by KEN HECHTMAN

The members of Montreal’s Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes (CLAC), currently spearheading the campaign against the deportation of over 1,000 refugees from Algeria’s civil war, have had their share of run-ins with the law. Local activist Jaggi Singh’s 17-day prison term for possession of a deadly teddy bear during the Quebec City FTAA protests in April 2001 springs to mind. But none of them have ever heard anything like the case of “Hassan,” the pseudonym of a young non-status Algerian who may wind up dead back home as a result of a jaywalking offence here.

The hardest-luck story ever to fall off a police blotter stems from an incident on March 31, when Hassan stepped off the sidewalk to hail a taxi at the corner of Decelles and Édouard-Montpetit. As Hassan recounts it, he was promptly stopped by police for jaywalking. Handcuffed and thrown in the back of a patrol car, he managed to talk the charges up to obstruction and uttering death threats to a police officer. His trial is set for November 26. He fears that if he’s convicted, he’ll be taken to the Laval immigration detention centre and from there to the airport. His lawyer, Denis Barette, admits, “They can—it’s important I don’t say they will—use this to send him back.”

Hassan’s story actually began eight years ago in Algiers, when an Islamist student strike was put down by the military occupation of Boumedienne University. Hassan, a freshman business major, soon dropped out, describing the atmosphere of checkpoints, surveillance and body searches as oppressive. “It was a prison, not a university,” he says. His description of the next year is a collage of arrests, beatings, and shoot-on-sight curfews, each incident more random, arbitrary and abusive than the next.

“You can’t be neutral,” he says of Algerian politics. “You can join one side or the other or you can die slowly by losing hope. I couldn’t join the Islamists—I didn’t know any. Joining the army means becoming an assassin. My only choice was to leave.”

No status, little hope

Hassan arrived in Montreal in 1995, applied for refugee status and, like most claimants, was denied. Naji Djelfaoui, spokesman for the deportees’ pressure group Action Committee for Non-Status Algerians, says Hassan was rejected because, “They only want to hear about specific and personal threats. In Algeria, everyone is under general threat and you don’t know who’s killing who. Masked men will kill 200–300 people in a neighbourhood, the police won’t show up until the next day and we’ll never know if it was the army or the GIA (Groupe islamique armé, the main Islamist opposition).”

In 1997, Hassan got a partial reprieve. Immigration Canada put a moratorium on deportations back to Algeria. He received a work permit and got a job in a skilled trade. But in April 2002, the moratorium was lifted and in September, the deportations began. As of October 9, 29 people are known by the Action Committee to have been deported, with another 275 at the Pre-Removal Risk Assessment stage.

“Under the new law, refugee claims are heard by a single person, and that person is a political patronage appointee, not a career civil servant with any knowledge of the country involved,” says CLAC member Sara Leon. She notes that appeals at this stage have a 97 per cent rejection rate.

Speaking to an Action Committee rally on October 3, social justice activist Jaggi Singh questioned the purpose of recent changes to refugee and immigration law. “These laws do not keep people out. The number of cross-border migrants is expected to reach 300-million in the next decade. Nobody can stop that. Nobody wants to. These laws are designed to create a class of people who have no rights.”

Hassan hasn’t yet been served with a deportation order, but he has fallen into the limbo of “sans-statut,” losing any right to stay in Canada now that the deportation moratorium has been lifted. He lost his work permit when the moratorium was lifted and now works at a $6-an-hour, under-the-table job while waiting for his court date. He says, “With all these conditions, we built a life here, we survived. Now they’re taking it all away. Don’t they understand? This is the only life I have. I don’t get another one.” :