July 2004: Tariq Ramadan, probably Europe’s best-known Islamic intellectual, was hired by the University of Notre Dame for an endowed chair at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. But with his household belongings already shipped to South Bend, Ind., U.S. authorities abruptly canceled his visa, preventing him from taking the job. A government spokesman invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act, allowing the authorities to bar anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity.” A year later, Mr. Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, accepted a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford and was appointed by the British prime minister to a commission on terrorism. Last fall, after a federal court ordered the government to justify its visa refusal, the U.S. State Department said the scholar was barred because of contributions totaling about $800 he had made to two European groups providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
September 2004: Karim Meziane, a physicist at the University of New Brunswick and a Canadian citizen born in Algeria, was turned away at the U.S. border when he tried to attend a scientific conference at the University of New Hampshire. Unusually, the Department of Homeland Security answered a query from him with a letter stating he was turned away because of “unlawful activities committed in Canada.” Mr. Meziane then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who wrote back that Canada “does not hold any information that would indicate involvement in criminal activities or criminal conviction for the name Karim Meziane.” U.S. authorities have not dropped their ban on his entry nor provided an explanation.
March 2005: Dora María Téllez, a historian who, while a young medical student, was one of the leaders of the 1979 Sandinista movement that overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had to resign from a teaching position she had accepted at Harvard Divinity School after the United States denied her a visa. A U.S. official said that Ms. Téllez, who served as Nicaragua’s minister of health, had been involved in “terrorism.” The accusation brought protests from Harvard and others. Ms. Téllez said the accusation created a threat to her “safety and personal integrity.”
August 2005: Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, a Bolivian historian, was unable to take a teaching job at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln after U.S. authorities withheld his visa. Mr. Ari is an Aymara Indian, one of Bolivia’s largest native ethnic groups. A specialist in Latin America’s indigenous populations, Mr. Ari received a Ph.D. from Georgetown University in early 2005. After being hired by Nebraska, he returned home to La Paz to settle his affairs. But the U.S. Embassy there did not issue him a work visa and canceled his still-valid student visa. This May, after the university sued the government, the Department of Homeland Security finally approved the employment-visa petition the university had submitted almost two years earlier, which allows Mr. Ari’s visa request to be considered.
November 2005: Vicente Verez-Bencomo, a Cuban scientist, was barred from entering the United States to accept an award at California’s Tech Museum of Innovation for his research team’s development of a low-cost vaccine for meningitis and pneumonia. Science magazine said the vaccine “may someday save millions of lives.” He was also invited to address a gathering of the Society for Glycobiology, in Boston. The State Department said his visit would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Mr. Verez-Bencomo told the Associated Press, “I wasn’t going there to talk about politics; I was going to talk about science.”
March 2006: All 55 Cuban scholars registered to attend the conference of the Latin American Studies Association, in Puerto Rico, had their visas denied. At the previous conference, held in Las Vegas in September 2004, all 65 registered Cuban scholars were informed 10 days before the event that their visa requests had been turned down. As a result, LASA declared it would hold all future meetings outside the United States until the government ends its policy of barring some of its members. In recent years, the Bush administration appears to have barred most Cuban academics invited by U.S. institutions for conferences or fellowships.
June 2006: Yoannis (John) Milios, a professor at the National Technical University of Athens, had his visa revoked and was put on a flight back to Greece after arriving in New York for an academic conference at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mr. Milios, a member of the Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) party, and twice a candidate for the Greek Parliament, was scheduled to present a paper at a conference organized by Stony Brook’s Center for Study of Working Class Life. He says officials at the airport questioned him for several hours about his political views and told him his visa was being canceled due to “technical difficulties” before sending him back to Athens.
October 2006: Adam Habib, a professor of political science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a prominent South African political commentator, was detained upon his arrival at a New York airport, had his visa revoked, and was sent back to South Africa. Mr. Habib was part of a delegation from that country’s Human Sciences Research Council, where he directs the program in democracy and governance. He had been scheduled to meet with officials of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Bank, and scholars at both Columbia University and the City University of New York (where he earned his Ph.D.). Three months later the United States revoked the visas of Mr. Habib’s wife and children.
April 2007: Riyadh Lafta, a prominent Iraqi professor of medicine at Al-Mustansiriya University, in Baghdad, was unable to enter the United States to give a long-planned lecture at the University of Washington and work with colleagues there on a research project on increased rates of cancer among children in southern Iraq. Mr. Lafta was a one of the principal authors of an October 2006 article in the British medical journal, The Lancet, that continues to be a source of controversy with its estimate that more than 650,000 Iraqis — many more than officially reported — had died as a result of the American-led invasion.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 41, Page A41
