Sucaad Xaaji Max'uud

[Cabdow]

The Toronto Star did a great job for keeping this story under the public eye, much respect! And thanks MMA for keeping us up-dated too

 

Ps. Once she comes home safely, the Torontonians should make alot of noise about this incident. Inorder to avoid something like this to happen to another innocent person in the future!

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

 

Whose fault is it?

 

(And why her plight 'is not as uncommon as people would think')

 

Suaad Hagi Mohamud's ordeal is almost over. But outrage is growing that officials didn't help her when she was detained in Nairobi and had to fight to prove her identity

 

Nothing in Canadian law stops the government from "picking and choosing" which Canadians it will help and who it will abandon, a former senior diplomat warns.

 

In the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Toronto woman who was detained in Kenya for 12 weeks, "overzealous" civil servants chose to abandon her, said former consular services chief Gar Pardy.

 

What's worse, he said, is that Ottawa could just say, "`Sorry it happened' and that's the end of it" unless somebody ensures there is a "protection of Canadians act."

 

Such an act would turn "Crown prerogative" – meaning Canadians are at the mercy of the government for anything not spelled out in law – into something that gives overseas Canadians some protection.

 

Mohamud's ordeal was closer to being over yesterday after Ottawa agreed to issue travel documents so she could return home. But other Canadians are still vulnerable.

 

"This is an issue that is not as uncommon as people would think," said Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman. "If it weren't for the fact she had supporters here she would probably have gone to jail for six months or a year for using a false document. Clearly that's problematic.

 

"There are lots of other cases where people don't get all the publicity because people aren't interested or they don't have advocates in Canada and they get stranded."

 

Many people are just assumed to be guilty, he added.

 

The Conservative government has clearly tried to stay away from Mohamud's case.

 

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan avoided comment even when a legion of supporters, family members and even Mohamud's Toronto employer came forward to verify her identity.

 

Pointing to a case in contrast, Pardy discussed the plight of Brenda Martin, who was jailed in Mexico, rescued by a minister's intervention and flown home in a government plane.

 

"I'd like that same level of service for everyone. It shows how this is a matter of discretion and discrimination" the way different Canadians are treated.

 

In another case, Justice Russell Zinn ordered the government to bring Abousfian Abdelrazik back from his Kafkaesque nightmare in Khartoum, where he received permission to travel but was denied a passport until he somehow disproved terrorism allegations.

 

"The only basis for the denial of the passport was that the minister had reached this opinion; there has been nothing offered and no attempt made to justify that opinion," Zinn said.

 

Pardy agrees that the litany of abandoned Canadians, from Maher Arar, tortured in a Syrian jail, to Abdelrazik and Mohamud should force someone in government to weigh the consequences.

 

"We get brown stuff on our faces every time this happens. There must be a better way of doing this.

 

"This is going on week after week. There should be some learning, some political will somewhere in the system to fix it."

 

Mohamud's ordeal started in May when airline KLM and Kenyan authorities flagged her as suspicious, saying her lips and eyeglasses didn't look like her Canadian passport photo.

 

Then the staff at the Canadian High Commission in Kenya not only failed to help her as a citizen but also sent her passport to Kenyan immigration authorities for criminal prosecution.

 

That step astonishes Pardy. "You would think they would bloody well have made sure their judgment was based on something more than thick lips," he said. "The ministers should be insisting on a proper investigation.

 

"Ministers have been getting a free ride. They are more and more sliding away from direct responsibilities when things go wrong. If ministers aren't responsible, then nobody is responsible."

 

When Mohamud's lawyer pleaded her case to federal court, the Tories refused to comment because the case of mistaken identity was now a legal matter.

 

One of the few remarks came from Cannon, who said she would have to try harder to prove that she was the person pictured in the passport.

 

All the crucial decisions in Mohamud's frustrating tale of a trip gone wrong were actually made in an office building overlooking the Ottawa River, where bureaucrats in the Consular Services and Emergency Management Branch of Foreign Affairs have the power to help or hinder Canadians in need of their government's help.

 

"The buck stops with them, and the advice they give to the minister," said MP Dan McTeague, a former parliamentary secretary responsible for Canadians abroad under former prime minister Paul Martin.

 

"When these matters become political, it's entirely the discretion of the minister responsible in the case and they're often told not to speak."

 

The overriding lesson, said Pardy, is "we need to make sure nobody forgets this."

 

Koronto Star

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Is citizenship now defined by the colour of your skin?

 

The DNA tests Suaad Hagi Mohamud was forced to undergo last week proved not only that she is who she says she is, but also that she is Canadian.

