Nayser Ahmed, his wife and two children, fled together.
As members of the violently persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority, their homeland, Myanmar, would never be safe.
The family ran together, they planned to come to Australia together.
“We were in Indonesia on the way to catching the boat to Australia,” Nayser says. “We were supposed to all get in one car and go to the boat but there were not enough seats in the car. I told my family to go ahead and I would be right behind them. But another car never came.”
A week after Nayser’s family arrived in July 2013, the Australian government’s policy changed: all new arrivals would be sent offshore.
“By the time I arrived at Christmas Island my wife and kids were already in the community in Australia.”
In detention in Australia, Nayser told officials his family was living in Australia.
“I just assumed that I would be reunited with them. But at the boarding gate they told me I was going to Manus.
“I felt numb. My heart and brain stopped working. I couldn’t muster the strength to say a word. I was completely frozen.
“I spent more than five years on Manus Island, away from my family. All I want in this life is to be together with my kids and family.”
After half a decade in the Manus island detention centre – an internment ultimately found to be illegal by the Papua New Guinea courts – Nayser was finally reunited with his family. But the lost years, he says, he will never get back, and the long years of separation have made their subsequent reunification difficult.
“At home, I was the head of our family. Every day I shared meals with my family, I walked my children to school, we celebrated special religious holidays together. Being apart has brought great stress to my family. It is not good for my children to be without a father figure.
“Two of my children were very young when we were separated. They have grown up without a father during important years of their childhood.”
Nayser Ahmed’s story has ended with him holding his children again, but so many may never have that chance.
Thousands of refugees – including members of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority – remain stranded and separated by Australia’s uncompromising policies to prevent refugees reuniting with their families.
Ali*, also a member of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, was forced to flee the country shortly after his second child was born.
“The situation in my home country had become unbearable and I had no choice but to flee for my life. I left my young daughter and son, my wife and my extended family behind, to find a safe place for us all.”
Ali reached Australia and is now living safely in the community, working in a pharmacy. But he is alone.
Because he holds a temporary protection visa, Ali is barred from even applying to be reunited with his wife and children.
“I am here, my body is here, but my mind and heart are not here. They are always with my family.
“I have two kids. I always think of their life, their future, and how I can protect and provide for them while I am away from them.”
The situation in Myanmar worsens almost daily. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were driven from their country by an unflinching genocide waged by the Myanmar military. In February this year, that military seized control of the government.
Ali’s family has escaped Myanmar for a crowded refugee camp over the border in neighbouring Bangladesh. “They are suffering,” he says, “with their futures escaping them day by day.
“It is hard to explain, but it is simple to understand. Imagine if you were separated from your kids, and you were safe while they were in a dangerous refugee camp. Not for a day, a week, or a month. But years.”
Australia’s deliberate cruelty
A new report from the Human Rights Law Centre, Together in Safety, argues the Australian government “has engaged in a strategic, deliberate and coercive campaign to separate refugees in Australia from their families”.
“Not only does the cruel campaign violate international law by using separation as a tool to punish and deter people from seeking safety – in breach of the right to family life, the rights of the child and the prohibition on torture – but it leaves Australia out of step with the international community, where countries like Canada and France actively seek to reunite refugee families.”
The report says Australia separates, and keeps separate, family members, by continually deprioritising the applications of permanent residents who arrived in Australia by boat, banning family reunion for refugees who hold temporary protection visas, and using offshore detention to keep family members apart.
Human Rights Law Centre senior lawyer Josephine Langbien said the Australian government was cruelly choosing to tear families apart.
“This report tells the stories of mothers who have partners and children in refugee camps overseas, but cannot bring them to safety in Australia. Fathers who have missed their babies’ first steps and first words, because the Australian government refused to allow them to leave offshore detention.
“There are thousands of people across Australia who are separated indefinitely from their loved ones, because the Australian government has made a deliberate choice to use family separation to try to prevent people from exercising their right to seek safety.”
The issue of family separation caused by Australia’s policies has been consistently raised with the government.
In 2016, the federal court ruled the immigration department’s policy of putting citizenship applications from people who arrived by boat “in a drawer” and ignoring them – stymieing potential family reunions – was not lawful.
Two years later, the UN’s high commissioner for refugees “urged the government of Australia to uphold the fundamental principle of family unity, and allow family members to be together”. The UNHCR said the long-term, deliberate separation of family members was a breach of a fundamental human right and acutely damaging to children.
A series of questions on family separation put by the Guardian to the Department of Home Affairs has not received a response.
Officials within Australia’s Department of Home Affairs are required to follow Ministerial Direction 80, which dictates that all visa applications for family members of people who arrived by boat must be given “lowest processing priority”.
Because new applications for family visas are constantly being lodged, the “lowest priority” applications are, in effect, never considered. There is a possible exemption to this practice in “compelling circumstances”, Direction 80 says, but this is not defined and has been almost never applied.
The Australian government, signed the “New York Declaration” for refugees and migrants in 2016, which committed it to “consider the expansion of existing humanitarian admission programmes … [including] flexible arrangements to assist family reunification”.
But migration experts argue there has been no effort to improve family reunion for boat arrivals.
Psychiatrist Beth O’Connor spent a year working on Nauru with Médecins Sans Frontières, and says long-term, indefinite family separation contributed to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation and attempts.
“There were families who had been separated for over five years and fathers who had never met their children, who had given up hope that they would ever be allowed to reunite.
“Every birthday, anniversary or milestone deepened their sadness.”
In Sydney, still gripped by the uncertainty of when, if ever, he will see his family again, Ali says he is grateful for the protection and acceptance offered to him by the people of Australia.
“I think that if the Australian people knew what has happened to me, and how I am separated from my family for so many years, they would understand my situation.”
Everyone has a family, he says, so everyone can understand.
“All I want is to hold my kids and my wife again, and to be safe together as a family.”
*Ali’s name has been changed to protect the safety of his family
