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The Land of The Indefinitely Incarcerated
 When I recently read the story of Shakir Baloch, a Canadian citizen who was unjustly imprisoned in the United States for seven months because of his Pakistani heritage and the colour of his skin, it reminded me of the Japanese incarcerations during the Second World War.
A doctor while living in Pakistan and son of a prominent politician, Baloch has been a Canadian citizen since 1994 and lives in Toronto. He had been working in New York as a taxi driver while he studied at the Columbia–Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York to recertify as a doctor in order to support his wife and teenage daughter. He was arrested in Queens, New York on September 20 in a post–9/11 frenzy in which more than 1,200 men, mostly of Arabic and Muslim background, were imprisoned in the United States. For months, his wife had no idea what had happened to him because he was denied the right to contact her or a lawyer. Of his seven months in prison, five were spent in solitary confinement in a small room that was under lights 24 hours a day. He said he was repeatedly interrogated about the events of September 11th. When he was able to go outside, he was in shackles. All this took place inside the Special Housing Unit of the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, a unit reserved for dangerous crimminals. He was finally released on April 15, 2002, after pleading guilty to a misdemeanour immigration charge and is banned from entering the United States for five years. Like he'd want to return... According to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty : "We are entering a very dangerous understanding of civil society if disappearances of hundreds of men of Middle Eastern descent is becoming a silently acceptable norm." So it seems the majority of these men were arrested because of the colour of their skin. Perhaps the most injust and disgusting (but not surprising) part of all this is the fact that not ONE of the 800 people who have been detained in the Metropolitan Detention Center by the U.S. government has been charged with any terrorist crime. Read more in this week's online edition of The Village Voice.
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