 

The point seems lost on the current federal government, which has been content to let her twist in the Kenyan wind for three months while it did everything possible not to sort out the details of a case of mistaken identity.

 

But it is a point worth remembering, especially in the face of mounting evidence that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's regime is determined to create different categories of citizenship. According to the administration's new meaning of Canadian citizenship, the main qualification is not residence, place of birth, oath of allegiance or passport – it's the colour of your skin.

 

And in Canada today, God help you if you're not white, because the federal government sure won't. Indeed, that government creates these problems in the first place.

 

Mohamud's case is a perfect example; her nightmare began when a functionary in the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi agreed with a Kenyan airport official and decided she wasn't the woman whose photograph appears in her passport. We were told, incredibly, that it had something to do with her lips. She was immediately declared an "imposter" and Kenyan authorities were asked to prosecute her.

 

Although she produced all kinds of identification – including a driver's licence, OHIP card, social insurance card and a Canadian citizenship certificate to boot – her fate was sealed. The poor woman even spent time in a Kenyan jail, the horror of which one can only begin to imagine.

 

Meanwhile, her 12-year-old son – clearly another figment of her imagination – languished in Toronto, wondering if, not when, his mother would be able to return home.

 

Months after Mohamud's ordeal began and even now that its falsity has been exposed, no one in Harper's government has said a word, let alone apologized.

 

This isn't just another political scandal; this is cause for deep national shame. This smacks not just of prejudice, but of apartheid.

 

The whole episode, don't forget, began and ended with Canadian officialdom. Even if one accepts that bureaucrats in a far-flung posting make ****** mistakes such as this, the elected government's response has turned that error into something wholly different, namely a matter of policy. Whether that policy is official or not, it's now clear that only certain Canadians can count on the protection of the federal government.

 

Had Mohamud been a white mother from Leaside, you can rest assured that Harper himself would have led the charge to have her repatriated.

 

And we're not talking about the Omar Khadrs, or the Maher Arars, men suspected of real or imaginary ties to terrorist organizations. We're dealing with a single mom who produced her Shoppers Drug Mart Optimum card and even receipts from a local dry cleaners.

 

But Canadian High Commission first secretary Liliane Khadour wrote to Kenyan immigration authorities, saying: "We have carried out conclusive investigations including an interview and have confirmed that the person brought to (us) on suspicion of being an imposter is not the rightful holder of the aforementioned Canadian passport."

 

Well – guess what? – Khadour couldn't have been more wrong if she tried.

 

Even yesterday, after the results of Mohamud's DNA tests were made public, not a syllable on the subject was uttered by anyone in government. Their silence speaks volumes. And what it says isn't pretty: Canada, that bastion of tolerance, that refuge of civility, that exemplar of multiculturalism, no longer belongs to its citizens. It is not ours, it's theirs. We just live here.

 

The Star

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Yes, Canjeex, brother. As brother North wrote, I might even be there at the airport to welcome her arrival, if possible.

 

But seriously, this could have been me or any Soomaali-Canadian who travels to Nayroobi. Walaahi it is sobering and bit scary too.

 

And I applaud the Toronto Star, no wonder it always have been my favourite paper that I read daily. I also wrote to their reporters thanking them for keeping this story in the limelight and in public consciousness.

[Gheelle.T]

Glad that her ordeal ended and that she is coming home to her family! Where are those making the loudest noises?

 

MMA, she deserves to get a red carpet welcome, indeed. By the way, is there any way that she can at least sue this crackhead led government of yours?

[Kool_Kat]

Sue them for what exactly? For doing their job? Shiish Soomaalina wexey wax kale kadhigaaney yaqaanan...Those who know this woman will tell you she looks completely different from years ago, hence the passport photo being four years ago...Not only did she lose a lot of weight, qofta midabkeeda xataa waa is badalay...And we all know all processes take time, specially from the government...If you ask me, she is lucky and should be counting her blessings iney this fast wax ugu dhamaadeen...

 

While it is true that this could happen to anyone of us, this is happening in Kenya where laaluush talks and others face jail time...Sad, but true...

[Somalicentric.]

^^^ I AGREE...

WOW SHE LOOKS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WALAHI.

DANG I'VE SEEN COUSINS THAT RESEMBLE EACH OTHER MORE THAN THOSE PICs!

[Gheelle.T]

KK, sue them for not doing their job. If it wasn't the Toronto Star, no one would have heard of her ordeal and this useless government wouldn't have cared.

 

You folks up there change your passport photo every other year eh?

