28 July 2006
Knocking on heaven's door
IT HAPPENS WITH EVERY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE held in a country belonging to the so-called First World. It is almost a classic feature and no one is really surprised when participants from poor countries are denied visas to entry the host country, preventing them to attend the event. The AIDS 2006 conference couldn't have been different.
"Entering Canada is not a right, but a privilege", clearly spells the Canadian embassy website. The would-be applicants learn there that visa officers are the supreme authority and can reject a visitor to the country at its very door, even after the visa has been issued.
Living in Geneva, I have to apply for my visa at the Canadian embassy in Paris. On the train — being the citizen of a fallen country — I cannot help imagining the visa officer as a sort of St. Peter taken from a popular mythology. It holds a huge golden key with one hand and a red Maple leaf with the other and looks at my application with a frown of disapproval while mumbles things I cannot understand.
I also learnt on the Canadian website that the visa officer has to be convinced that I have no intention to stay illegally in heaven — I mean, in Canada — and therefore I am a "bona fide visitor" with "sufficiently strong ties" with my country of origin as to guarantee my return.
"Tell him you are leaving here your two biggest treasures", suggests my wife, meaning my 5-year old daughter and herself.I might work in my case, especially since that fact is supported with a job and a legal permit to live and work in a country that actually attracts immigrants, but it doesn't in many others. The St. Peters sitting on rich embassies in poor countries all over the world know all too well that for many desperate parents to leave behind their own treasures might be the only way to assure them a better life, if not simply just a life.
This — or other of the like — might has been the suspicion that grew in the minds of the St. Peters guarding the doors at the Canadian embassy in New Delhi, who have refused the visa applications of eight Nepalese participants who were granted full scholarship to attend the conference by the organizers.
One of them, a young woman living with AIDS and mother of two children, was awarded the scholarship and invested a significant amount of time, a lot of effort and the equivalent of four monthly salaries in flying back and forth between her city and Delhi only to see her application refused "due to the current situation" of her country.
"She could not believe it — says the person who told me the story —. But she could not do anything as well. It was a foreign land, she was alone, she does not speak good English. [...] Can someone tell this young lady the reason she was awarded a scholarship and the reason she is declined a visa. Or should I just tell her that she should forget everything and go back to work. Who will reimburse all the cost incurred during this whole time, anyway?"It is not only Nepalese participants, of course, who are being refused visas. Africans are having trouble too, in spite that the conference organizers have a team working to try to resolve problems with the Canadian government.
The Canadian embassy website candidly explains what the logic is: There has to be no doubt, in the mind of the visa officer, about the intentions of the applicant. "In case of doubt, the visa is refused. We do not give the applicant the benefit of the doubt."
