Dec. 2004

And so the story moves towards its end. The Bakhtiyari family's phones have been confiscated and they wait in Baxter to be taken to Pakistan. They are asking to go to Afghanistan because that is where they come from, but Amanda Vanstone won't let them go there. Although they speak no Pakistani language and speak Farsi, the language of their home region Uruzguan in accents appropriate to the region, they will go instead to Quetta, in Pakistan.

How do we know they come from Afghanistan? Well, the Governor of Sharestan said they did in a document signed on 7/9/2002, correctly naming all the children's names. Roqia Bakhtiyari's brother Muzar Ali voted, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the Afghan election of last October 9, a right he has as a duly registered (and investigated) Afghan citizen. Justice Kenneth Haynes of Australia's High Court, moreover, said on Monday of last week they may well be Afghans. 'It is at least arguable,' he said while ruling the baby Muzar, though born in Adelaide, was somehow not an Australian, 'that the applicant's parents are both citizens of Afghanistan as they claim.'

They look and sound like Afghan Hazaras. The father Ali when I showed him a cricket game on television was mystified by it, unusual in a Pakistani, and asked me only if Ponting was an Afghan. And indeed, he looked like one, like Montezar, in fact. The mother Roqia when asked identified Afghan tribal recipes for bread and sour milk, and told how her village celebrated the birth of children.

But where was the village and what is its name? Ali drew a map that showed in central Uruzguan a village called Chaqu next to a village called Chenar under mountains called Daikwidi. They are all there where he said they were, but an Australian reporter, Alistair McLeod, later killed, went to a place a hundred miles north of the real one. The translator he brought with him belonged to the murderous Northern Alliance, and to him, of course, the fearful villagers in subsequent valleys professed unanimous ignorance of everyone. Bakhtiyari? Never heard of him. Roqia's brother Muzar, dumped in Quetta so peremptorily that the DIMIA officers with him were arrested for lacking visas, went back to the real Chaqu however, and got and sent proof that Ali and Roqia are who they said they are. No court has yet considered this evidence.

Asked yesterday if she had read their file, Amanda Vanstone said she hadn't. Asked if she had seen any evidence they were Pakistanis, she said she hadn't. Asked if she'd seen, or anyone had seen, their Pakistani birth certificates, she agreed there weren't any. She said, however, that they'd had a 'fair go' -- including, apparently, twenty-seven months behind razor wire -- and that fair go was now, sadly, fading to black. She never visited Woomera and, though herself a lawyer, never looked at the evidence.

That Ali is a Pakistani depends on a document that is not signed or dated and indicates one Akhbar Ali to have been born in Quetta in Pakistan. The names of his family -- Mariah, Zaquia, Sikander and Ghazansar -- are not those of Ali Bakhtiyari's family. On this alone, an unsigned, undated document with the wrong names in it, he is held to be from Pakistan, none of whose languages he or his children speak.

Alamdar is in year eleven at St Ignatius College and doing scholastically well. Montezar, in year ten, is thought a world class soccer player and won the school medal for his ability in that game. The little girls Negina, Samina and Amina have made friends at school who are now crying on talkback radio.

What has all this suffering been about? Well, for the government to admit they were wrong and by their significant errors and cover-ups caused more suffering than Lindy Chamberlain's family endured would raise the question of the many libels they have committed against this family. They let it be known, for instance, that Ali was an 'electrical plumber' from Quetta but never gave the address of his shop. They let it be known he was a rich man with businesses in Saudi Arabia and Alan Ramsay, the fool, printed this in his column. They let it be known, last week, that Roqia was so stressed with parenting that she would be better off in Quetta, begging with her family on the streets. And they did not let it be known there is a tiny village called Quetta, not far from Chaqu. Which may be where the confusion began. They've got, in short, a lot of answer for, and pay damages for, perhaps, in what may turn out to be -- if our democracy survives -- Australia's Dreyfus case.

It began, of course, as cover-ups usually do, with an honest mistake. Roqia couldn't identify some Afghan currency. But it was Northern Alliance currency, then unknown in her district. When she was rejected because of this, and they found out Ali had already been accepted -- correctly -- as a fugitive from the Taliban, they had to prove his story also was false. And they told so many tales about him that no-one remembers now any more what it is they said he did wrong. He did nothing wrong, of course, just try to save his family from slaughter by selling up and risking all on a perilous journey to a better, kinder land. And so the story moves towards its end. Merry Christmas, Bakhtiyaris? Bah humbug.