FRANCE : Emigre Still at Airport 6 Years Later

When Alfred Nasseri arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 1988, he paused in the lounge to jot a few words in his diary while waiting for the authorities to sort out a small immigration matter.

Nasseri is still there, more than six years and 6,000 diary pages later, unable to enter France and unable to leave. He is a man without a country in a Europe that, technically at least, is without borders.

His diary of loose-leaf papers is in three boxes, given to him by workers for the German airline Lufthansa. The papers, his cassette tapes and all his possessions are strapped to a luggage cart.

“What I need and what I want is a passport,” Nasseri, a small man with thinning black hair, a carelessly groomed mustache and hollow cheeks, said the other day. “Then I will leave the airport.”

Nasseri’s long sojourn in Terminal One of the airport near Paris is the curious result of misfortune and bureaucracy.

His real name is Merhan Karimi Nasseri, and he was born 49 years ago in a region of Iran that, at the time, was under British jurisdiction. At age 18, he left Iran to work on a degree in Yugoslav studies in Britain. When he returned to Iran, he was imprisoned as an enemy of the shah and the authorities revoked his passport, replacing it with papers that allowed him to leave the country but never return.

Nasseri went to Brussels, where the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees granted his application for political asylum and gave him papers allowing him to apply for residence in any European country.

But those papers were locked in a suitcase that was stolen in 1988 at a train station in Paris. Nasseri subsequently bought an airline ticket from Paris to London and was allowed to board the plane after showing a copy of the theft report to police. In Britain, though, immigration officers put him back on a flight for De Gaulle, where he has been ever since.

France will not let him in and, without a passport or a country willing to accept him, it can’t expel him either.

His Paris attorney, Christian Bourguet, persuaded a French court last year to issue 15-day traveling papers that would allow Nasseri to go to Brussels to reapply for political asylum.

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Nasseri sees that as a positive sign but, tired of being turned away by countries, he is wary of taking the offer, saying he would prefer an international passport and British citizenship--a hope that seems without basis.

“The court didn’t say anything about British citizenship,” he said. “If I solve that problem, I won’t need to go to Brussels.”

So Nasseri--who has adopted the nickname Alfred--has become a fixture in the circular confines of Terminal One, well known to shopkeepers, flight attendants, police officers and even some passengers.

He spends his days and nights on a plastic bench in the basement lounge, recording his experiences in his diary and watching passengers ride the glass-enclosed moving walkways to their departing flights.

During the day, he reads through a stack of British newspapers that have been discarded by passengers, watches television in the airport doctor’s office and occasionally strikes up conversations with passengers.

But the hours grow long.

“It’s not a good solution to live a long time like this,” he said, speaking softly in lightly accented English.

Nasseri speaks no French and depends on the kindness of flight attendants, who keep him in shaving kits, toothbrushes and toothpaste from stocks for passengers. They also give him meal tickets, which he can use in the terminal restaurants.

As a reporter left him the other day, he asked that a copy of the resulting article be sent to him.

“Do you have my address?” he asked. “It’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, Terminal One, Boutique Level.”