Pakistani? Afghani? Does it matter?

This is the story of the Bakhtiyari family. The children, Alamdar, Montezar, Nagina, Samina and Amina, were 13, 12, 9, 6 and 3-years-old, respectively, when they were placed in detention in Woomera.

Their brother, Mazhar Bakhtiyari, was born in custody in Australia on October 15, 2003. His mum, Roqia, was ill for most of the pregnancy and confined to bed for the last three months with diabetes and high blood pressure. Mazhar was almost lost at 11 weeks and again at 26 weeks after the forced "removal" of his uncle from Baxter.

With Roqia considered a flight risk, Mazhar was born under guard. The concern was that she would run from the hospital minutes after giving birth, leaving her baby and five children behind.

Roqia’s first eight months with Mazhar were spent in a motel room in Adelaide, with occasional visits from her husband, Ali, and their older children, but always with guards around. The records from this time in Adelaide chart the despair of Roqia, who was even refused the right to ring Ali in Baxter for many of those months.

Just getting visiting rights for Ali was a war of wills with Annabelle O'Brien of DIMIA (Department for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) who was determined that Roqia, the baby and the five older children should be forced to visit Ali in Baxter once a fortnight. The point of this cruelty was never defined in the recorded emails, but in the end Roqia stood her ground and Ali was allowed to stay with her at the motel two nights a fortnight.

When Mazhar was about 8-months-old, he and his mother were placed back in detention, but were allowed to move into a house in Dulwich with the other children. However, in an email from Sue Gould (from DIMIA) written at this time, it was made very clear to Roqia and Ali that they were not going to get a visa, they were not going to be able to have a free life in Australia, and Ali would not be allowed to live with them.

The Dulwich house was huge, even with the presence of the guards, and life for Mazhar was terrific for a time. His sunny nature and great beaming smile meant that he was spoiled by everyone who ever came into contact with him.

Many of the guards and carers were loving towards Mazhar, but some were utterly heartless, in line with the behaviour of staff from both DIMIA and ACM (Australasian Correctional Management) .

There was an attitude among some of the "carers", who had been juvenile prison guards, that baby Mazhar and the other children were criminals.

One guard called Tess told me on our first meeting that the children were under guard, serving their sentence, and had to obey the "rules", which seemed to be a moveable feast. After a great deal of talking with Tess she came to understand that the people she was guarding were not criminals, but rather just little children who had suffered terrible trauma and who needed to be treated with care.

Tess was a funny woman. On one hand she could be quite decent, but on the first occasion I arrived with Merlin Luck (of Big Brother fame) to visit the children she came storming down the corridor of the house and manhandled us out the door into the cold.

The older children, Monty and Alamdar, behaved magnificently, and in the end the only loser for the night was Tess, whose own children were great fans of Merlin's and wanted his autograph. As we were unable to go inside, the boys picked up table and chairs and took them onto the front lawn for us. Roqia made Afghan tea for Pauline Frick (from Catholic Centacare)  and we had a tea party with the children on the front lawn. Mazhar was the star of the show at almost one-year-old, while Nagina, one of the girls, was coy around the handsome young Merlin.

None of us at the party that night will ever forget the way in which a couple of young boys showed adults how to behave with dignity, and I suspect Merlin will hold that night dear for the rest of his days.

DIMIA allowed Mazhar to have a first birthday party, however, just two days before the party a thief broke into the house and stole all the money and valuables, as well as phones and belongings of the older children.

I rushed down to the house that day to find Roqia distraught and flat out on her bed with sickness, declaring the party would not happen. Samina (another daughter) had made beautiful invitations, Ali was all organised to come over and cook the food, the decorations had been bought - what to do?

The family had a conference call with Ali and decided the party would go ahead regardless. It was amazing to go to the house on the night and see the work they had done to make the house beautiful.

Decorations adorned the kitchen, the passage, the dining room and every space the children could find. There were balloons, ribbons, cards and everything any family could want for the first birthday of a much adored and spoiled baby boy.

With the help of donations from a caring public, Ali and Roqia had made a banquet fit for a king. When I offered to help Ali cook he chased me off with a spatula saying, "This is my party, I will cook, you just enjoy yourself". So I did.

We all did. After much negotiation with DIMIA for permission to hold the party, the department had agreed, but only with two conditions. The first was that only 20 people were allowed, including the family. The second was that there be two guards at the house for the entire function. I don't know what they thought we would do: run off with the children maybe?

The guests Ali and Roqia chose to invite included a magistrate, his wife and their lawyer daughter; Father Greg O'Kelly, headmaster at the children’s school; Jeremy Moore (the Bakhtiyaris’ lawyer) and his wife and youngest son; Dale West, the head of Catholic Centacare and his two daughters; Mr West’s Deputy, Pauline Frick and her two youngest children; and various carers and their children and grand-children. This gathering was a respectable bunch in anyone's language, so the paranoia of DIMIA was very misplaced.

In the end the guards remained discreetly in the background while the guests and the family enjoyed the only normal Bakhtiyari family gathering for their entire four years in Australia. It was a bitter sweet occasion, and little did we know that it would be the only time we would celebrate with this family we had all come to love.

Dozens of photos and videos were taken that day with some of them being sent to The Advertiser a few days later. But the very next day the guards bundled poor Ali back to Baxter like a criminal, with young Mazhar oblivious to this cruelty being inflicted on his father.

It needs to be stated clearly that Roqia and Ali adore their children. All they ever wanted was a free life for them away from the wars and dangers of Afghanistan and the precarious existence of Afghan refugees squatting in Pakistan.

