Media for social change

Everyone has an intriguing life story to tell. We have all experienced significant moments that alter the course of our lives. For the better or the worse. But some stories are more compelling than others by the sheer intensity of the intrigue. Every so often, I come across an individual with a riveting story to tell. The past six years of Abousfian Abdelrazik’s life, as he described for one and a half hours on September 24 in a Montréal community centre, comes right out of a spy novel. In all spy novels, there are always the characters who suffer from applied foreign policy as practiced by intelligence agencies who follow leads without evidence. Since the first Gulf War, innocent people who suffer or are killed at the hands of powers-that-be are innocuously referred to as ‘collateral damage’.

To end Abdelrazik’s ordeal, he needed travel documents from the Canadian government to allow him to fly home. After months of refusing to provide Abdelrazik with these documents, a Canadian Federal Court Judge ordered the Canadian Government on June 4, 2009, to “issue [Abousfian Abdelrazik] an emergency passport in order that he may return to and enter Canada” and to “arrange transportation for [Mr. Abdelrazik] from Khartoum to Montreal, Canada such that he arrives in Canada no later than 30 days from the date hereof.”

In his story, Abdelrazik tells how he was twice arrested and imprisoned, why he took sanctuary inside the Canadian Embassy (much to the embassy’s consternation), and when he was put on the United Nations 1267 no-fly list by the United States.

For more details about his story, visit Peoples Commission Network website.

The video below is a ten-minute condensation of his presentation, in his own words, of the lengthy ordeal at the hands of Canadian, American and Sudanese intelligence agencies that left him in forced exile in Sudan for six years.