Abandoned in Kenya

The ordeal of Suaad Mohamud, the Canadian trapped in Kenya since May, is a national disgrace. An apology and a new policy are in order.

A consummate, national disgrace. The still unfolding ordeal of Ms. Suaad Mohamud, the Canadian citizen trapped in Kenya for the past three months due to the actions of our government officials, cannot be described in any other way.

The facts speak for themselves: In May of this year, Ms. Mohamud goes on a three-week vacation to Nairobi to visit her ailing mother. On May 21, as she prepares to fly home to Toronto, a Kenyan customs official stops her and has her arrested, saying that she looks different than her passport photo. The next day, still in airport custody, she is visited by a Canadian consular official, to whom she explains she is a Canadian citizen. As proof, she presents over a dozen pieces of Canadian identification, many of them government-issued.

Despite the evidence, the Canadian official declares her to be an imposter and voids her passport. On May 25, after spending a total of four days at the airport in custody, Ms. Mohamud is taken to the Canadian High Commission office, where she re-presents all of her documentation and asks to be fingerprinted, so that those can be compared to the prints on her immigration records. On May 28, the First Secretary of the Canadian High Commission in Kenya writes to Kenyan immigration officials stating it had been “confirmed that the person brought to (us) on suspicion of being an imposter is not the rightful holder of the aforementioned Canadian passport,” and sends her voided passport to the Kenyan officials to aid in the prosecution.

On June 3, Ms. Mohamud is arrested on charges of fraudulent use of a passport and being in Kenya illegally. She is thrown into a Kenyan prison, until a friend posts $2,500 bail to get her released, over a week later. Only when her family hires a lawyer, who sues the Canadian government, and Canadian media reports on her plight, does our government re-open the case. On August 4, a DNA test proves that Ms. Mohamud is who she claimed to be. As of now, she is still in Kenya, separated from her husband and 12-year-old son in Toronto, and has been living off of charity throughout this ordeal.

As an international lawyer who has frequented the region, there are a number of things that make this case particularly disturbing. One is that it is not uncommon for certain border and customs officials in developing countries to try to extort bribes from travelling foreigners. It’s clear that Ms. Mohamud fits the profile of the people typically victimized in this way: a woman traveling alone from a wealthy "first world" country, who was non-white and, according to her passport, not born in Canada. She was traveling on vacation, rather than on business and, importantly, she was not a diplomat, Canadian government or international official, so interfering with her would draw no immediate repercussions.

We don't know for sure, and probably never will, but this looks like a textbook case of a “wealthy foreigner” being targeted (Ms. Mohamud has also stated that she believed she was being solicited for a bribe when the official first started questioning her identity).

What makes the actions of the Canadian officials particularly odd and disturbing is that Consular staff in developing countries are generally well aware of these realities, having often seen (or even experienced) such extortion attempts. As a result, they are sensitive to the fact that they act as the last, and often only, line of defence for a normal citizen who is being so targeted while traveling abroad.

The gravity of this situation should not be underestimated. This was no mere inconvenience that Ms. Mohamud was (and continues to be) subjected to. Make no mistake; she was put into very real danger. For those who don’t know, a prison in a developing country is not a place where anyone would want to be. It is not an exaggeration to say that she could well have been killed in the eight days before her friends managed to raise the funds to bail her out.

What also needs to be clearly understood is that these events were not merely something unfortunate that happened to Ms. Mohamud; in reality, this was something that was done to her. Whether as a result of incompetence, or merely indifference, the galling fact of the matter is that in this case, Canadian officials not only failed to protect Ms. Mohamud, but were ultimately responsible for her prosecution and subsequent ordeal.

One of the prime duties of any country, and particularly all democratic ones, is to make best efforts to protect its citizens abroad. Lately, in an apparent reversal of previous policy, Canada seems to have forgotten that. In this and a number of other recent cases, the Canadian government has refused to render assistance to Canadians in jeopardy overseas, until supporters of the stranded parties have actually had to take the extraordinary step of hiring lawyers to take the government to Federal court. In the recent Abdelrazik case, the Federal government actually sent its lawyers to argue that it had no obligation to assist Canadian citizens overseas, and only acted to bring Mr. Abelrazik home (he had been stranded in Sudan for the past two years, and was living in the gym of the Canadian Embassy – seriously) when they lost the case and were literally forced to act by a court order.

It is interesting to contrast this case with the recent situation in which two American reporters were captured, tried, and sentenced to prison in North Korea. The U.S. government sent former President Bill Clinton to successfully negotiate their release; in Ms. Mohamud’s case, the Canadian government took away her passport, erroneously branded her an imposter, and facilitated her prosecution. Call it Southern hospitality versus Northern exposure.

Canada’s new posture in these cases is bizarre. Given the increasingly globalized world in which we now live, and our country’s stated intention to be a leader in this new reality, it is strange that our government would adopt a position sure to make Canadian citizens wary about going to other nations. The (justifiable) fear that, should they run into trouble there, Canadians may be on their own, will only breed insularity.

One thing is for certain, the government’s handling of this matter has been a complete embarrassment. Now that her identity has been verified, a mere two months after her incarceration in Kenya, the Canadian government has at last asked the Kenyans to drop the charges against her. Though it must be coming, there has been no apology offered. In fact, thus far there has been no comment from anyone in a position of authority, which matches the utter lack of a sense of urgency, interest, and remorse which has been displayed throughout this entire sorry affair. Indeed, the only government comment on the matter came from the Foreign Affairs Minister, who said two weeks ago that the onus lay on Ms. Mohamud to try harder to prove she was a Canadian citizen. Having already produced a dozen pieces of identification, along with testimonials from employers, friends, and family, it’s hard to imagine what more Ms. Mohamud could have done, unless it is now incumbent on travelers to carry DNA test results when crossing our borders.

One can only hope that with Ms. Mohamud’s identity now undeniably established, our government will act swiftly to reunite her with her family in Toronto, and that moreover, responsibility will be taken for this fiasco and policies implemented to prevent it from ever happening again. Undoubtedly, this will be difficult and painful, but it should be done knowing that what Ms. Mohamud suffered through over the past few months was much, much worse.