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By Maxim Kniazkov
WASHINGTON: The largest civil
rights organization of American Sikhs has expressed outrage at a new
US airport security policy that it said allows arbitrary searches of
turbans, a sacred headdress for members of the religion.
The Sikh Coalition said Saturday
that it had been informed by the Transportation Security
Administration that under its new guidelines, turbans could be
subject to manual pat-downs even if their wearers had passed a metal
detector test.
“Telling screeners to search
people in turbans is the same as telling them to search black people
or Arabs or Muslims,” Amardeep Singh, executive director of the
Sikh Coalition, said in a statement. “The policy allows screeners
to single out travelers on the basis of their religion.”
Singh argued that the message the
new TSA policy sends to the public is that “people who wear
turbans are dangerous.”
“That attitude challenges the
spirit of religious pluralism on which our country was built,” he
stated.
TSA spokeswoman Lara Uselding,
reached by AFP by telephone late Saturday, acknowledged that on
August 4, the agency that oversees security at 450 US airports as
well as railroads, ports and mass transit systems revised its
screening procedures for head coverings.
But she denied the changes that
will be carried out by all 43,000 US airport screeners had anything
to do with religious beliefs espoused by travelers.
“TSA does not conduct ethnic or
religious profiling, and employs multiple checks and balances to
ensure profiling does not happen,” Uselding assured.
However, the coalition insisted
the feelings of about 500,000 followers of the Sikh religion who
have made their home in the United States were still likely to be
hurt.
The turban is a sacred headdress
in the Sikh religion given to its followers by the faith’s
founding gurus, or prophets.
Obligatory for men and optional
for women, it is worn to underscore the distinct Sikh identity and
full commitment to the faith, according to members of the religion.
Sikhism is the fifth largest
religion in the world followed by an estimated 23 million adherents,
the majority of them in India. The largest Sikh communities in the
United States are located in the West Coast.
Because of their devotion to the
turban, some Sikh individuals have been harassed in the wake of the
September 11, 2001, attacks, as some Americans associated them with
members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas
station owner from Mesa, Arizona, was shot and killed four days
after the attacks by a mentally unstable American man, who had
concluded, after seeing Balbir’s turban, that he was an ally of
al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
According to the Sikh Coalition,
the new headdress policy marks a significant departure from
procedures adopted by the US government in November 2001.
The old policy, the group said,
allowed airport screeners to search turbans only after their owners
had triggered alarms when passing through a metal detector.
Screeners were also required to do as much as possible to avoid
physically touching the sacred turbans.
The new procedures recommend
physical pat-downs of the Sikh headdress without acknowledging the
religious sensitivities involved, the coalition noted.
Uselding did not elaborate on the
search techniques.
The new headwear policy also
covers cowboy hats and some berets, the Sikh coalition acknowledged.
But it noted that the turban was the only type of mandatory
religious garb, the mere presence of which could trigger a secondary
screening at security checkpoints.
“Since September 11, 2001,
hundreds of Sikhs have been harassed, beaten, and even killed
because of the association of their turbans and beards with
terrorism,” noted the coalition statement. “The TSA procedures
put an official stamp of approval on this harmful stereotyping by
the public.”
--AFP
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