By BaghdadhopeMany years ago I bought a book containing Beatles’ songs lyrics. Yesterday, reading an article published by the Toronto Star, that book came back to me. Or rather, the story I was reading made me remember the first verses of a song and the image representing it. "He’s a real Nowhere man, sitting in his Nowhere land, making all his Nowhere plans for nobody…”
“Nowhere man” is the title of the song, and those verses seem to me perfect to describe the history of Anjeal Sarkissian, her husband Karabet Aram and their three children Shant, Agob and Apel, an Armenian family living until a few years ago in Iraq where their ancestors had established more than a century ago. Armenians then, but Iraqis for the law, the language, the traditions acquired over time. Armenians who, like many other Iraqis were forced to flee violence and threats and to live in a refugee camp in Jordan with a single, far away, hope remaining on the other side of the ocean and of the continents, in the cold Canada where Anjeal's brother, Azad, lives. A brother who in the last six years tried, with the help of the Assyrian Methodist Church of Canada, to rescue his relatives and getting them in Toronto, strong of his Canadian citizenship acquired after having legally emigrated there in 1997.
Let’s imagine the shock, the disillusion, the despair when, after the last attempt, the response of the Canadian visa officer in Damascus was that Anjeal and her family could not reach their relative in Toronto but could rather go to Armenia. Go to Armenia? Certainly the ancestral ties with that country exist but life, the future of Anjeal, Karabet and their children, denied in the country where they were all born, is not in a land where they would be foreigners and alone just as in Taipei or in Hungary, but where those who love them, wait for them, would help them to rebuild their lives gone to pieces live. And then, even if they chose it they could not go to Armenia. Who, as one client of the immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges, tried to do after the rejection of his refugee application by Canada, not only was refused the visa by the Armenian embassy in Canada, but also a document certifying his request, and its refusal, that could serve to resubmit the application to Canada. According to the refugee case law, in fact, Canada can redirect a request for refuge to a third state only with the guaranty that it will be accepted, but Armenia, according to Arman Akopian, chargé d'affaires of the Republic of Armenia in Canada, accepts only applicants well-established in the Armenian diaspora, pointing out how, given the period of economic transition that the Asiatic country lives, it cannot absorb an influx of refugees and therefore this practice "is not encouraged."
It is against these laws that Azad Sarkissian, the Armenian-Canadian, will have to fight to free Anjeal, Karabet and their children, the "Nowhere family."