Visa joys

So, eight months later, I finally have my passport back from the Syrian embassy. For the first time in umpteen phone calls someone has actually confirmed that I was denied a visa, although my remains a matter of conjecture. Up to now, I've simply been repeatedly told on the phone that 'Mr Makdisi' or 'the consul' was dealing with it, and had my various emails completely ignored. A friend-of-a-colleague who applied as a freelance photographer was told that he could have a travel visa but couldn't take any pictures while he was there. Shock, horror, the Syrian dictatorship doesn't want anyone to whom they can't clearly attach to an institution wandering about their country. And lest anyone think I'm not applying the same stands to my own horrible government, read on...
Bizarrely, I've also been given back the postal order for my fee. The young lady at the embassy desk informed me that that was because they are “nice” and return visa charges on denied applications. Although since it's over six months old it's entirely and the Post Office's discretion as to whether they refund it, so I'm not holding out much hope there.
So, the question now is whether I actually risk using this passport ever again, or simply ditch it. Can I depend on the Syrians having simply had it sitting in a file for the past eight months, or should I – given the recent activities of their equally nasty but possibly more efficient brothers in the Mossad – be a little paranoid about they might have been doing with it? Answers on a postcard from Damascus...
This has been the week for people getting shafted by various visa agencies – mainly the British. Firstly, there was the Palestinian farmers who were meant to be in the UK for Fairtrade Fortnight, of whom only one actually got a visa. One, a woman with kids from a West Bank village, got a refusal letter from the British embassy in Amman saying that the officials there were concerned that she wouldn't return home – to Iraq. Anyone would think that British bureaucracies were either a) incompetent or b) not keen to have the effects of Israel's military occupation widely known.
Then there were the various speakers who had to contribute to a SOAS conference on the Palestinian left by video instead of in person. Leila Khaled has, of course, been denied a UK visa on at least one occasion (2005) and is also now routinely denied Schengen visas, so her absence was hardly a shock, even if it was a pity. Jamal Juma of the Grassroots Palestinian Anti Apartheid Wall Campaign was prevented from travelling because the Israelis arrested him – as well as many other anti-Wall campaigners – in December, and they haven't got around to returning his documents for him to even apply to travel with.
And thirdly, my mate Adie has been comprehensively shafted by the British Embassy in Cairo, which (unlike other European embassies) insists on having a letter from a 'legitimate' humanitarian organisation before it will issue waiver letters for British citizens to enter Gaza. So it looks like Adie, who has been waiting in Cairo for two months since the Viva Palestina convoy, will not be spending the next six months in Gaza working with a kids' project and building student solidarity networks. The embassy ruled that the fairtrade organisation he had a letter from was not a 'legitimate humanitarian organisation', and appeals for support from his MP, Gerald Kaufman, have borne no fruit.