Respect half-breeds who are. . . Born with a country [Archives:2003/03/Focus]

TEWFICK AABDULAH ALI MOHADI
Email:[email protected]
Long a go, our grandfathers and grandmothers traveled thousands of miles away from their villages and bore our fathers in the societies where they settled.
At those times there were no political boundaries between nations as the situation is nowadays, no strict immigration policy, and no need to pass through the sophisticated asylum status procedures. Our fathers brought us to life through our indigenous mothers who are totally foreigners. Both societies, the one to which our fathers belong and the one our mothers do, called us later, “half-breeds” (Muwallad). I don’t know if it is a biological name.
Left alone
Today, in the time of globalization, when the whole world is considered as one village, we the half-cast community, are facing a lot of problems to have an ID card, passport, and a peaceful environment in our job areas. Just because we are born of two different societies, we are left alone to face a helpless long bureaucracy. I only believe, Allah is too right, when He creates us that way. He has always the best reasons before He does something comes to being.
We, the people who travel from mother’s country to father’s country, we know in heart, the breathless process to have a lesypassé (Murruor) in the embassy of Yemen accredited in any foreign countries.
After we arrived here, the second long bureaucracy procedure will start all over again. We are questioned a lot of things, which is totally beyond our power. Sometimes, they need us to deliver the former old passport, which the Yemen Embassy in mother’s country retained in return of the lesypassé. Here at the immigration authority, the staff and the supervisors precisely know that, Arabic is not our mother tongue, but they need us to learn it and speak it over night.
In the Immigration Authority, most are good, flexible, experienced, understanding and tolerant people. But some are still untouchable. The only word they know is the word ” No!”
They are all checking exhaustively and repetitively the documents provided by the half-breed applicants before they issue the passport. Literally they check our papers several times again and again and even again. They are even hesitating their own handwriting and may cancel all of a sudden what they did minutes ago. Nothing is believed till you have your passport in your hand and walk away from the yard. While you are walking to the gateway, a policeman may call you from behind and say to you ” return the passport your document is unfit! “We know the bottom line of all this is, about surveillance, the security concern. The government may plan to identify and filter those, who are seeking for getting a passport while they are not Yemenis. It is something good to brush our foreign policies in this regard. I appreciate the Ali Abdulah administration that he is working hard on blocking the access to the wrong people to possess a Yemeni passport.
To keep the image of Yemen in the outside world, this is a conditional policy undertaken by the president currently.
Where do we belong?
The policy is good, as long as we are all working for prosperous Yemen. But, in the name of security concern, the fate of the half-breed community may be marginalized whenever bad situations after bad situations occur.
I would like to say something important to the Yemen congress: ” if we, the Yemeni half-breed community, are not given a citizenship in the countries of our mother’s, and if we are still feeling small in our father’s country to apply for passport, do you mean that, we are the people, who are born without a country?”
We are hearing from the public rumors that, it is still the president who is fighting for our right. Leave alone our bloodlines, we are contributing a lot to the Yemen economy. Today, even the EU- member states are giving international protection, work permits, residency permits and then an international passport to emigrants who are flowing like a river in to their countries in a dynamic basis.
We are not emigrants. It is your own people who migrated and brought us to life in the courses of their travels. We are rather re-settlers. Yemen is your country and our country.
We need to develop the nature of globalization with other societies for our own economic benefit. And we need to accept the nature of resettlement to our own blood. The Jewish people are collecting individuals from the entire world whenever they get a sort of legend history related with them. Americans give citizenship in a Diversity Visa.
Speaking about the president
Yemen is an Arab and a Muslim nation. Under Ali Abdullah leadership, we respect our neighbors, we work with the international community and we develop the trend of the import / export, to possess the benefit of positive trade balance.
The president’s economic reform is motivating privatization and investment and that has been showing a good result bit by bit. He believes in free economy and he complies with the culture of globalization, he is holding and caring the entire society according to its culture and needs. He is a popular leader due to this very nature of his. Without any exaggeration, we are proud of his leadership! He is both modern and traditionalist! And that, it has to be.
We hope, the Yemen half-caste society will be getting a better treatment in any governmental institutions and will have a chance to contribute to the country’s economy flexibly.
A man without a country is bad, but it is worse when a country is left out without its own people.

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