Damaged souls caught in third wave of suffering
Michael Gordon
The Age
9 February 2008
www.theage.com.au

Bound by sorrow: Aslam Kazimi (left), Younis Mohammadi and Abdul Jafari.
Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones

ABDUL Jafari calls it his new, unwanted friend. It is the recurring nightmare that ends when he wakes, crying and in a cold sweat. It would take him a day, he explains, to describe the dream in all its graphic detail, but he offers this synopsis.

He is alone in a desert with only a bucket of water when a wind storm comes and the bucket spills. Then he realises he is near the ocean and notices one of his five children coming towards him in the surging sea, calling for help. He runs into the water, reaching for the child's outstretched hand, only to see it disappear. There are other nightmares, too, like the one where he is chased "from mountain to mountain" by men with guns, and many dreams that involve his family, where "they keep following me and I keep following them".

But it isn't just the nights and the dreams that Mr Jafari has come to fear. Lately he has become forgetful, prone to losing things and subject to panic attacks. As he explains it: "I remember my family and then my mind shuts down."

It happened recently when he was driving to his job as a meat packer in Dandenong. He crashed his car and caused around $2400 damage to another vehicle. Luckily, no one was hurt. Since then, he has ridden to work on a borrowed bike that is too big for his tiny frame.

Mr Jafari, about 40, has not seen his wife and children since he fled Afghanistan eight years ago. The youngest child was not born when he left. He has no pictures and struggles to remember their faces and their ages. Compounding his heartache is the feeling of guilt that he is now safe while they are not. "I am living in a peaceful environment, but my mind is not in peace," he said.

The departure of the last asylum seekers from the Nauru processing centre yesterday marks the end of the former Government's Pacific Solution, but the anguish continues for hundreds, like Mr Jafari, who suffered under it. It also poses a challenge for the new Rudd Government.

More than 11,000 people who were demonised as queue-jumpers were subsequently found to be refugees and afforded temporary protection. About 9500 have since been granted permanent protection and, with it, the right to sponsor family members to join them.

Most who had wives and children have now been reunited but many, like Mr Jafari, have not. Indeed, about 800 applications to sponsor families are still being processed by bureaucrats, and other refugees, who have only recently been granted permanent protection, are yet to lodge their applications.

Insiders say refugees like Mr Jafari can be confident that their applications will ultimately be approved, though it could take another 12 months. The situation of others, like Aslam Kazimi and Younis Mohammadi is potentially more problematic.

Mr Kazimi was 18 when he married Latifa, who was 17, in January 2000. Within two months he fled his village in Afghanistan, insisting that, if he had stayed, he would have either had to join the Taliban and kill others or be killed. While he was detained in sweltering isolation on Nauru, he discovered that his wife had conceived during their two months of marriage and he had a son. Then came the tragic news that his baby had died in a bomb blast. His family fled to Iran but became separated from his mother, who was deported to Afghanistan, in the winter of 2005. Since then, Latifa has cared for Mr Kazimi's three brothers and his sister, all of them still teenagers, in Pakistan.

Mr Kazimi's father was murdered by fundamentalists when he was 14. He discovered only last year that his mother had died after her forced return to Afghanistan. Her sister had borrowed money (that Mr Kazimi has since repaid) to take her to hospital "but it was unsuccessful". His siblings still do not know their mother is dead and Mr Kazimi does not want to tell them until he can do so, face to face.

Despite all this sadness, Mr Kazimi has worked hard since settling in Melbourne after spending 3½ years in offshore detention on Nauru, first as a factory worker, now as a painter. His fear is that, if his wife is given a visa to join him, there will be no one to care for his siblings.

Mr Mohammadi's story is similar. He was among those rescued by the Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, in August 2001, an act of compassion that prompted the Howard government to insist that those rescued would not be allowed to set foot on Australian soil. This was the beginning of the Pacific Solution.

His wife is caring for his two children, one of whom he has not seen, as well as his three younger siblings, while he works in a Dandenong factory and waits for a decision on his application to bring them from Pakistan to Melbourne. "It's hard, but what can I do?" he says.

Paris Aristotle, director of the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture, says Jafari's emotional deterioration is typical of many cases being assisted by the foundation. "And it's not difficult to imagine why that is the case," he tells The Age.

"We'd all be responding in the same way. Those features of a sense of hope being dashed time and time and time again are consistent in a number of people right now. The ability of people to recover from profound trauma and loss is almost always linked to a great extent to their ability to re-establish their families.

"In the absence of that, dealing with loss, grief, guilt, all those things, is almost impossible because there is this constant and persistent yearning for something that has been left behind."

David Manne, co-ordinator of the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre (RILC), describes the anguish of those still without their families as a "third wave of suffering", the first being the trauma that forced them to become refugees and the second being their period in detention.

"There needs to be a whole review of the current system of family reunion," says Mr Manne. "There needs to be more flexibility in terms of who and which family members are included and there needs to be an expansion of the program."

The demand for help in preparing applications to sponsor family members is so strong that organisations like RILC run regular evening and day-long sessions on Sundays, where volunteer lawyers, helped by interpreters, assist refugees to fill out forms and offer advice.

IT IS emotionally draining work, even for those who are trained to remain detached. One interpreter, for instance, remarked last Sunday that, despite 22 years' experience that included working in the Baxter detention centre, there were times when he had to excuse himself so that he could cry.

How recently had this occurred, I asked. "Last week," he replied. "Today."

The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, shares the concern of refugee advocates and says it will support any one-off arrangement to expedite the reunion of families that remain separated under the policies of the former government.

"The denial of family reunion to these people is not in the interests of the refugees, their families or the Australian community," says Ariane Rummery, a spokeswoman for the UNHCR. "It keeps refugees in a traumatic and protracted period of uncertainty where they cannot get on with their lives. It delays their integration into Australia life and can lead to long-term psychological harm."

New Immigration Minister Chris Evans, offered the refugees some cause for optimism when he answered a series of questions from The Age, but said the priority given to processing separated families had to be "managed flexibly within the overall allocations of the program".

While his expectation was that the department would deal "flexibly" with family groups, he said "clear evidence" would need to be provided that younger siblings were part of the family group refugees were seeking to sponsor. This poses potential problems because "clear evidence" in the form of death certificates of parents or other documentation often does not exist.

On the question of whether these cases could be dealt with outside the humanitarian program, Senator Evans says it will be "examined against other priority areas in the program".

Mr Kazimi, Mr Mohammadi and many others, meanwhile, do their best to reassure family members over the telephone, though the lack of progress leads to feelings of depression and guilt.

Such is Mr Jafari's anxiety that he flew to Pakistan late this week to reassure them even though he will face a bigger financial burden if his application to sponsor them is successful. "I have to see them and tell them that I am their father," he told The Age.

The temporary reunion may rekindle the dream of the family being together in a safe environment. At the very least, it might bring an end to his nightmare.

What was the Pacific Solution?
The Howard government's policy of transporting asylum seekers, who attempted to come to Australia by boat, to processing camps on Manus island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru. It was implemented after the Government refused the Tampa permission to drop a cargo of rescued asylum seekers on Christmas Island in August 2001.

What did it cost?
While government figures put the cost of running the offshore centres at $289 million, a report prepared by Oxfam and A Just Australia calculated the total cost at $1 billion, including navy interception, detention centre infrastructure and running costs, aid packages to Pacific governments, transport and health services.

What happened?
Of more than 1500 who arrived between 2001 and 2003, almost 1000 were resettled as refugees, most of them in Australia, 78 were resettled without being found to be refugees and 482 returned voluntarily after being told they would not be allowed to resettle in Australia.