When Mazhar was tired and cranky I would make Roqia howl with laughter as I scooped him up in my arms and took him all over the house and grounds pointing at things and saying, "what's this Mazhar" or looking at photos and saying, "who's this Mazhar?" until he calmed down and went to sleep. After they landed back in Afghanistan I got a message from Roqia that he was walking all over the village with the Afghan children pointing at things and saying "what's this?". My legacy to this baby boy I loved like my own grandson.

On the December 6, 2004 the Government called on a citizenship case in the High Court against Mazhar. The government’s position was that he could not be granted citizenship because he was either stateless or a Pakistani citizen, and if he wasn't a Pakistani citizen he was an Afghan citizen. This was DIMIA's way of saying they didn't have a clue about Mazhar’s nationality, and they didn't care just as long as the baby was not an Australian and they could legally deport him.

The case was adjourned until December 13 while extra information was sought. After two hours of arguments Justice Hayne stated, "on the evidence presented it is at least arguable that the parents are Afghan citizens as they have always claimed" and refused the application. This was a mortal blow to all of us trying hard to get a degree of justice for this family.

The lawyer for the Bakhtiyaris, Jeremy Moore, was stricken with the verdict. But then Justice Hayne allowed the Government to stick the boot right in and demanded costs against the baby. Fancy asking a one-year-old baby to pay court costs for a case he didn't know anything about.

As a result of this verdict, the Government was then able to inflict on this family the most hideous cruelty, so cruel that their neighbours likened the behaviour of DIMIA to that of storm troopers in a totalitarian regime. All the children at St Ignatius and St Aloysius were devastated at the treatment of their friends just as they were preparing for Christmas.

The reports show that at 7am on December 18, 2004 about 50 guards stormed into the Bakhtiyari house and dragged all of the children from their beds. Nagina was not allowed to put on her scarf, Roqia could not change the baby or give him a bottle, and all the other children were terrified.

This attack came out of the blue. I had talked to them on Friday and been invited for Sunday lunch. Even with the initial set back of the High Court decision they were optimistic about their future, as all the other people they had been imprisoned with had now been granted visas. The Bakhtiyaris knew they were the only Afghani children left without visas and they really believed they would get theirs before Christmas. Their cousins had been found to be genuine refugees a few months earlier, after being in Woomera and Baxter with them for over three years, so we were all hopeful.

I walked down to the house at 2am on the Saturday and I was overcome with a sense of dread, and a fear that I would never see them again. People were awake in the house but the alarm still hadn't gone off in my mind. Walking home I almost convinced myself I was being fanciful, that they would be there on Sunday and that everything would be fine.

But they had been taken to the Port Augusta "housing estate" where Senator Vanstone claimed they would be better off. It beggars belief that such traumatised children could be better off in a prison hundreds of kilometres from their friends, but she would not budge in spite of the nationwide outcry.

On the December 30 the media of Australia witnessed the kidnapping and deportation of this family on a hired jet to nowhere. Senator Vanstone had been informed they were from Afghanistan and at this point not one member of the media had the guts or the nous to ask for the evidence, except Matthew Abraham of the ABC.

The last Australia saw of them was as they disappeared in a jet, peering from the windows in despair, white faced and tormented. A rumour started a day later that they were in prison in Bangkok but this proved to be untrue. Monty, managed to get an email to his friends from Dubai expressing their sadness and upset at having nowhere to go. He said that money changed hands in Dubai but he did not know what it was for.

On January 2, 2005 word came that Pakistan had allowed them to enter but had denied them a hotel room because they had no papers. Mazhar was forced to sleep on the road in the snow and almost perished. A baby boy, as Australian as I am, dumped in a foreign country and still Senator Vanstone assured Australia they had had a very, very, fair go. I wonder how Roqia and Ali will explain this cruelty to Mazhar when he is old enough to understand?

News from Afghanistan was scarce for weeks during which time I hardly slept and could barely stop crying. Then, on my birthday I received the Freedom of Information documents that Roqia had asked for in September 2004, and the madness of the beaurocrats in DIMIA became blindingly clear.

To turn Mazhar into a Pakistani was the most bizarre distortion of the truth that I had ever seen. His birth certificate was obtained by DIMIA just weeks after his birth, a certificate the family did not know existed. It stated that both Roqia and Ali were Afghan citizens who had been married in Afghanistan.

I think at this point Ms Narelle Lee (from DIMIA), went completely insane. On January 13, 2004 she wrote to the Pakistan embassy to tell them that Mr Asghar Ali had been verified as a Pakistani national and that she wanted Mazhar to be declared a Pakistani citizen.

She enclosed an Australian Certificate of Identity which seems to have been rejected by the Pakistani embassy so on February 5 she phoned a Mr Wali at the embassy to ask him to follow up.

The next day she spoke to the embassy again and then faxed them a copy of Mazhar's birth certificate demanding that he be confirmed as a Pakistani citizen. She requested the return of the Certificate of Identity at that time and it looks like she received a letter from the embassy stating that Mazhar was the son of Asghar Ali Bakhtiari and was a Pakistani citizen due to being the son of a Pakistani.

Each time these letters had been presented to the Federal Court and the High Court, the letter explaining how he became a Pakistani citizen was not presented, so I guess it was reasonable for the courts to believe this was was genuine. But it is beyond belief that a birth certificate stating the Afghan nationality of a new born could have been used to turn him into a Pakistani.

So determined were DIMIA to rid themselves and Australia of the Bakhtiyari children they used a tiny baby.