Tough refugee rules create agony for parents

By MARINA JIMÉNEZ
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

When Fazel Salimi was accepted as a refugee, he was forced to make an impossible choice — leave behind his newborn son, or get the rest of his family out of war-torn Iraq to the safety of Canada.

The infant, Mohamed, didn't have travel documents, so Mr. Salimi made the excruciatingly difficult decision to leave the five-week-old with the baby's grandmother after being assured by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that a visa would be issued within three months.

More than a year later, Mohamed is still stuck in a war zone, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada has requested that the baby undergo DNA testing to prove he belongs to Mr. Salimi and his wife, Runek Qahramani.

It's an expensive and potentially dangerous undertaking; the baby would have to make the treacherous trip from Baghdad by highway to Amman or cross into Syria for the $900 DNA test.

"I feared if I had stayed in Iraq with my baby, I would have been killed in the Ramadi refugee camp, where we lived, or lost my landing papers for Canada. But now I worry I made the wrong decision," Mr. Salimi said in an interview from Winnipeg, where he lives with his wife, parents and four-year-old son.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20041015.wrefug15/BNStory/Front/

how terrible...:(