A man without a country

I'm going to tell you Suleimane Camaná's story.
Suleimane was born in Guiné-Bissau twenty five years ago.
His parents got separated when he was seven.
With no right to choose, he remained with his mother who travelled to Senegal.
For many years he lost track of his father.
At the age of nine he was already working doing errands in exchange for bread.
In the years that followed he would do a bit of everything, including carrying goods or work at a car garage, always without having any wages, only food in return (sometimes not even that, instead he felt the lashes of a whip).
His mother remarried when he was twelve and since he didn't like his stepfather, he's started to live on the streets.
His mother would die just a few years later.
One day he heard someone speaking of Europe, "the land of the white, where no one felt hungry".
He's decided then that there was where he wanted to be.
For six years he saved the little money he could demand from a few of his employers until  he finally had enough for that- much desired- boat trip.
Except that the voyage wasn't what he expected as a large part of his travel companions died along the way.
Finally the vessel drops them somewhere around Barcelona and a guide takes them to Switzerland by not very known pats...
Suleimane will remain in Switzerland for the next three years.
However one day he meets a man in France who tells him he has met his father who is now living in Portugal as a Portuguese Citizen.
From then until he gets his father's contact isn't hard.
His father's reassurance that it will be easy to get Portuguese documents with his birth certificate (which his father had kept all these years) raises Suleimsne's hopes to have a better future here in Portugal.
So with nothing but a hand full of dreams Suleimane arrives to his father's house in the north of Portugal.
However on the day after his arrival he is awaken to a much harsher reality.
On their way to take care of Suleimane's legal documents, he and his father are approached by the public security police inspectors who suspect they might be illegal because they are speaking creole...
With no Portuguese legal documents Suleimane is arrested.
The only contact allowed between father and son will be a single phone call in which the son informs the father that he's already in Lisbon.
Desperate to remain in Portugal Suleimane will beat the inspectors as they try to take him to the plane a few days later.
He is beaten back.
Realizing it will not come to anything he rips open his wrist with is teeth (in his mind anything is better than going back to his country even death).
The inspectors will handcuff him, tie his legs and carry him to the plane.
Unfortunately for the Portuguese inspectors, the Guiné authorities do not allow Suleimane back in his country for from their point of view he has no family or job perspectives there,
The twenty five year old is sent back to Portugal (on his way the inspectors try to reach an agreement with Morocco's authorities to leave him there, but they are not up for it).
Portuguese inspectors will try to deport Suleimane once more, yet the attempt will still be unsuccessful.
Living in fear of deportation Suleimane keeps himself locked inside his father's house, too afraid to come out should he find another inspector eager to send him away from the only relative he has, although a tribunal has forbidden his deportation for the time being.
I must say, I am not proud at all of the way Portuguese authorities handled this all case.
Are we humans or are we beasts?
Tell me, is it not better to provide Suleimane with the documents which would allow him to take part of the working class in Portugal and build a life for himself instead of force him to remain inside a house by fear of getting caught?
And don't tell me he will take someone else's job if that happens. These people work on heavy hard jobs and I don't see many Portuguese born citizen's applying for them...
Suleimane thought he had nothing when he had no money nor clothes he could call his own.
Yet we've proved him that he could loose what he didn't think he had, a country, his dignity and his will to live and fight for a better tomorrow.
What does it make of us?
(This happened in May 2013)