.
An immigration officer in Newark believed his story and let him stay. But an immigration judge in Arlington County, who heard final arguments on his case 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, did not believe him.
She ordered him deported.
But, like 165 others, the Northern Virginia man cannot be deported. Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, the United States has followed a United Nations directive not to forcibly return Iraqis to their country because it is too dangerous.
Al Zaidi's fate was decided at a time when places such as Anbar province, Nasiriyah and Ramallah had yet to become almost household words. Trial transcripts show that U.S. immigration prosecutors and judges had little idea what a Sunni or a Shiite was or why they would want to kill one another.
Since then, al Zaidi has become part of the largest refugee crisis unfolding in the Middle East in decades, with one in eight Iraqis having fled their homes or the country. In the process, he has become one more story of the fallout of war.
When al Zaidi's appeal of the deportation order was denied in September 2005, immigration officials picked him up at his job at a laundromat and put him in jail, where he stayed until June. He was released, because detainees who can't be deported but pose no threat can't be held for more than six months.
So al Zaidi, 39, lives like a dangling man, in limbo between the hell of his past and fears of a hellish future. In the United States, government officials had suspected he might be an agent of Hussein. In Iraq, he fears that his countrymen, suspicious of his long absence, will think he works for the CIA.
"Of course they're going to kill me," he said in accented English. If not the Shiite militia already asking about him, then the Sunnis or Hussein loyalists. "But I am already dead."
Before he was detained, when he still had hope of staying in the United States, al Zaidi saved money. He thought about buying a house and having a family. He listened to English-language tapes. But now, nothing matters. He started smoking unfiltered Marlboros again. He spends his days watching television, not really paying attention. On a whim, he bought a new car.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he said. "Before, I was careful. But now, for what? Let me enjoy."
Except that he doesn't.
Since his release, he has lived with a friend in a bare townhouse in Vienna, furnished with two white plastic chairs and a TV. The laundromat doesn't want him anymore. Because of his immigration status, the community college he had hoped to attend will not take him. He doesn't eat, except for coffee and nibbles of junk food, such as the packets of Oreos and Mentos strewn on the floor of his room among piles of legal papers. His bed is a sheet on the floor, his pillow a rolled-up winter jacket.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he is seized with the notion that he must see the ocean. He goes to Atlantic City. He watches the waves. He doesn't understand what is happening to him.
"It's like I destroy my life."
A Setback in a U.S. Court
Some people have believed al Zaidi. A doctor at George Washington University concluded that al Zaidi "did indeed suffer the torture and abuse that he claims." And a psychoanalyst diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, writing that "he has suffered a process of brutal human degradation."
In February 2001, he told his story on the stand in U.S. immigration court in Arlington. Al Zaidi said he had been drafted into the Army, like all other Iraqi men, and served as a mail clerk during the Iran-Iraq war.
His first arrest, he said through a translator, came in 1991 for participating in an uprising against Hussein after the Persian Gulf War. When his mother tried to bar police officers from their home, they hit her in the head, he said, and killed her.
He said he was arrested in 1996 for having writings of a Shiite cleric in his house. In 1999, he said he was arrested after he and other Shiites shouted anti-Hussein slogans after their leader, cleric Mohammed Sadeq al Sader, was assassinated.
Prosecutors had relatively minor questions about the case. "You still hopeful you can reach agreement in this case?" Judge Joan Churchill asked prosecutors, according to a court transcript -- meaning that they would agree to asylum.
"Yes," the prosecutor answered.
Then, in March, Churchill received an anonymous note that said that while al Zaidi was in Iraq, he was "working as secret service" for Hussein and that he was sent to the United States to kill high-level officials.
A new prosecutor submitted pages from "Saddam's Bombmaker," a book by Iraqi exile Khidhir Hamza, who claimed to have run Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Hamza wrote that during the Iran-Iraq war, Hussein used Shiite soldiers as human mine detonators. Therefore, prosecutors said, al Zaidi must have had special ties to get a desk job.
Assertions in the book were later questioned by a number of former U.N. weapons inspectors, Iraqi scientists and Iraqi military officers.
The author of the letter, determined to be al Zaidi's roommate in Arlington at the time, Khalid Houmadi, testified that al Zaidi's trip to the United States was financed by Hussein, but he admitted to regularly loaning al Zaidi money.
Churchill sided against al Zaidi. She said she thought his escape through Russia and Cuba was "suspicious," her written decision says. She dismissed the GWU doctor's exam and physical evidence of al Zaidi's torture, saying that it might "be consistent with other causes."
And she said Houmadi "cast considerable doubt upon the credibility of crucial aspects of [al Zaidi's] claim."
Al Zaidi went into a rage. Houmadi was just out to get him, he said. Before writing the letter, Houmadi had threatened to attack a man, and al Zaidi had said that he would report him.
Months later, Houmadi attacked the man. And, as promised, al Zaidi testified against him. Elliot Casey, an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Alexandria, wrote a letter to Churchill, saying that the court found al Zaidi's testimony "completely credible." Houmadi was sentenced to 10 months.
Karla Harr, an attorney for al Zaidi, appealed his case in 2002. It was denied in a one-sentence opinion by one judge, a product of the Department of Justice's new policy of "streamlining" asylum cases. Before, a three-judge panel had reviewed asylum appeals. Under streamlining, the amount of overturned decisions dropped from 25 percent to less than 5 percent, according to studies by the American Bar Association and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
"The complexity of the issues involved in this case demanded a three-panel review, " Harr said.
Al Zaidi was in the process of filing an appeal when he was detained in late 2005. In May 2006, in detention and on a one-month hunger strike, al Zaidi asked for his appeal to be dropped because he thought it would get him out. His attorney assured him that it wouldn't and that he would be released soon because of the rule that says that detainees who pose no threat can't be held for more than six months. But al Zaidi said he had to get out. He dropped his appeal.
"They punish me too much." He was released in June.
'I'm Really, Really Tired'
Al Zaidi sat in front of the TV in the spare townhouse. The announcer mentioned Nasiriyah, where he was born. "It's very beautiful there," he said absently.
He is officially under an order of supervision and is waiting for the U.S. government to send him back to Iraq. Once a month, he must check in with his supervisor at the Department of Homeland Security.
He goes to a Panera Bread restaurant where other Arabs and Iraqis hang out. He even sees Houmadi there from time to time. "He apologized to me," al Zaidi said, shrugging.
"I'm really, really tired," he said. And the nightmares come if he tries to sleep. He no longer prays. "It's like I can't find myself."
And so the dangling man with the story that was not believed went out for cigarettes.
作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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逃出虎穴，又入狼窝－－遭受萨达姆迫害的伊拉克人在美国政庇失败面临遣返
