American Justice

Newsweek
Shroud of Secrecy
The jailing of two elderly Afghan asylum seekers has hurt a family--and underscored Washington’s lack of transparency in a post-9/11 world
By Eleanor Clift
Updated: 6:31 p.m. ET July 1, 2005
July 1 - The wheels of justice are not turning smoothly for Gokal Kapoor, a Hindu who entered the United States illegally in 1997 after fleeing Afghanistan to escape religious persecution by the Taliban. He applied for political asylum and had every reason to expect it would be granted.

But four years after his case first made its way into the system, it was finally dismissed on the basis that the Taliban’s removal from power meant that the family did not have a well-founded fear of future persecution. By then the septuagenarian had a Social Security number, worked as a baggage handler at Dulles Airport, paid taxes and had hoped to be included in a U.S. program that routinely granted asylum to Hindu refugees from Afghanistan. What he didn’t take into account was the extra scrutiny he would receive in the post-9/11 world.

The immigration judge who initially turned down his application was critical of the fact that Kapoor’s prominent brother, Dr. Wishwa Kapoor, chief of general internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, did not attend the immigration hearing. For this reason, the judge apparently believed he must have aided and abetted his brother’s illegal entry into the United States.

The judge was wrong on both counts. Hindus do not believe they can live in Afghanistan without being persecuted, and there are so few left in the country it’s hard to prove otherwise. And Dr. Kapoor didn’t testify because his older brother, now 70, was too proud to ask him. The judge could have summoned the doctor to testify, rather than smear him, a man of impeccable reputation who was not there to defend himself, let alone his brother.

Ten days ago, Dr. Kapoor got a 10 p.m. call from his sister in Virginia to say that their brother and his wife, Shiela, 69, had been taken from their home by immigration officials. The officials told the couple’s son--who had graduated from high school earlier that day--that his parents would be back in a few hours. They were not, and it took two days before a lawyer hired by Dr. Kapoor found out that the couple were in Pamunkey prison, north of Richmond, Va.

Dr. Kapoor does not know why his brother is being held. “[We] cannot get any information from the authorities,” he told NEWSWEEK. “The only thing we know is that they want to deport him back to Afghanistan. They fled the persecution of the Taliban and they would rather die than go back.”

Everything has been done under a cloak of secrecy. There is none of the transparency that should be a hallmark of democracy. Family members, friends, even people of influence in a position to help are kept in the dark.

“I am disheartened by what is happening in our country,” Dr. Kapoor e-mailed Richard Shriver, a friend who is attempting to intervene in the case. “I am concerned that we are playing into the hands of people who are only interested in curtailing our freedom. This era unfortunately reminds me of what we did to Japanese in another era. I am distressed immensely and the scars are going to remain for a long time.”

Dr. Kapoor is an American citizen. He came to the U.S. more than 30 years ago after earning a degree in chemical engineering from Kabul University. He intended to return to Afghanistan to practice medicine, but the war and the communist takeover there put an end to that. Today as UPMC’s chief of general internal medicine with some 90 doctors, professors and researchers reporting to him, Dr. Kapoor is one of the foremost medical leaders in the United States. Yet he feels helpless when it comes to his brother’s plight.

His prominence as a physician gives Dr. Kapoor access to people who should be able to help his brother. Among those he has contacted is Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican. “Sending them to Afghanistan where there is no Hindu community and where religious hatred is still extensive is condemning them to possible atrocities against them including murder,” he wrote to Santorum. “I am a strong believer in the justice system in our country; however, I feel that justice is not being served in this case.”

A Santorum spokesman says the senator is looking into the matter. Meanwhile, Dr. Kapoor--who finally received a phone call from his distressed brother in prison earlier this week--is also in touch with Shriver, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan and director of telecommunications at Defense under President Ford. Shriver describes his current work as nation-building, a field he entered through the International Executive Service Corps, which sends retired Americans who have the expertise and the energy into the world to help out. Shriver met Kapoor when his wife underwent a liver transplant at the Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“Is this the America we know?” Shriver asks incredulously when he tells the story of Kapoor’s brother. A man with deep connections in the political world, Shriver started a year ago trying to pry loose information about Gokal Kapoor. He called Fred Fielding, a Washington lawyer who served in the Nixon White House and who knows, as the saying goes, where all the bodies are buried. And he wrote a letter to President Bush, drawing on the fact that he had known Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush’s national-security advisor. “We lived in police states and we know what they’re like,” Shriver told NEWSWEEK. “I believe if President Bush got a briefing on this, he’d say this can’t be right.”

But Shriver doubts his letter will get past the mailroom. He doesn’t know anybody in this White House, and the Bushies are notorious for shutting out everybody, even veterans of Bush One. A Republican whose instinct is to support Bush, Shriver finds these events profoundly disturbing. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Berlin, where he is provost of the European College of Liberal Arts.

Their home is near the square named for Martin Niemoeller, the Lutheran pastor who spent seven years in a concentration camp for speaking out against Hitler. Niemoller’s most famous statement was: “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the trade unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.” Shriver knows the passage by heart.