Asylum Network

Stories of Survival

Thomas Wesu

Africa

Thomas Wesu is lucky. Not only because he is still alive, after making friends among his country's brutally persecuted ethnic minority. Not only because he has received asylum in the United States, so that he won’t face execution by the state police at home. Not only because he has now learned — after more than a year without contact — that his wife and children are also alive and safe out of his country.

Mainly, Thomas is lucky because, before trouble hit, he had a job. He had money. He had contacts. He had an education, and he was smart.

Thomas’s trouble with his government grew unexpectedly out of a couple of personal friendships. Through his work as an executive with a local company in his country’s capital city, he had formed close relationships with colleagues who happened to belong to the country’s ethnic minority. But as a civil war between the government — controlled by the ethnic majority — and rebels from the minority ethnic group soon intensified, the local population and the army took to the streets, arresting and lynching members or relatives of that ethnic minority.

Thomas, however, did not abandon his friends in the face of adversity. "My opinion was that the civil war resulted from the fact that some citizens did not find their place in the existing dictatorial political situation," he says. And so, when the surge of government-sponsored ethnic hatred threatened his friends, Thomas did not abide by the government’s plans. On the contrary, he assisted his friends as well as he could.

He gave his friends shelter from the local police and from the rioting mobs, and he arranged for their escape from the government-controlled territory. He maintained telephone contact with his “exiled” friends. "I was able to talk to my friends,” he says. “We did not talk about politics, only about personal matters like our health and our families."

But in December of 1999 Thomas was contacted by the local security police. The police chief warned him that his friends, being of the same ethnicity as the rebels, were enemies of the state "who must be subjected to revenge attacks in reprisal for perceived or potential disloyalty to the regime." Thomas responded calmly by arguing that the state should open itself up to inter-ethnic dialogue.

Days later, soldiers armed with rifles raided his home, charging into his house as he was dressing and threatening to shoot his wife and children. Thomas was stunned to discover that he had become a criminal, wanted by the police. “There were soldiers everywhere in the house,” he said. In front of his family, “they started beating me with rifle butts, ropes and boots. They said they would kill me.”

Corruption and bribery being common, Thomas's wife frantically offered the soldiers jewelry, household goods and $800 in cash to get them to leave. They left, but they took Thomas with them to the security police headquarters. “I was very scared,” he says, “because that place had a very bad reputation.

After sitting handcuffed for hours, Thomas was interrogated about his friends in rebel-controlled territory. As he refused to answer, the soldiers beat him, kicked him, lashed him with ropes and sticks in his head, chest, shoulders and arms. “My nose and my mouth were bleeding, and my body and my head hurt,” he remembers.

“Then they took my hands and they put sticks between my fingers and they pressed my fingers together. It hurt so much I could not feel my fingers. I did not even have the strength to moan.” The soldiers kept asking him about his friends, the alleged rebels. In particular, they asked him whom he was calling by phone in rebel territory, and what they talked about.

Throughout the interrogation and torture, Thomas revealed nothing. His wife managed to obtain his release by using more connections and paying more bribes. After two days of hospitalization, Thomas went back to work, still in pain from, among other injuries, a broken collarbone that would never fully heal.

He thought that his nightmare encounters with the security police were over. Unfortunately, just over a month later, Thomas received a message at work. Soldiers had visited his home, threatened his wife and children, and accused them of belonging to the rebels’ ethnic group. He was told that his wife had been hospitalized after being hit by a rifle butt to the knee — in front of their children.

Then, a few months later, the security police warned Thomas that they now had “documentary proof” that he had been in contact with enemies of the state. Fearing for his safety, he sought protection from the country's human rights agency. But the agency had become instrumental to a government propaganda campaign designed to extol the country’s human rights record. Thomas's complaint fell upon deaf ears.

Soon after, security agents cornered Thomas in the parking lot of his workplace. “The security agents told me that they had proof that I was collaborating with the rebellion,” he says. “They told me: 'you deserve death, the punishment of those who commit treason against this country. You will be arrested, tried in a military tribunal and sentenced to death.”

Then, the security agents told Thomas: “we will let you go, but on one condition: you will report monthly on government opponents. If you do not fully cooperate, you will be executed.” At that point, Thomas realized that he was in the gravest danger, because he understood immediately that the security police would use him first, then get rid of him anyway. “I saw myself as already dead. I was very, very scared.”

He pretended to cooperate with the police, but quickly arranged to leave the country. He obtained a six-month visa to the United States, and with the help of a $400 bribe to airport customs officers, he boarded a U.S.-bound plane. He could not bring his wife and children with him, so they had to go into hiding.

“I am but one victim among many others,” Thomas reflects now. “I was lucky, because of money and good contacts that I made, to have had the means to escape. There are many others who did not have the opportunity I had.”

“He came with a passport, lots of documents," says Nicolas Seckel, the pro bono attorney provided to Thomas through Catholic Charities Legal Services. “We were very confident that it was going to go well. He understood what sort of evidence he needed, and he knew how to tell his story.”

The asylum case, Nicolas says, was a particularly easy one. An examination by Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network physician James Cobey, an orthopedist, confirmed that Thomas had sustained injuries consistent with the abuse he described at the hands of government agents. Even today, the pain in Thomas's left shoulder persists; it still keeps him up at night, and doctors have told him it is doubtful he will ever regain full range of motion.

Although his legal road to asylum was relatively easy, Thomas’s first months in the U.S. were most difficult. The day after he left his country for the U.S., his wife and children fled the capital city. For more than a year, Thomas did not know their whereabouts, did not know even whether they were still alive.

“It was not good at all for me. It was terrible not to have news,” he says. Finally, a friend called to tell him they were alive and well, having successfully fled to another country. "I don’t know how to describe how very, very happy I was to talk to them on the phone," he recalls.

Now Thomas is planning to enroll in a vocational program at a U.S. university, and he awaits his family’s arrival. He looks forward to earning the American equivalent of his degree, doing useful work in his adopted home, and providing for his reunited family.

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