Betrayed Read online

  Unlike refugees who jump the queue and end up in detention camps, we were provided with an apartment in the western suburb of Liverpool. My father had already had a job lined up, as a consultant and engineer at a welding factory. Other Kurds were moving into the region and a small community began to build up. In time, we moved to another apartment, which was in a quieter area and where we had access to a swimming pool. My parents could already speak English—don’t forget, my mother had a brilliant education from her father, a teacher, and my own father was well educated, too—and when we were at home they spoke in both Kurdish and English. So my early childhood was privileged in that I learned both languages.

  I was enrolled in the Liverpool junior public school, where there were a mixture of children from other countries—Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Lebanese. I was the only Iraqi girl, and other students, not even having heard of Kurdistan, thought that I was Italian. One day, when a Lebanese girl asked where I was from and I told her she said: ‘Oh, you’re one of us, then.’ But I had come from a proud Kurdish family and I quickly pointed out to her that the Kurds are like no others in that region—we were ethnically different and had our own language and dialects.

  My mother was adamant that we should cling to our heritage.

  ‘Do not mix with Arabs when you meet them,’ she would tell me time and again. ‘While we are from northern Iraq, we are different. Always remember that. I don’t want you to be fanatical about it, but always remember who you are, where you are from.’

  While my mother had implored me not to be fanatical, she was obsessed with doing whatever she could to help the Kurds, both in Australia and in Iraq. She started working for a Kurdish radio station, reading the news in three different dialects and also writing her own poetry and reading that out, too. People would say to me: ‘Your mother is very talented—she’s a news reader and an entertainer all rolled into one.’

  She was also a woman of contrasts as far as the Kurds were concerned. While she went out of her way to help newcomers settle in and give advice over the radio—even taking people to hospital by taxi if the need arose and asking nothing in return—she didn’t like us mingling with the Kurdish community in general, unless it was for special events, such as newroz—New Year’s Day—but which marks the time in 612 BC that the Kurds’ existence was first recognised when the ancestors of today’s Kurdish people rose up against the Assyrian empire.

  Baian was still a very beautiful woman but as often happens, her blonde hair had now darkened and taken on a reddish sheen. But she turned men’s heads wherever she went. Even in my younger years I could see how they were attracted to her. And I could see how, as the months rolled by, my parents began to see less and less of each other. While she ran back and forth from the house, caring for us children when we were home from school and going to the radio station, my father was always absent except for late in the evening. His job as both a worker and a consultant was very demanding and it was only at weekends that we were able to be united as a family. We might go to the beach at Cronulla or sit on the banks of the George’s River for a picnic.

  While these were peaceful scenes, my parents were distressed at the news that was pouring out of Kurdistan—news that my mother in her role at the radio station was among the first to hear. In mid-March 1988, Saddam Hussein unleashed his most evil weapon of mass destruction against the Kurds, using poison gas on the town of Halabja, killing up to 5000 people and leaving thousands more to die of terrible complications, such as disease and birth defects for years afterwards. Human Rights Watch declared the attack as an act of genocide and to this day it is the biggest chemical weapons attack against any civilian-populated area. My parents were devastated—but remained thankful that their relatives were out of reach of the gas clouds.

  It was when I began my senior education at Liverpool Girls High School that my mother implored my father to find us a new home. There were, she complained, too many Middle Eastern people moving into the district. Looking back on that time I can see that it was a strange kind of racism but because I was still young I didn’t see anything wrong in her comments. In any case, we moved to an apartment in nearby Chipping Norton, which my father was able to purchase on a mortgage because his wages from the factory were very good.

  Among the girls I befriended at high school was another Kurd—her family knew mine. As she was a newcomer my mother asked me to look after her, guide her around, show her where she could buy nice clothes. My mother even helped the family financially and told me that I should remember to do the same thing for other Kurds if they needed help. It was curious that while she did not want to mix with them, she went out of her way to help them, like a shadowy benefactor. I’ve come to realise, though—oh, how I have realised—that her reluctance to keep her distance was due to the idle gossip that began as soon as her back was turned. She had had enough of it in Iraq, the unceasing chatter about this family and that, how much they earned, what kind of furniture they had, how they got on with their children or this cousin or that aunty.

  In any case, I did as my mother asked and helped the new girl, Sheireen, who was among a group of some 50 families who had arrived in Australia in 1992 following more uprisings in the north and south of Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War. I told Sheireen that if anyone bullied her, if she needed any help whatsoever, she could come to me. I introduced her to teachers, to my school friends, helped her buy the best learning books, to say no to drugs, who to avoid. Although she could speak English—she had picked it up in a refugee camp before arriving in Australia—she was still in great need of guidance and I was there for her. How it hurts me now to think of the betrayal that was to come. By her and so many others.

