By Susan Hollows
How difficult is it to be accepted as a refugee in Australia? Gek Buoi Minh, a 15-year-old Cambodian girl scratching out a living in Song Be refugee camp in Vietnam, has waited over five years for her migration application to be approved. She has never been to a proper school and gives her occupation as "growing cabbages".
Her uncle, Van Minh, had fled with his wife and baby daughter from their village in Cambodia. They spent three gruelling years in a refugee camp in Thailand, and in 1984 were accepted in Australia as refugees.
In 1989, Van Minh had a telephone call from an old friend from their village, a Mr Lam, who had ended up settling in Melbourne. Lam had originally been a stall-holder in the market in their old village, and close friends with the Minh brothers and their families.
Lam told Minh that he had recently returned from Phnom Penh, and that he had by chance discovered Minh's one surviving niece in a small village in Vietnam. Minh had not heard of the fate of his brother and his family of six children since fleeing the devastation of the Pol Pot years.
To get to Phnom Penh, Lam had to fly to Ho Chi Minh City and travel by bus or car across Vietnam to Cambodia. While having a rest in his journey in the small village, he noticed a child standing on a street corner. She had a strong resemblance, he thought, to his old friend, Chang Minh, the stall-holder next to him in the market in their Cambodian village.
Lam approached the girl, and addressed her in Teo Cheuw, the Chinese language they all spoke. He asked if she was Chang Minh's daughter, and was amazed and delighted when she said she was. He told her he had been a close friend of their father, and asked where the rest of her family was. To his dismay, she told him that both her parents and all her five brothers and sisters had been killed. She herself had survived only because old Mrs Vinh, who had been looking after a number of babies and young children in that part of the village, had taken her with her when she was forced to flee the fighting.
The girl led Lam back to the house where she lived with Mrs Vinh, and he spent an emotional hour talking with the old lady. She told him that Gek Buoi's parents left the toddler with her during the day while they went off with all the other able-bodied villagers to work the fields under the orders of the Pol Pot forces.
One evening they did not return. The road to the village was blocked by Vietnamese soldiers, and she was very frightened by shooting and explosions all around. She fled with the toddler and the few possessions she could gather together. They ended up in the Vietnamese village where Lam had found them.
Application
As soon as Lam got back to Melbourne, he rang Minh in Sydney. Minh immediately set about trying to rescue his one surviving niece. He applied to the Australian Department of Immigration for her to migrate to Australia as his "orphan relative".
Van Minh's wife's sister, Lam Ding, was living with her husband and four young children in Ho Chi Minh City. Mrs Minh wrote to her sister, telling her their news, and asked her to go to the village and see if she could bring Gek Buoi back to live with her family.
This Lam Ding did. In January 1990, when the old lady died, Gek Buoi went to Ho Chi Minh City.
The new start did not work out for Gek Buoi, however. Her aunt's sister had four children under the age of 12, and they shared the single-roomed house with the landlord and his wife and child. After a while the strains became too great, and Gek Buoi was forced to leave.
She made her way north to the refugee camp at Song Be, and there she had stayed ever since.
It took over three years to process Minh's application for a visa for Gek Buoi. After she got the all clear from her medicals and then the police confirmation that she had no criminal record, the Vietnamese authorities issued her with a clearance to leave the country.
That meant that the Australian embassy could now go ahead and issue the visa. But, no! An official in the Australian Embassy in Bangkok discovered a discrepancy in the spelling of her name in one of the many pieces of paper that had to be collected. Despite the fact that transliterating Chinese names into English can give rise to all sorts of different and inconsistent spellings, this official thought that this single discrepancy — Mien instead of Minh — indicated that there was some doubt about the identity of the girl.
She was interviewed at length, through an interpreter. Unsurprisingly, the effort to get the story out of a girl who was probably terrified of the foreigner, and totally ignorant of the ways of bureaucrats and their notions of "proof" and "logic", was doomed to failure.
The official thought the whole story "lacked credibility" and refused to issue a visa, on the grounds that Gek Buoi had no proof of identity. The fact that no-one born in Cambodia at that time had birth certificates seemed to be irrelevant.
Appeal
When the family in Sydney heard the outcome of the three-year wait, they sought advice and decided to appeal against the decision. They got statutory declarations from Lam, and from Lam Ding in Ho Chi Minh City. They also got statements from leaders in the Cambodian community in Sydney attesting to the bona fides of the family.
They lodged the appeal (at a cost of $200) with the Migration Internal Review Office. After almost a year, they received a letter saying that the review officer was not convinced that there was enough proof of the girl's identity, and that the decision to refuse the visa was upheld.
Again they sought help, this time from the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, a community legal centre which gives free legal advice and assistance to people with immigration problems.
They were advised to appeal to the independent Immigration Review Tribunal, and that they would probably stand a good chance of winning.
The worker from the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre spent several hours getting the story from the family, and prepared a submission. There was a six-month wait for the hearing, and the family had to pay $300 up front for the case to be heard.
When the time for the hearing finally came, the tribunal member decided that it would be necessary to interview Lam by telephone in Melbourne. He was rung, but his wife said he was out and uncontactable, so the hearing had to be adjourned.
After another several weeks, the hearing was finally reconvened. The tribunal member seemed not to have familiarised himself with the case, and spent a lot of time simply trying to establish what had happened. He obviously had not read the submission from the worker helping the family, and moreover had no knowledge of the difficulties of translating from a Chinese language into English and vice versa.
Luckily, Mrs Minh's sister and her family had just migrated from Ho Chi Minh City. Lam Ding was able to tell the tribunal how she had located the girl in the village, and how Gek Buoi had lived with their family in Ho Chi Minh City for several months before going to Song Be refugee camp.
As the hearing progressed, it dawned on the caseworker that the tribunal member had not understood the facts of the story, and that because of the communication difficulties, he was not inclined to believe the clients' story. At the conclusion of the hearing, the member would not give any indication of which way he was going to decide, but said he would let the family know in about six weeks.
Damage control
The caseworker discussed her fears with the family. They got hold of the tapes of the hearing and went through them word by word to nail down all the misunderstandings which they thought the member might have had. For example, when he asked a seemingly straightforward question such as "Did you know her?" it came out in translation as "Do you know her/him?" — neither the tense of the verb nor the gender of the person could be translated. Again, when the Cambodians mentioned months, they were referring to lunar months, not the solar months the tribunal member was thinking of.
When a new submission was finally ready, the caseworker sent it to the tribunal, having first got the agreement of the member to read it. He took three months to make a decision, but finally the family received a letter saying they had won.
Now the department will receive the decision from the tribunal. Presumably Gek Buoi will have to have her medicals all over again, because the previous ones were valid for only a year. So it will be another several months before she actually gets here.