STRANDED AIRPORT BLOGGER GOES DARK
SYRIAN MAN SEEKING ASYLUM IN CANADA ARRESTED AFTER LONG STAY IN MALAYSIAN AIR TERMINAL
ASyrian man who has lived for seven months in the budget terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport while he seeks refugee protection in Canada with the help of an activist in Whistler, B.C., has been arrested by Malaysian immigration police.
Hassan al Kontar’s popular social media accounts — on which he chronicled his life of boredom and uncertainty, his diet of airplane meals donated by Air Asia staff, and his efforts to bathe and groom himself in public washrooms and sleep on public benches — have gone ominously silent.
Al Kontar, 37, appears to be in imminent danger of deportation back to Syria, which has been devastated by a civil war marked by horrific maltreatment of dissidents and opponents of the ruling Assad regime. He faces imprisonment there for failing to complete mandatory military service.
His Toronto lawyer, Andrew Brouwer, a leading immigration lawyer, is “actively seeking to maintain his security,” and as a result has decided any public comment would be unhelpful. Laurie Cooper, a public relations professional in Whistler who has been raising money for him and helping co-ordinate his application for asylum in Canada, also declined to comment.
The Malaysian authorities, however, have publicly promised to deport al Kontar to Syria after they are finished interrogating him.
“Passengers at the boarding area are supposed to get on their flights but this man did not do so. He is situated in a forbidden zone and we had to take the necessary action,” said Mustafar Ali, Malaysia’s immigration chief.
He said al Kontar would be questioned by police. “We will then communicate with the Syrian embassy to facilitate deportation to his home country,” he said.
His story is a much darker and dangerous version of the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal, in which an Eastern European man is stranded in New York’s JFK airport after his fictional home country falls in a coup, and he becomes legally stateless.
Although he is not exactly stateless, al Kontar does not have the travel documents to get anywhere.
He comes from Dama, Syria, a small farming community of minority Druze in the far southwest of the country, near Suweida, where his father was an engineer and his mother a nurse. The region was attacked by ISIL fighters this summer. “It’s the price we keep paying as minority and peace believers,” he wrote at the time.
He left in 2006 to work in the United Arab Emirates as an insurance marketing manager, and the last time he visited Syria was in 2008. The war began in earnest in 2011, and the following year Syria refused to renew his passport because he had not served his military duties.
Having overstayed his visa in the UAE, and with his Syrian passport temporarily renewed, he was deported to Malaysia, which is one of the few countries that will accept Syrians on tourist visas.
He overstayed his Malaysia tourist visa, and as a result he can no longer enter the country by leaving the airport, nor leave it by boarding a plane.
He has tried various other countries. In February 2018, Turkish Airlines refused to board him on a flight to Ecuador. In March, he got to Cambodia, but they sent him back. His Syrian passport is set to expire in January 2019.
In the meantime, Canada has emerged as one of his most promising potential destinations. That is thanks largely to the efforts of Cooper, who has worked with Canada Caring, which helps refugees. A fundraising campaign raised more than $15,000. But his asylum application was filed only in March, and the wait can be as long as two years.
It is not clear what prompted the decision of the Malaysian authorities to arrest him now, after so many months.
His last posting on his Twitter account was a montage of “my life journey in photos,” with the comment: “In hard times, you will discover that what you become during the process is more important than the aim itself. You knew it was hard but you did it hard.”