  Two

  My schoolgirl days were fun—and rebellious. I skipped classes to go to the movies or the swimming pool and gossiped with my classmates about the boys in the school next door. We unashamedly talked about our crushes. There was a pool in our apartment complex which also had adjoining tennis courts. The first thing each morning, before heading off to school, I would jump in the pool and do a few laps, along with my brother. I was good at sports, doing karate training at weekends, a skill my parents had insisted on me taking up, and getting picked in the school team at netball. I had also been playing the piano—classical music—since I was eight. Sometimes I’d rollerskate around a nearby lake, racing my brother on his skateboard. It was great fun. We were real Aussie kids!

  My parents—although Muslims, they were not strong adherents to the faith—had given me the freedom to do pretty much what I wanted, except that they made sure I stayed in at night in my early teens, telling me I was still too young, even though many of my classmates were out and about after dark. My father was what you would call a worldly man, enjoying his vodka and his cigarettes, and telling my brother that when the time came he would rather he drank and smoked in front of him than behind his back. He was happy to let me wear a bikini when I went to the swimming pool. And neither of my parents objected to me drawing naked pictures of women, supporting my art and asking me what I was trying to convey.

  But when it came to boys, they were very protective of me. I was allowed to go to school discos on weekends as long as it was with a group of girls, who my father would pick up and take, and then he would make sure to come back for me later. My parents told me nothing about the whys and wherefores of sex—it was left to my school teacher to explain those things to the class of girls, holding up a cucumber and fitting a condom over it, saying that this was how you avoided getting nasty diseases or falling pregnant.

  The time came when I found myself a boyfriend, an Anglo-Australian. Of all places to meet, it was in the library, which was shared by both the girls’ and boys’ schools. Realising my parents would frown on me, still in my early teens, ‘seeing a boy’ meant we had to meet in secret. Patrick, a good sportsman himself, had an old car and whenever the chance arose, he would drive us to Parramatta or some big centre where my mother was unlikely to be during her ro
unds of the Kurdish community. We’d flirt with one another in McDonald’s and hold hands at afternoon picture matinees, but it never went any further than that.

  During school holidays, our parents took us on no less than four trips to Germany, where we had a number of relatives. When I say ‘a number’ I mean no less than 300! I enjoyed the trips there, meeting new cousins who seemed to be just about everywhere, yet each time as we flew home to Australia, I felt a sense of excitement. Australia had really grown on me and it was, after all, where my friends were.

  My mother had a powerful influence on all around her, to the point that many women in the community resented her. Perhaps it was because she was sharper than them, or it may have had something to do with the way their husbands would stare admiringly at her and hover around her at Kurdish events she might attend. They would find any excuse to talk to her about politics, history, anything that would engage her in conversation. I would later hear comments, passed on by my friends, about what a mismatch my parents seemed to be. My mother was slim and beautiful with high cheekbones and my father was a short, dark, Arab-looking man with a beard.

  Her beauty opened many doors for her within the Kurdish community in Australia and also when she was on visits to Kurdistan. In my younger days, I never knew what she did on those trips but I came to learn later that in 1992, when I was 12 and she was abroad she had been arrested in Turkey, pretending to be a Turkish refugee in one of the border camps. She had been caught taking photographs to gain evidence of how the Turks were treating the Kurds and she was thrown into prison. It took a begging phone call from a high official in the Kurdish resistance of Massoud Barzani, to the Turks to win her freedom. At home in Sydney she was a wife, a mother and a newsreader at a radio station. Overseas, God knew what role she played.

  In 1994, as I was approaching my 14th birthday, my mother had a surprise for me. She was pregnant. She gave birth to my sister a whole 13 years after her last child—my brother—and she was still only 30. Curiously, I felt that the arrival of baby Bojeen did nothing to lessen the sense of restlessness that I was beginning to see in my mother. She had already thrown herself into the community, was out and about everywhere, and now this little baby had come along. But she still gave me the impression that she wanted to continue to, well, ‘explore’ is the best way I can put it. Now she had a baby to look after, as well as continuing to do our cooking, tending to household needs and maintaining her work at the radio station. And she continued to help Kurds financially, not only in Australia but by sending money overseas to them. It was my father’s money that he had earned, yet he did not object as long as her generosity was not going to disadvantage his own family. In any case, he trusted her implicitly, handling as she did all our cheque books and being in charge of the bank statements.

  Somehow, my mother still managed to fit in the time to help people locally. Shortly after my sister was born, a new Kurdish family arrived in Liverpool and the daughter, who was 18, wanted to stop wearing the hijab, the Muslim scarf. She felt out of place at school among other girls with their hair flowing freely. One evening, when we went to visit the family, my mother spoke to the parents in general terms about how girls in Australia had a right to ‘be themselves’. She even revealed her knowledge of the Koran by reciting how no-one should be forced to do anything because that would be against God’s will. The very next day, the girl turned up at school without the scarf. It was an example of my mother’s influence.

  When did I realise that things were going wrong between my parents? Perhaps it was when I was just 12 or 13, when I recall my mother telling me how she had been a victim of a forced—she didn’t use the word ‘arranged’—marriage at the age of just 15. And I remember comments like ‘I wish I’d never married your father’. They would never argue in front of me, but I heard her say to him once that it was all his fault that we had had to flee from Kurdistan—obviously a reference to the time he had lost his shoe with that incriminating information tucked inside.

