September, 2005

Ali Bakhtiyari was an unusual, quirky house guest. He rose and prayed at 3 a.m. He sat and gazed by the hour at the water view. He refused however to swim, since this would mean baring his upper body. He hated it when I showed him -- briefly, in passing -- some barely clad young catwalk models on Foxtel. He copped, but did not approve, my wife wearing jeans.

He refused our offers of money but ate with relish a chickpea curry, oranges with mint and honey and thin dark chocolates, and washed the dinner plates by hand, and offered to do 'carpentering work' and odd jobs in recompense. He thanked us effusively, calling us 'good and pious people' for getting him to our chiropractor Anton who eased his chronic back pain for no fee.

He befriended my two sons, who reminded him of his two sons, lately imprisoned in Woomera, and all one afternoon between them watched Test Cricket, a game he was unfamiliar with, fair proof I thought he was not a Pakistani. At the day's end, he asked only one question: Was Ponting an Afghan? And, indeed, he looked like one.

Two weeks later he was suddenly arrested and back in Woomera, his chiropractic treatment discontinued, his pain worsening, his pride smashed, his brilliant children accorded a colouring-in book instead of an education, his chicken-coop dwelling repeatedly invaded, the toys of the children confiscated, and the rest of it.

Bob Sessions of Penguin has offered Montezar, the literary son, a hefty sum to write Montezar's Journey, a memoir of their odyssey. The Taliban executions in their town. The selling of the tiny farm. The land trip to Malaysia. The sinking boat. The launches full of armed men, megaphones, shouting, the helicopters overhead. The two boys' escape when the Woomera razor wire came down in the demonstration. The hiding out in Melbourne. The boys' unwise appeal to the British consul. Ali's distraught arrival in Melbourne to find them already gone.

My illegal visit, then, to Woomera and the taped conversations. The brief national uproar and the many, many court cases. The release, for a year and a quarter, of the children but not the parents, into a kind of paradise, a big house, a Catholic school, academic and sporting honour, the unasked gifts, free meals and entertainments; the videotapes, the computer games, the dolls, the bicycles, the soccer outings, the day at WOMAD, the night at Theatresports, the cheery house visits of Premier Rann, the final court case, and then...the Ruddock nemesis. The Vanstone punchline.

Vanstone, who lived quite near them in Adelaide, but never agreed to visit them. And then their Christmas imprisonment, and their forced air flight under cover of the tsunami to Pakistan, whose officials promptly declared them Afghan Hazaras and jovially paid their twenty-seven-hour taxi ride to their war-smitten native country, and the story continues.

I wrote and wrote about it, emphasising the obvious, that if they were Pakistanis the younger children would speak a Pakistani language, Urdu or Pashtu, and if you said 'I will kill you' in one of these languages they would flinch and run away, and if they did not, they were not Pakistani. That if Ali were an 'electrical plumber' (whatever that is) as DIMIA said, the address and phone number in Quetta of his small business would be on record, and where was it? That if Ali and Roqia were Pakistanis, birth certificates, marriage certificates, school records, business licences would prove it, and where were they? But none of these questions were answered. It was like the start of Orson Welles' The Trial where Orson's voice rumbles: 'This door was created before the beginning of the world for you alone to go through, and now I am going to close it.'

As always in tyrannies, it started as an honest mistake, one that blew out into a cover-up, a persecution, an unjust imprisonment, a crime against humanity and a national shame; Australia's Dreyfus case, a blot on our history. The honest mistake was when Roqia couldn't identify Northern Alliance currency, which was not in use in her district, and the DIMIA officials thought this proved she was not what she said. And if she wasn't, Ali wasn't either. They had to be both from...well...Pakistan. That they looked and sounded like Afghan Hazaras, and spoke their dialect, didn't matter. As with Lindy Chamberlain it was somehow mystically known they were guilty, so that was the only evidence looked for. Their innocence was out of the question.

And so twenty-six years, in toto, of childhood, youth and adulthood were lost by these good, plain, decent, ungreedy people. Irreparable emotional harm was done to most of the children. Ali's manhood broken. Roquia's health wrecked by separation from her children, round-the-clock policing, diabetes and defiant child-bearing. Australia defamed throughout the Muslim world. Though innocent of everything, and wrongly imprisoned, they must now pay a million dollars for their unchosen compulsory lodgings if they want to come back. Though scholarships are available at St Ignatius for the boys, who won gold medals there, for sport and English, they must pay a million dollars to re-enrol. And they have been libelled monstrously, called Pakistani fraudsters by ministers of the crown, by Russell Skelton, Alan Ramsay, Alistair McLeod, Piers Akerman and most of the radio talk-jocks. Millions are owed them if they can just shuck off their present sorrowing angry weariness and sue.

But they don't much like Australia now, or even want to think of it, the little girls refusing to speak English, Alamdar waspishly sure he was lied to. And the world will know of it once the film of Montezar's Journey is made, and it will be; and it gets an Oscar, and it might, for the story is so good. A bit like Lord of the Rings, really. And in the meantime Ruddock and Vanstone, who conspired to impede the course of justice (in my view), are unpunished, and the DIMIA officials whose cover-up caused such human suffering, such torment of children, such breaches of the rights of the child, on evidence that was mistaken or forged, are somehow wondrously not in the dock, pleading the court's indulgence, but in their usual government offices earning good money for their 'useful work'.

I ask the guilty ministers -- and they are as guilty as the persecutors of Dreyfus -- to invite them back, pay their fines, give them instant citizenship and $220,000, say, the price of a modest house in Adelaide, and, oh yes, issue an apology. To the Australian people an apology too, for the $6 million they spent on this baseless torment of the innocent, some of them infants, one a baby, one a pregnant, diabetic, sorrowing mother. Is this what Ruddock would call 'a fair and appropriate outcome'? I think so. Let him look to his own arraignment, in due course, by the ICC and a future Attorney-General, if he does not.