http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxmc121802.html
December 18, 2002 The Progressive
McCarthyism Watch: A Request for Training in Relief Work Raises Suspicion
Yaju Dharmarajah and his wife, Pilar Schiavo, were trying to sign up for a training session put on by the federal government in how to do emergency relief.
This innocuous request prompted a visit.
Dharmarajah and Schiavo, who live in Hadley, Massachusetts, hope to do international refugee work. They've taken trainings with the International Red Cross and other groups, they say. On July 3, Dharmarajah called the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) and left a message to see if they could participate in one of its training sessions.
"I got a call back on July 5," he says. "An outreach director asked why we were interested in trainings. We told her we wanted to do refugee and relief work in Africa and Asia. Then she said, 'What do you do for a living?'
"I said, 'I'm a union organizer, and my wife is a documentary filmmaker.'
"Then she asked me again why I wanted to get training."
The whole conversation lasted only two minutes or so, he says.
Five days later, on July 10, an Amherst police officer and a UMass police officer came calling. Both were in plain clothes. The Amherst police officer was Sergeant Charles H. Nelson, who left his card. Dharmarajah and Schiavo believe the UMass officer was Barry Flanders, who is working with the FBI. (See "FBI Goes on Campus," McCarthyism Watch, December 17.)
"It was early afternoon, maybe like 2:00 or 3:00, and they knocked," says Schiavo, who was born in the United States. "I thought it was the neighbor, and I just yelled, 'Come in.' "Then I heard these male voices, and I said, 'Oh, just a minute.'
"They said they were looking for a Pilar and a Yaju.
"I said, 'I'm Pilar.'
"And they said, 'We got a call from MEMA, and we want to ask you a couple of questions.'
"I didn't allow them in. I was talking through the screen. At first, I couldn't think who MEMA was, and then I said, 'OK.'
"They said, 'We got a call from them saying you were interested in trainings on terrorism and you wanted to film them.'
"I kind of laughed, and I said, 'I didn't want to film them, and we didn't call them about trainings in terrorism. That has nothing to do with what we're interested in. We wanted training on disaster relief.'
"They asked why.
"I said, 'We're wanting to do refugee work, and we're trying to build our resumes.'
"They asked me what my films were about.
"I told them: One is about a woman on the men's wrestling team in high school, and another is about three gay men in a white community, and the other is about community organizing on low-wage work.
"One of the officers asked if we were affiliated with any organizations. I said, 'No, I was in the room when my husband made this phone call, and he didn't say anything about terrorism, I think someone's projecting their own fears.'
"One of them said, 'Yeah, that could be. We've been getting a lot of calls with everything going on.' "
For Schiavo and Dharmarajah, the visit was rattling.
"It's just very scary," says Schiavo. "We were a little nervous about speaking out about it. People aren't thinking with reason right now."
They suspect that their phone has been tapped.
"We don't know if we're on a list now," Schiavo says. "We had been hoping to go to Montreal, but now we're afraid to cross the border because he could be detained indefinitely. And we're worried about applying for jobs now. We wonder if we're damaged goods and we won't be able to get international work just because the woman my husband talked to at MEMA was paranoid about his accent."
A spokesperson for MEMA was not able to track down any information on this case, and the FBI in Boston had no comment. Neither Sergeant Nelson nor detective Flanders returned phone calls seeking comment. (The Daily Hampshire Gazette first reported on this case in an article by Cheryl B. Wilson on November 19.)
Dharmarajah, is a Tamil, a member of a persecuted minority in Sri Lanka, and he says his recent experience brought back a sense of deja vu.
"We were used to being pulled out of cars and put into jail. It happened to the entire family. They'd do raids on our house and put us in jail for a day, or a couple of hours, and then we'd get out," he recalls. While he acknowledges that the repression in the United States today is nowhere near what it was in Sri Lanka, he says that people there would at least know where you were. "But because of the Patriot Act, we have no rights. I can be deported, and I can be held without charges, and my wife has no way of knowing where I am."
-- Matthew Rothschild
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