A frightening sign of post-9/11 times
September 29, 2004
BY CAROL MARIN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement
Last week I did something I swore I would never do. I put up a sign in the yard of the weekend house our family owns in Michigan.
It reads simply, ''Free Ibrahim.''
Ibrahim is 42-year-old Ibrahim Parlak. He is sitting in jail right now in Battle Creek, Mich., awaiting an Oct. 26 immigration hearing that could result in his deportation.
In the war on terror, the terror right now belongs to Ibrahim Parlak, who for the last 10 years has owned and operated Cafe Gulistan, a small Middle Eastern restaurant on the Red Arrow Highway in Harbert, Mich.
His story is a cautionary tale in a post-Sept. 11 world.
Parlak is a Turkish immigrant. As a Kurd, he was hardly welcome in the country of his birth, and as a younger man he joined the PKK, a Kurdish resistance movement. In 1987, on the Turkey-Syria border, the PKK got into a skirmish in which two Turkish border guards were killed. Parlak was one of those scooped up and arrested, though he denies any role in the killings.
Imprisoned and tortured for a year and a half, once released he fled Turkey and sought asylum in the United States in 1992. Back then, the United States was busy condemning Turkey for human rights abuses and didn't regard the PKK as a terrorist group. The United States granted Ibrahim Parlak asylum.
That was then, and this is now.
Today the Turkey we used to condemn for cruelty to Kurds is our ally in the war on terror. Today the PKK, now known as KONGRA-GEL, is judged by the United States to be a terrorist organization. And today the circumstances that caused Ibrahim Parlak to be granted asylum in this country are the very ones now held against him as he fights for his freedom.
For the last 10 years, according to his neighbors in Harbert, Parlak has led an exemplary, peaceful and productive life. He is the doting father of a 7-year-old daughter and an active member of the business and civic community.
People were stunned when authorities took him away on July 29.
It seems the Turkish government, after all these years, inexplicably decided to resentence Parlak, even though it did not seek his return or want him to do more time.
That alerted U.S. officials, who now say Parlak didn't fully inform them at the time of his grant of asylum that he had ever been convicted of a crime in Turkey.
On Oct. 26, his case will be heard before an immigration judge in Detroit.
The federal government's track record on arrested terrorist suspects is not a good one. Just this month, and also in Detroit, a federal judge threw out the 2003 terrorism convictions of men federal prosecutors once hailed as a ''terrorist sleeper cell.''
The government by its own admission was guilty of prosecutorial misconduct. The judge in the case, citing an ''understandable sense of mission and zeal'' after Sept. 11, nonetheless said the government had lost sight of its obligations to the justice system.
You don't have to be a Muslim in America to be both worried and afraid.
Right now, under the guise of responding to recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to address our intelligence failures, some in Congress are trying instead to ramp up the Patriot Act to allow for even more latitude in the deportation of immigrants and the surveillance of suspects.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are becoming less and less free and not at all brave. I count myself in that number.
As a reporter for almost all of my adult life, I've never been comfortable with buttons or bumper stickers or signs in the yard. Truth be told, I'm still not. But then, this is not a comfortable time in this country.
While justifiably concerned about security within our borders, we are not justified in some of the measures we have taken.
Free Ibrahim.
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