[Liibaan]

TORONTO STAR: Harper says 'first priority' to get Mohamud home

Harper says 'first priority' to get Mohamud home

TheStar.com - Canada - Harper says 'first priority' to get Mohamud home

 

 

NICK WADHAMS FOR THE TORONTO STAR

A Kenyan passport officer arrested Suaad Hagi Mohamud, saying her lips were unlike those in the passport photo. Accounting ordered of role played by Border Services Agency in case of Canadian woman stranded in Kenya for nearly three months

 

August 13, 2009

Iain Marlow

Allan Woods

John Goddard

Staff Reporters

 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today the Canada Border Services Agency will have to answer for its role in the plight of a Canadian woman marooned in Kenya for nearly three months.

 

"Our first priority as a government is obviously to see her get on a flight back to Canada," Harper said in Kitchener today, referring to Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Canadian citizen who was detained because Kenyan and Canadian officials there thought she did not look like her passport photo.

 

"In the case of the Canadian Border Service Agency," Harper continued, "I know that minister (of public safety Peter) Van Loan is asking that organization for a full accounting of their actions in this case and we'll obviously review those."

 

Based on what officials at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi said were "conclusive investigations including an interview," Mohamud was branded an "imposter." Her passport was handed over to Kenyan officials for prosecution on charges of improper use of a travel document.

 

Harper said that Canadian officials are eager to resolve "what is not an easy case" and to get Mohamud back to Canada.

 

Kenyan authorities are expected to drop all charges against the woman tomorrow, clearing the way for her to be reunited with her 12-year-old son in Toronto.

 

Neither Van Loan nor Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, who has responsibility for managing all consular cases involving Canadians in need of help abroad, have commented on the case since Mohamud's identity was confirmed through a DNA test that showed she was a 99.99% match with her son.

 

Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian, was branded an impostor by staff of the Canadian High Commission in Kenya because she did not resemble her passport photograph. Her lips were different from the four-year-old picture, as were her eyeglasses.

 

In a telephone interview from Nairobi yesterday, Mohamud gave further details of the event that started her ordeal when she tried to board a KLM flight home on May 21 after a three-week visit to Kenya.

 

A Kenyan KLM employee stopped her. "He told me he could make me miss my flight," she said of the KLM worker, who suggested Mohamud didn't look like her passport photo.

 

He seemed to be soliciting a bribe, she said, an experience Somali-born Torontonians say is commonplace for them at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

 

When she didn't pay, a Kenyan immigration official arrested her. Canadian consular officials went along, returning Mohamud to the Kenyans, who threw her in jail on charges of entering Kenya illegally on a passport not her own.

 

On Monday, DNA tests proved Mohamud's identity.

 

Yesterday at the high commission, officials continued to treat Mohamud with indifference, a friend who drove her there said.

 

When Mohamud asked if Canada might help her retrieve her luggage, seized when she was unable to pay her room bill while trying to prove her identity, consular officials refused, the friend said.

 

In Toronto, lawyer Raoul Boulakia said a friend of his has arranged to pay the bill as a donation.

 

The Kenyans also owe her $2,500 (U.S.) in bail money, posted after she spent eight days in June at Nairobi's Langata Women's Prison.

 

Mohamud said the high commission advised her yesterday to stay in the country until she collected the money from Kenya, a process that could take weeks. But Boulakia said he told her to get out of the country first and get the high commission to collect it for her later.

 

The case highlights the often-puzzling approach the Conservative government takes when deciding which citizens imprisoned or stranded in foreign countries are entitled to high-level help.

 

Trade Minister Stockwell Day, for instance, requested clemency this summer for a 24-year-old Canadian sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, but the government abandoned a convicted killer from Alberta sitting on death row in Montana.

 

Last week, Ethiopian diplomats were called on the carpet after the conviction for terrorism of Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal. But Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was never charged with a crime and was cleared by Sudan and Canada of suspected Al Qaeda links, lived a prisoner's life for six years, the last of which was spent in limbo on the grounds of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. He needed a judge's order to bring him home.

 

For the few Canadians who do get Ottawa's ear, dozens of pleas go unanswered, say advocates and lawyers for citizens who get into tight situations abroad.

 

"What I find most disturbing is that Canadians are possibly being judged in absentia by an Orwellian jury comprised of the Canadian cabinet," said Dan McTeague, the Liberal MP for Pickering-Scarboroug h East who was tasked with handling cases of citizens in need of help abroad under prime minister Paul Martin.

 

Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed argued Abdelrazik's case against the government. He said the most troubling government decisions inevitably involve security questions.

 

"There is this kind of interpretation that we can't do something that's going to be perceived as soft on the war on terror or showing that we're not holding up our end of things," said Hameed, suggesting Ottawa has an ever-present fear of being cast as a security threat to the United States.

