ON PEACE-KEEPING FORCES

Darfur refugee shocked by world's indifference to genocide in his homeland

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Martha Rial, Post-GazetteHashim Adam Mersal, seen on Liberty Avenue after meeting with his attorneys, is seeking asylum in the U.S. after entering the country illegally last May after escaping genocide in Sudan's Darfur region.Click photo for larger image.
A refugee from the troubled Darfur region of Sudan, who entered the United States illegally and spent five months in Pennsylvania jails, is free on bond in Pittsburgh now, seeking political asylum in hopes of bearing witness to the genocide at home.
"I am a man without a country," said Hashim Adam Mersal, 25, flanked by two attorneys and his Pittsburgh sponsor in a Downtown law office on Monday.
"I have witnessed so many atrocities. I cannot understand the silence of the world," he said through a interpreter. "They are wiping out my people and nobody seems interested."
Mr. Mersal entered the country last May through Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., using a phony diplomatic passport from Chad. For two months, he moved among Sudanese exile communities in Washington, New York and Indiana. On July 29, he was riding in a car with other young men from Sudan when Pennsylvania state troopers pulled them over on Interstate 80.
According to his court-appointed lawyer, Bill Kaczynski, Mr. Mersal showed the police his passport and told them it was a fake.
"He was very forthright and didn't try to hide anything," Mr. Kaczynski said.
The young man was arrested and jailed in Allegheny County on one criminal count of using a fraudulent document to enter the country. That was eventually reduced to a misdemeanor for improper entry by an alien. He pleaded guilty and was released, only to be picked up by immigration authorities and transported to York County Prison, where the U.S. government holds some federal prisoners.
"They wanted to make sure he was just a simple purchaser of the passport and not involved in any manufacturing or distribution ring," said Mr. Kaczynski. "For them to get the information they needed was logistically difficult."
On Jan. 19, the authorities released Mr. Mersal into the custody of Khadra Mohammed of the Pittsburgh Refugee Center, which financed the $5,000 bond. He has been living with her family in Carrick ever since.
Bob Whitehill, an immigration attorney who is handling the case pro bono, said he will file the formal application for asylum in the next several weeks.
"If anyone qualifies for political asylum because of a well-founded fear of persecution, this would be such a case," said Mr. Whitehill. "Returning home would be a death sentence. But there's no such thing as a slam dunk."
There's no way to know how many people from Darfur are in the United States because statistics on Sudanese nationals aren't broken down by region, said Bill Strassberger of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Washington, D.C. But overall, he said, his department had 63 applications from Sudanese for political asylum in fiscal year 2005. Of those, 47 were granted, eight denied and the rest are pending.
Those figures, however, don't include cases such as Mr. Mersal's, which are handled by immigration judges rather than his department.
If those applicants prevail, he said, they get a green card after one year.
Mr. Mersal is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, one of several targeted for extinction by the Sudanese government. The ruling powers work "unofficially" through marauding Arab militias known as the janjaweed, who have free rein to rid the country of particular ethnic groups and take their land.
According to Mr. Mersal, the janjaweed arrived in his village one morning in August 2003, close on the heels of an air strike by Sudanese government forces. They sacked his village, raped the women and killed many of the men, including his father and brother, whose bodies he saw lying on the ground.
At the behest of his mother, he took the family's only valuable possession -- its cattle, or what was left of it -- and walked for two days to cross the border into Chad, leaving behind his 16 surviving brothers and sisters. For the next two years, he lived off the sale of the cattle and sought word of his family. But he never succeeded in locating anyone or even finding out if they were alive.
After two years, he decided to come to America and tell the story of his people's destruction.
Now free to move around while his asylum case proceeds, Mr. Mersal has made the first snowy footprints of his life, watched his first TV outside of a jail cell, and become a big fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Willie Parker is his favorite.
He said he's been received well in Pittsburgh, and that if he gets a work permit he'll take the first job from anyone who will hire him.
He also hopes to get this message out to Americans: The United Nations and the U.S. government mean well in sending food and other aid to Darfur, but most of it is stolen by the Sudanese government and never reaches its intended recipients. That, he said, only allows them to finance their repression of Darfur.
"What we need," he said, "is peace-keeping forces on the ground to stop the killing. Keep the food and save our lives."