PORTUGAL-INDIA: Crime Rings Sell Fake Portuguese Passports By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Feb 13 (IPS) - A Portuguese official thought he was seeing things when he read a huge billboard offering Portuguese passports, along the highway running from the airport to the centre of the city of Goa in western India. ''Worried about your future and wish to keep your family's options open? Take advantage of the benefits of Portuguese nationality, which is available to all people from Goa'', read the billboard. Similar ads can also be seen in Diu and Daman, the other two cities in western India that along with Goa formed the Portuguese State of India (PSI) until late 1961. Indian citizens entitled to Portuguese nationality because they or their forebears were born in the PSI before Portugal pulled out frequently apply for passports to sell for a paltry sum to organised crime rings. The mafias then sell them at a high price not only to people from other parts of India but also to citizens of neighbouring countries who are physically similar to Indians, like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The process of applying for a passport costs nearly 700 dollars. The crime rings then sell the documents for between 1,240 and 1,860 dollars, according to information disseminated early this month by Goan-born Portuguese parliamentary Deputy Narana Coissoro. The secretary of state of the Portuguese community, Jose Cesario, was the Portuguese official who spied the billboards on his way to Goa during a visit to the former enclaves in India late last year. But despite the efforts by Portugal's judicial police, and by the Civil Registry, where 11,221 passport applications are under investigation, Portuguese authorities admit that the racket continues. Cesario said ''sales of Portuguese nationality have become a lucrative business'' for crime rings that specialise in forgeries and in trafficking immigrants to the European Union (EU), of which Portugal forms part. When asked about the shady business by international analyst Ana Cristina Pereira who writes for the Lisbon newspaper Publico, the lawyer for the former PSI, Teresa Colaco, said ''there are less billboards in the streets now, but there are still ads posted every day in the newspapers'' in Goa, Diu and Daman. Since Portugal joined the European Economic Community, now the EU, in 1986, applications for Portuguese passports have soared, peaking between 2000 and 2003 at double the number of a decade and a half earlier. Since the start of the 21st century, an increasing number of cases of ''usurpation of identity'' began to be seen, with ''applications submitted under the names of people who had already applied for Portuguese nationality,'' said Conceicao de Jacinto, the head of the judicial police forgeries department. The judicial police estimate that 15,000 people from India have applied for Portuguese citizenship in consulates since 1994, and that less than half did so on the basis of genuine birth certificates and other documents. Among the bearers of adulterated Portuguese passports -- which differ from fake ones in that the document is authentic although the information it contains is not -- are alleged Indian terrorists Abu Salem and Masood Azad, who were captured in Lisbon in 2002. Neither had any family relations in the former PSI. Portuguese law stipulates that citizens born in the former PSI before Dec. 19, 1961 are entitled to Portuguese nationality. On that day in 1961, the governor of the PSI, General Antonio Vassalo e Silva, ordered the Portuguese military garrisons defending the borders to surrender when they found themselves surrounded by Indian troops sent in by then-prime minister Jahawarlal Nehru. That was seen as the formal end to Europe's long colonial history in India, which began in 1498 with the arrival of Admiral Vasco da Gama's Portuguese fleet, and later involved British and Dutch possessions. The current law ''assumes that at that time, the citizens of Goa, Diu and Daman were forced to adopt Indian nationality, and because of that, they are still offered today the possibility of recuperating their old Portuguese nationality, a right that extends three generations,'' lawyer José de Castro told IPS. The cases of India in 1961 and East Timor in 1975 ''were very different from Portugal's peaceful withdrawal from Brazil almost two centuries ago, from Africa (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tomé and Príncipe) in 1974 and 1975, and from Macau in 1999, because there was no invasion in the latter cases.'' Because the former possessions in India and East Timor were ''invaded by countries as big and powerful as India and Indonesia (in the case of East Timor), Portugal had little time to pull out,'' and in their disorderly retreat, ''officials did not take care of documents, which were poorly preserved or lost, and many of them are now illegible, which facilitates forgeries by the people trafficking rings,'' said de Castro. Cesario said the passport racket had taken on such magnitude that ''we have received protests from officials in Britain,'' which is home to an estimated 942,000 people from India. There are also 200,000 Indians living in the Netherlands, 100,000 in Germany, and 55,000 in France. But the case of Portugal stands out in that only 5,000 of the 65,000 Indians living here do not have Portuguese nationality. Portuguese is the mother tongue of 90 percent of Indians living in Portugal. But only half are Catholic -- the main faith professed by the 20 million inhabitants of Portugal's former possessions in India. The passport racket also worries Indian immigrants in Portugal who have their papers in order, as well as Indians who hold Portuguese citizenship. ''The authorities are beginning to look with mistrust at all people who look Indian, even though the great majority are Portuguese, as I am,'' Joao Fernandes, a businessman and key figure in the community of immigrants from Diu, told IPS.(Copyright Inter Press Service) ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################