 

Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman knows better than most how fickle the government can be. He represents Makhtal, an ethnic Somali sentenced to life in an Ethiopian prison for terrorism.

 

Makhtal's case got the backing not only of Cannon but Transport Minister John Baird, who took up the mantle after being approached by the large Somali community living in Baird's Ottawa West-Nepean riding. They are pushing the Ethiopian government to accept that Makhtal's only link to terror is hereditary — his grandfather founded a separatist Somali group in eastern Ethiopia.

 

But Waldman has also done battle with Ottawa. He took the government to Federal Court after the Tories decided Ronald Allen Smith, the death row inmate in Montana, was no longer deserving of Canada's help or official government appeals on his behalf that the death sentence be commuted, help that Canadians on death row have received for decades.

 

In 2007, the Conservatives cut all ties with Smith's case — he was convicted in the 1982 killing of two aboriginal men — because he had been tried and convicted in a democratic country, the United States.

 

It was the launch of a controversial new policy that was first announced on Nov. 1, 2007 and repeated several times with subtle changes and conditions over the next five months. But legislation, or amendments to existing laws or policies, never followed.

 

This March, the court ruled that no clear policy actually existed and making life or death decisions on the fly breached Smith's right as a Canadian citizen to the full protection of the federal government.

 

The judge ruled that while the government has every right to make foreign policy, it must give fair warning and a detailed explanation of those decisions.

 

The trend of picking which Canadians get access to help and which don't has put the government on a collision course with courts.

 

With files from Robert Benzie

[Kool_Kat]

Originally posted by Gheelle.T:

KK, sue them for not doing their job. If it wasn't the Toronto Star, no one would have heard of her ordeal and this useless government wouldn't have cared.

 

You folks up there change your passport photo every other year eh?

LOOOOOOOL@If it wasn't the Toronto Star, no one would have heard of her ordeal...

 

Walaahi sidaacad ah aan u qoslay...Just cuz the Star is the newspaper the poster of this thread prefers to read doesn't mean they are the only ones who kept this story in the limelight...

 

To tell you the truth, this whole situation is a mediocre...Canadian officials over in Kenya wax fiican kama maqal, iskaba iloow the Kenyan officials, and to top everything off we have abaay heeleey who is pulling Michael Jackson on us (I guess doesn't matter if you're black or white didn't apply in this situation lol)...She should be glad she wasn't thrown and left to rotten in jail...Alxamdulilaah ineydhahdo waaye, that's all I am saying...

 

And no we don't change our passport photos every year...Matter of fact, I have changed a lot since I've the taken the photo on my passport, laakiin wajiga waa wajigii uun...

[nuune]

Koolokaat ma waxaad leedahay sucaad xaaji macoow muunyo indhaha ayey murqa ku leedahay

[Kool_Kat]

^Wax aan dhihin ani afka ha ii galin...

[nuune]

^^ iney ku karbaashto miyaad ka baqi, I know inaad mashiidiyaan taahy by da way, indhaheeda waaba laga baqaa taas, waa SOL member ayaan thread kale ku arkey oo waa khamarjiyadna waa la yiri, askartii keenyaatiga ahaa bey candhuuf indhaha kaga seertayna Nayroobi baan ka maqley markey dhaheen bishimahan adiga ma ahan, which was da main reason oo loo sii qabsadey kibirka waa loo dhashaa ma anoo Canadian ah baad i qabsateen xaaaq tuuuuuf bey tiri baa la yiri

[Kool_Kat]

^Iyaah! Don't let the pretty face fool you Nuunoow...Ani dadka bakeeri biyo ah uma kabado, kuweesto kuwaa ina Biyo Makabato Waji Fargeeto Ku Xagxagato Cidiyo Sakiin Ku Qarsato in la'idhaho ma'ogid miyaa? SOL member ku yeh...lol

 

Ar iga tag maskiintoo ciyaal baraf ah aan iska ehee...Waxaaba i xasuusisay sheekadoo wareersan oo FB kasacoto...Idaa Idaa!!!

[Raamsade]

I'm happy to read this woman's ordeal has finally ended. It's by now clear that she was done wrong.

 

But do you know what's also putting a smile on my face? It's the vindication, yet again, that Liberal Democracy is the best system to live under. It is the only system extant that can deliver real justice.

 

Here you had a woman that was accused by the mother of all The Powers That Be -- i.e. the central government -- of fraudulence. Not only was she able to challenge this accusation but lived to tell all about it. What's more, she can still pursue compensation for the ordeal she went through.

 

Under what other conceivable political systems would this woman's ordeal have had similar ending?