When Kuwaiti-born Palestinian refugee Aladdin Sisalem arrived in Melbourne on May 31, 2004, greeted by the glare of television cameras and the welcome of supporters, his emotions were tinged with a sense of triumph and relief. Sisalem was imprisoned in a detention centre on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island for 18 months — over half of that time on his own. After Green Left Weekly broke the story of his lone ordeal, a public campaign in Australia eventually won his release.
Sisalem left Kuwait in 2000 and was determined to find a country that would allow him the freedom to live life without persecution and harassment, and to pursue his dream of becoming an airline pilot or an aeronautical engineer.
When I spoke to him soon after his arrival in Australia, Sisalem was unconcerned about the limitations associated with his five-year temporary humanitarian visa. He was just happy to be out of detention and able to live freely in Australia.
Twelve months on, Sisalem is faced with daily reminders of the cruel restrictions that his temporary visa places on his ability to plan a new life here.
It wasn't until he applied to bring his family to Australia that Sisalem realised he had to wait at least another four years, and then only if granted the right to stay permanently could he even submit an application for family reunion. His current visa even prevents him from visiting his family, because if he leaves Australia he would be barred from returning. This is a deeply painful issue for Sisalem, given his family's terrible situation in Kuwait.
Following the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War, Palestinians living in Kuwait were targeted as scapegoats, labelled as supporters of Saddam Hussein and expelled in significant numbers. Those Palestinians who remained had to find a Kuwaiti citizen willing to "sponsor" them in order to continue living and working there. Sisalem's family was one of these lucky few, but upon turning 21, Sisalem was considered independent and had to find his own sponsors. Without any options for sponsorship, and after spending some time in hiding, he fled the country.
Sisalem's father is ill with kidney failure and needs a transplant. Sisalem told me he's convinced that the deterioration in his father's health is because he's so worried about what's happening to his son. Sisalem was completely out of contact when he was travelling on foot from West Papua to Papua New Guinea, and his parents thought he was dead. If he wasn't on a temporary protection visa (TPV), Sisalem would travel to Kuwait to donate a kidney to his father.
Sisalem's younger brother and sister have not yet turned 21, but they are terrified about what they will do when the time arrives. Sisalem told me he had hoped that his 18-year-old brother would be a fighter like him, but was devastated to discover that he has tried twice this year to commit suicide.
Sisalem's visa precludes him from applying for Austudy payments, but he nevertheless started a two-year diploma this year in aerospace engineering through RMIT TAFE. Federal legislation requires that all TPV-holders pay full fees for TAFE or university courses, but the state government has waived those fees for courses that it oversees. Completion of the diploma will give Sisalem advanced standing in the four-year university degree, enabling him to complete it in three years.
When he first applied, Sisalem was actively discouraged from doing the course by RMIT's administration. He was told that it would be too difficult and too much of a financial struggle. Sisalem told me he thought it must be a very special course that is hard to get into.
Study is a daily struggle. In addition to the challenge of learning a swathe of new technical terms, Sisalem found the whole study environment difficult to get used to.
The Melbourne Age's Andra Jackson, who has reported Sisalem's story since she first discovered his imprisonment on Manus Island, put him in touch with the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Given the Chance program. Run from the Ecumenical Migrant Centre, it provides mentors for refugees facing education and job barriers. Sisalem has had personalised tutoring from two men who are senior engineers with British Aerospace Engineering in Richmond, and told me that their help has been central to his ability to keep up with his study.
It's difficult for Sisalem to concentrate on study. Receiving Centrelink's Newstart payment, he has to look for work each fortnight. It's a draining process, and he's finding that a lot of employers are reluctant to hire someone on a temporary visa.
Sisalem is also convinced that the medication he was forced to take daily while in detention has damaged his brain's functioning. He says he can't think the way he used to. He can't remember the names of all the drugs, but he was given three different medications — five tablets — every day, among them a high dose of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. He became dependent on them.
There are two additional things that have made Sisalem's first year in Australia an even greater struggle. The first blow was when Sisalem's cat Honey — who was brought from Manus Island to Melbourne after an international campaign to reunite them — went missing in December. Honey was his only companion during his 10 solitary months on Manus Island. After three months in quarantine, Honey had only been living with Sisalem since the end of September. He letterboxed his neighbourhood, asking for anyone who had seen Honey to contact him, but he hasn't heard anything. He just hopes she is being looked after by someone.
The second blow was being diagnosed with a rare and dangerous strain of malaria. Soon after Sisalem's arrival in Australia, he became quite sick. Doctors didn't diagnose it as malaria until he got sick a second time, during a series of Green Left Weekly public meetings that he spoke at in August. Sisalem said he was visited and examined by half-a-dozen different doctors while in hospital, all curious to see a patient with that type of malaria, borne only by mosquitoes found in a small area around Manus Island.
Sisalem has been told that the medication he's taking has only an 80% success rate, and he has had another two bouts of malaria since August: one in December and another in February. He still doesn't know whether the medication has fully eradicated the virus.
A few things have helped to keep Sisalem's spirits up. He has made some good friends. He was also given an opportunity by Anthony Kitchener, who employed Sisalem in a factory in 2004, to restore a 1968 Alfa Romeo. Sisalem is trained as a mechanic and the car had been sitting idle in Kitchener's garage for six years.
Kitchener presented Sisalem with a deal: restore it, fix the engine, then sell it and keep a third of the proceeds. Working on the car in his spare time over two months, it provided a form of therapy for Sisalem, doing the sort of work he knew and loved. Now he just has to find a buyer.
From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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