Europe and Immigration: Reflections on the fortress

In March I set off for an international conference in Luxembourg, the organisers having booked me on a Sabena (Belgian Airlines) flight from Gothenburg via Brussels. At Sabena's checking counter at Gothenburg's international airport I discovered that I had no chance of boarding the plane. I wondered why, and the ground hostess checking in my luggage pointed out that I am Palestinian and that my visa to Belgium had expired.

With a touch of superior reproach in my voice I enlightened the Belgian lady that I had not planned to break my journey in Belgium. I went on, topping up the sarcasm, that in any case I had only a 45-minute stopover in Brussels, sufficient simply for me to catch my flight to Luxembourg, a country for which I had a valid travel document and a visa. With disinterested slowness, the ground hostess informed me that Palestinians ought to have a special permit to enter Belgium and that I would not be able to get on the flight unless I had my Belgian visa renewed.

It was when I let go of my "Palestinian" temper, that a Sabena check-in supervisor arrived on the scene and took me aside to inform me that their decision not to accept me as a passenger was part of elaborate new legislation that the airline had received from Belgian authorities, a draconian set of new regulations restricting entry of non- Europeans into Belgium.

She then showed me a copy of the legislation which stated, among other things, that not only would I not be allowed, under the prevailing conditions, to board any Belgian plane, but neither would I be allowed to touch Belgian soil or enter that country's air space for the duration of a single second, even if I had the right of re-entry into Sweden (where my trip was beginning) and had a visa to Luxembourg (the country of my destination) -- and even were I to stay in the very aircraft that had taken me there -- unless I had a valid visa!

I protested vigorously and in harsher language, but to no avail. Eventually I did what I had to do. I recovered my luggage and stood at a KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) counter to be booked on a flight to Luxembourg, this time via Amsterdam, which, to my chagrin, would not leave until 2pm that day. As I waited for the computer to change the route but not the final destination of my trip, I calculated that my trip to Luxembourg would take five hours longer -- five hours in which I had all the time in the cosmos to curse. But curse whom? Curse myself, curse my naïveté; indeed curse the European and Arab worlds in which I lived.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/811/op8.htm