Dear fellow citizens, immigrants and visitors:

[Ivo Skoric]

Dear fellow citizens, immigrants and visitors:

Every Friday at noon there is a peaceful protest in front of the Federal 
Plaza building on Manhattan for the release of Farouk Abdel Muhti, a 
stateless Palestinian activist, who was arrested earlier this year for being 
in the country illegally. That after being here for 25 years. And because 
he doesn’t want to be here legally or otherwise. He wants his country 
back, and he’ll gladly let himself being deported there.

Farouk was arrested with no warrant, and he is kept in jail with no 
criminal charges being pressed against him, with INS trying to peddle 
him to the various Arab embassies in the middle of the night, rather 
unsuccessfully so far. 

The protest is put together by the Center for the Human Rights of 
Immigrants (http://www.itapnet.org/chri) and attended by a dozen or so 
headstrong Lower East Side activists, who still happen to believe that 
the Bill of Rights, not the Patriot Act, is the law of this land. (More on 
Farouk: http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020429.html)

You are welcome to join. But, please, please, do not take any pictures. If 
you really have to, then, make sure to point your camera away from the 
Federal Plaza building. Last Friday, I did not, and I was taken to the 
building to be interrogated by the FBI. There is no sign in front of the 
building that prohibits taking pictures. But a Federal Protection Police 
officer will approach you, if you take one. He will take your ID and, if 
your name and accent sound foreign, he will ask you to follow him 
inside. The accredited NY1 TV-crew, for example, at that same time, took 
shots of the federal building liberally, without being taken in the custody.
(Here is another similar story: 
http://www.2600.org/news/display/display.shtml?id=1441)

There, in the office where “Osama Bin Laden Wanted Dead Or Alive” 
poster looms large over your head, your drivers license will be copied, 
you will be asked to hand over any weapons you might have on you (I 
handed over my symbolic orange box-cutter), a background crime check 
will be run on you, and two young, perspective, plain clothed FBI agents 
will eventually come down to ask you a series of questions very 
important for national security of this country, like: what is your 
connection with the protesters outside, are you a Muslim, and do you 
support Farouk besides supporting his release from the jail.

Farouk wants the same that the president Bush claims to want: 
Palestinian statehood. Protesters are the same non-violent people that 
appeared on every peace protest since I came to this town 13 years ago. I 
mean, the FBI can’t seriously believe that they are plotting a terror 
attack, now? Why did they ask me to delete both pictures that I have 
taken - including the one of protesters with no buildings in the 
background? Was their informant in that picture? Or is this handful of 
aging activists really such a frightening sight for them?

And no, here for the record, I am not a Muslim, and furthermore, I never 
expected that I would be asked about my religious beliefs by a police 
officer in a country defined by the freedom of religious beliefs. 
(But if you are a Muslim, you might want to read this: 
http://www.nyclu.org/coop_fbi112502.html)

Yes, I know that there was September 11. I was here. Does that mean that 
visitors won’t be able to take pictures in New York city any more? My 
connection with the protesters is, actually, via one Tino Mucic 
(http://balkansnet.org/tino.html), who ended up sharing the cell with 
Farouk for being in the country illegally, after being caught taking a 
picture of Statue of Liberty from behind a fence marked “no 
tresspassing.”

Thirteen years ago I came here from a country where individual tourists 
faced risk of being arrested as spies for taking pictures of, let’s say, a 
railway station. That country is no more. And the political system that 
ruled it, went to the trash bin of history, as well. Or did it? Are tourists in 
New York city now safe from being accused for ‘terror and mayhem’ only 
if they come in organized groups as they were while visiting communist 
countries in the past?

At least, to their credit, FBI is about twice as fast as State Security Police 
was in former Yugoslavia taking notes and getting to the point. In 
hindsight, however, I got a political asylum in this country for one too 
many unreasonable, unjustified, and unwarranted searches, arrests, and 
interrogations of my person, possessions, and premises in the 
communist Yugoslavia. Where am I going to go now, if my new 
homeland becomes more and more like my old one?

The U.S. tops both the list of countries with the highest prison 
population, and the list of countries with the highest prison population 
per 100,000 people. Among 22 countries at the later list, the U.S. is the 
only Western Democracy. There U.S. is closely followed by Russia, 
Belarus and Kazakhstan. There are 6 other former Soviet republics and 1 
former Soviet satellite on that list, so half of the list is comprised of the 
U.S. and the former Soviet Bloc (The Economist, Pocket World in 
Figures, 2003 edition, page 95). 

I am curious, whether, in case the United States is broken down to its 
constituent States, the list of highest prison population per capita would 
be solely shared by former Soviet republics and the constituent States of 
the U.S.  Curiously, as Soviet Union collapsed and Russia tries 
desperately to look more like America, the US does it best to 
become a better and more efficient Soviet Union.

The U.S. lives in the state of heightened paranoia. We are warned daily 
of the enemy within that is preying on us. And we behave as prey more 
and more. Running scared. Tentatively thinking about tomorrow. All this 
fear is new even for those who are tasked with enforcing it. My backpack 
was not searched, for example, and purely as a hypothesis, I could have 
had a bomb inside and detonate it when the FBI agents appeared.

But the fear is definitely here. As it was in former Yugoslavia in the late 
eighties. The fear of otherness, of those different than us. The Muslims, 
for now. This fear is reciprocal: as much as we fear them, they fear us. 
And in fear, with time, the distrust and hate builds up. We watched ten 
years of mayhem in the Balkans, with every party squarely claiming to 
defend itself. Isn’t something to be learned from that experience?
(Check this previous story of mine: 
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgibin/wa?A2=ind0210&L=justwatchl&
D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=22476 )

ivo