Holland permits Syrian officials to interrogate Syrian refugees
Syria-Netherlands, Politics, 2/25/2006

Two Syrian officials are working in the Netherlands to check the identity of Syrians that will have to leave the country.

The Syrians are asked to come to the offices of the Dutch immigration service, but not told that they are going to meet representatives of the Syrian government. Most of the 270 Syrians who are interrogated by the Syrians, amongst them asylum-seekers, are afraid that their information will end up with the Syrian intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

The "presentations" of the Syrians are held in Zwolle, Den Bosch, and Rotterdam. According to the Dutch immigration service (IND) the Syrian officials belong to the Syrian immigration service in Damascus.

This "Al Hijra wa al djawazat" (passport and migration) is part of the ministry of internal affairs and is "only run by the military and the secret service," says Abdulselam Youssef, spokesman for the Platform of Syrian Refugees in the Netherlands.

Giving information to them is dangerous, he says, pointing at the dictatorship of the Syrian government, "also for the relatives of these people in Syria."

There are a few hundred Syrians living in the Netherlands without a permit to stay, most of them rejected asylum-seekers. To deport them, the Dutch government normally sends them to the embassy in Brussels to get travel-papers. As this doesn't work, the Dutch and Syrian government decided to send in two Syrian officials which can determine the identity of the Syrians on Dutch ground.

One of the officials, Ghazi Hamdan, has according to several sources a high rank in the Syrian army. His job would be the gathering of information on Syrians living abroad. The other, Ahmed Hayoush, works as an immigration-official. According to several Syrians who spoke to them, they posses photographs of the Syrian asylum-seekers, and information on their names, places of birth -- also of their parents and other relatives.

The Dutch ministry of justice assures that sensitive information of the refugees stays secret, but the Syrians don't believe that. They say it is unbelievable that the IND asks them to come to their offices, without telling them that they are going to meet Syrian officials. "We are set up," says one of them.

Video-footage, shot in secret, of one of the meetings shows the Syrian officials asking if the Syrians are political asylum-seekers or if they had economic reasons to come to the Netherlands. Minister Verdonk of Immigration had a hard time last year in the Netherlands, when she had to admit that information on deported asylum-seekers from Congo was being sent to the authorities in Congo.

Human rights-lawyer Haitam Malehdie, who will be granted the important Dutch peace-prize de Geuzenpenning next month, says in Damascus it's dangerous to send people back to Syria. "The authorities ask themselves what these people where doing abroad, and will keep a close watch on them. Nobody knows what exactly happens under the Syrian regime. People can just disappear."

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