  Sometimes, after I heard them in animated discussions in the bedroom, my mother would storm out of the house and not return for several hours. And there was the time when I came home and saw a couple of champagne glasses on the table.

  ‘Oh, who came by?’ I asked my mother, surprised to see drink glasses there in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘None of your business,’ she replied.

  And then there was the lingerie. She was shopping around for really sexy, expensive, designer label underwear and it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing my father would have been interested in. So who was she trying to impress? I never saw my mother with another man, but then, my parents had never seen me with my boyfriend from the library. There was always a way.

  If my father ever came home from work early enough, before we, the children, went to bed, we would have a family chat about work and school. I was always groaning about maths, while my brother was proudly talking about his achievements in that subject. Soon a new topic began to creep into the conversations, very insidiously at first but, in time I realised it was all part of a master plan my mother had hatched.

  ‘Those holidays we’ve had in Germany—you children enjoyed them, didn’t you.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ my brother and I replied, thinking that another vacation to Europe was in her mind.

  While she left it there the first time she raised the topic, Germany began to enter the conversations more frequently until finally when we had once again said how much we had enjoyed our holidays there, she turned to my father in front of us and said: ‘There you are, I told you they’d enjoy living there. It’s a far better life and we’d be much closer to our relatives in Iraq than here in Australia.’

  Suddenly I realised what she was proposing. ‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘What are you saying? That you want us all to leave and live in Germany?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Your father and I have discussed it.’

  ‘But I’ve got all my friends here! There’s my education—I want to do my Higher School Certificate and start a career. You know that I may want to be a doctor or perhaps be a forensic analyst, something like that. And you’ve always told me that knowledge is power.’

  Baian had all the answers, of course.

  ‘You can finish your Higher School Certificate in Germany. It will be better for your resumé to show that you completed your education over there.’

  I was 17 at the time and I had to concede to my mother’s argument. Life wouldn’t be so bad in Germany and being there would not harm my academic progress. I felt sorry for my father, though. He had agreed to stay behind to put all our affairs in order, including selling the house. As soon as he had sold it, he would send the money on to an account my mother was going to set up in Germany and then come over to join us.

  ‘It will be money for you, for your futures,’ he told my brother and me. ‘And of course your little sister will benefit from it too, in time.’

  But there was something I had found out about our finances that my father was not aware of. One day, in my mother’s absence, curiosity led me to look at the bank statements. I was surprised to see that some $200,000—money that my father had earned through all those long hours he was working—had been withdrawn. I was to find out in time that it had been sent to my uncles—my mother’s brothers—in Kurdistan for a sinister reason that I would later learn about. How I wish I’d had the foresight to understand what the future held as my mother made preparations for us to fly to Germany.

  My father came to the airport to see us off. It was the summer of 1998. My father hugged me and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t say goodbye, Dad,’ I said. ‘We’ll be seeing you when you come to join us.’

  We flew to Dusseldorf and then travelled to the university city of Siegen, in the west of Germany, some 50 miles east of Cologne. The pursuit of knowledge in that city had taken over from the iron ore mining industry of old. I was soon to learn why the town was
popular with Kurdish people—with its white buildings set against a background of mountains, it would have reminded many of northern Iraq, eastern Turkey and the Zagros Ranges. Its one big claim to fame is that the painter Rubens was born there. On the way I had asked my mother who we knew there. She told me we had a very nice relative, a distant cousin, who had lived there since he was a teenager, was now a prominent lawyer and also owned a pizza restaurant.

  We stayed at first in a small apartment owned by one of our relatives in the centre of the city and it wasn’t long before I was introduced to the distant cousin. My mother had been invited to a Kurdish party and, with the baby being cared for, my brother and I went along with her.

  ‘There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,’ she said and led us to a tall, handsome man who immediately reminded me of the Welsh singer, Tom Jones. I thought he was ‘cool’. He spoke English, which was a relief because everyone else around us seemed to be speaking in Kurdish or German. We had, my mother informed me, met ‘him’ before on one of our holidays to Germany but I had been too young to remember him.

  After a few weeks my mother found us a place to live in the mediaeval city of Munster, directly to the north of Siegen. I asked my mother who we knew there. She told me that was where this distant cousin lived. Our new place was a townhouse apartment, very art deco with a wooden floor and three bedrooms, my mother and baby sister in one bedroom and my brother and I having one room each. The place was too dark and heavy for my liking, but perhaps I was unfairly comparing it with our bright home in Australia.

  It was in that city that my mother’s friend had his legal practice and a pizza restaurant, and where my mother arranged for me to take German lessons at a foreign language school. Munster is known as the bicycle capital of Germany but it was also home to a large British forces base. In between my language lessons, my mother lined me up to work as a waitress at his restaurant. I answered the phone and served the pizzas—mainly to British servicemen who filled the place out. I got on well with them. They were always making cheeky ‘come on’ remarks, but always in a jokey way. I realised why he wanted me there—I was pulling in the British customers because they could chat to me in English.