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All men are created equal -- but only when times a
jannah
01/15/03 at 04:51:11
Hey deen if we had a canadian forum this would be in it. I think this is nadirah's bro from peg but not sure.

All men are created equal -- but only when times are good
Since 9/11, the colour of Mustapha's skin has limited his freedom and rights
 
Paula Simons  
The Edmonton Journal


Tuesday, January 14, 2003
 
Until Sept. 11, 2001, Suresh Mustapha never doubted his identity as a Canadian, as a North American.

"I'm about as homegrown a Canadian as you can get," he says.

Mustapha was born in Edmonton 34 years ago and raised in Sherwood Park.

His parents are both Indo-Canadians, his father Muslim, his mother Hindu. They were born in Trinidad, where their families had lived for four generations.

The Mustaphas came to Canada in the 1950s to go to university and build a better life for their kids.

Suresh, their middle son, became a poster boy for second-generation immigrant success. As a high school student, he excelled at sports and academics. He was chosen to represent Canada at the world high school debating championships. He went on to the University of Alberta, where he took a degree in genetics, played rugby, and served as president of the Students' Union. Then he went to Harvard's prestigious School of Business, where he earned an MBA.

Since then, he has been working for McKinsey and Company, an international consulting firm.

For years, Mustapha has been a frequent flyer, consulting across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. In 2000, he flew about 130 times, most often to the U.S.

To speed up the process, in 1998, he applied for, and received, a special pass, the U.S. immigration and naturalization service's highest security clearance.

He went through an FBI background check and personal interview. He provided his fingerprints for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service database.

With his Canadian birthright, and his Harvard degree, he was a citizen of the world, a world where ethnicity and skin colour didn't matter.

Then came Sept. 11. Mustapha noticed that other passengers were looking at him strangely when he got on airplanes. Whenever there was a random security check of passengers, he was inevitably one of those searched.

Last summer, after the U.S. government introduced tough new security measures, things got worse.

Last June, he was flying from Toronto to Washington, D.C. "I expected maybe there'd be a tougher time. I don't go anywhere with any illusions. I just assume I'm going to be searched."

As usual, he was selected to be searched. He boarded the plane and took his seat. The flight crew announced that they had to stop to unload some suspicious luggage. He looked out the window to see his suitcase being taken off the plane.

"They said, 'Passenger Mus-

tapha, please come forward,' " he recalls.

Another passenger, a Muslim woman in a head scarf, was also called up. Both were asked to step off the plane while their luggage was ripped apart. Eventually, he says, their things were put back together and they were allowed back on the plane.

"I kept getting the evil eye from the other passengers. I didn't even want to get up to go to the bathroom."

Mustapha says he was never one of those Canadians who liked to Yankee-bash. As a Harvard grad, working for a U.S. company, he always considered himself pro-American. It's his affection and respect for American ideals, he says, that makes the constant suspicion so hard to take.

"All men are created equal. That's all nice to speak about when times are good.

"But when times are tough, do you swing away from your values? The United States should stand for liberty and freedom. If you take people's freedoms away in order to protect your way of life, what you have left isn't what you started out to protect.

"I don't want to sound like a whiner. But it's the presumption of guilt based on my ethnicity that I can do without.

"If I put myself in their shoes -- well, you do want to protect yourself. You can't be naive. There's a need for intelligent, proactive measures to manage risk. But there should be ways to do it without humiliating people, a way of building a system that protects people's dignity. Don't pretend that these searches are random. It's just not true."

At the moment, Mustapha is working for McKinsey in the Philippines, doing consulting work in Asia. And Asia is where he's thinking of staying. Travelling to the United States these days, he says, is just too much of a hassle.

"Here, I'm not ethnically profiled. Here, I get the full and equal treatment I used to get back home that I used to take for granted."


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