Iranian man tells of his struggle to care for troubled teenage son on Nauru after wife and daughter taken to Australia for medical treatment

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A refugee family cleaved apart by Australia’s offshore detention regime say their lives have been destroyed by being forcibly separated for more than three years with no prospect of being reunited.



Jalal – not his real name, but a pseudonym to protect family members – is an Arab-Iranian asylum seeker who has been stranded with his son on the island of Nauru since they were transferred from Christmas Island three and a half years ago.

But his wife and daughter, initially sent with them to Nauru, have been in Australia since 2014, for treatment for a serious heart condition and for breast lumps respectively.

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Jalal has not been allowed to see his wife and daughter since they were taken from Nauru to Australia.

Every member of the family has been formally recognised as a refugee, as defined by having a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland and cannot be returned there. But there is no indication of when or where they might be reunited.

Jalal’s son Mansur, a child when he was taken to Nauru and now aged 19, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. His father says it is the result of the trauma of fleeing Iran, the family’s midnight deportation to Nauru, and the sudden separation from his mother and sister.

Mansur has tried to kill himself several times, has developed an eating disorder and regularly absconds from Nauru’s processing centre to sleep in the strip-mined middle of the island.

“Immigration destroyed our family,” Jalal told the Guardian from Nauru. “We are not a family any more.

“It’s torture to make us live far away from our family. We have nothing to live for.”

He said his son had formerly been an outgoing and confident child – captain of his school in Iran – before the family had been forced to flee violence in the country’s south-eastern, largely Arab province of Khuzestan.

“I thought he used to go to the market, but he used to sleep in the forest. He told me ‘Dad, I don’t want to see people’.”

Jalal said camp authorities and doctors had not properly explained or treated his son’s condition. Instead, Mansur had been placed on “whiskey watch” – a surveillance reserved for refugees believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

“Now they’re watching him because they know he tried to kill himself, they put a guard to watch him because they know. All he wants was to be with his mum and sister to get their support.”

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Several doctors and psychiatrists who have treated Mansur on Nauru have recommended he be transferred to Australia for treatment and to be reunited with his mother, but these have been rejected.

The Australian government has a policy that it will “only approve medical transfers to Australia if refugees or asylum seekers are likely to face permanent disability or death”.

But the family’s enforced and indefinite separation has caused Mansur permanent harm, his father said.

“When his mother and sister left he had a lot of worry, he stopped eating until he weighed 39kg,” Jalal said of Mansur. “They told him that if he ate they would take him to Australia.”

Father and son continue to live in a tent in the immigration centre on Nauru, with a guard posted outside monitoring for any attempt at suicide.

“My son doesn’t like the tents, they’re full of rats and cockroaches,” Jalal said, adding that Mansur spent long periods hiding in a tree in the detention centre, refusing to eat anything or speak to anyone.

International Health and Medical Services, the private contractor responsible for the healthcare of the detainees, has placed Mansur in confinement several times to monitor him and ensure he is eating. Each time he is discharged back to his tent, however, he refuses to eat, and absconds from the centre, and from care, into the empty areas on the island.

Sleeping in the rocky centre of the island has left Mansur’s skin burned by phosphorous dust, with multiple bacterial infections on his legs which form abscesses, described by Jalal as “rotten pimples that eat him from the inside”.

Jalal has little faith in the proposed deal with the US for refugees from Australia’s offshore immigration camps to be resettled in America. Interviews for the proposed resettlement have been taking place, conducted by the US departments of homeland security and state, but no one has yet been resettled. There is no certainty around how many, if any, refugees will be taken.

“Everything we have heard about America is a lie,” Jalal said. “They said to me until your family comes back to Nauru there is no solution for you.”

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The Guardian put a series of questions regarding family separations to the Department of Immigration. Officials directed the Guardian to comments from department secretary Mike Pezzullo before Senate estimates in May.

Pezzullo said for people moved from offshore processing to Australia for medical treatment, there would be a “general expectation” they would returned offshore once their treatment was complete. He said refugees hoping to be resettled in the US would be expected to go back to Nauru or Manus Island first.



“If there is a particular vulnerability, or for compassionate reasons … I can see there could be a circumstance where the minister or the minister’s delegate might allow them to come to a different view.”

Pezzullo did not address the issue of families being separated, either temporarily or permanently.

Ian Rintoul, spokesman for the Refugee Action Coalition, told the Guardian the deliberate separation of families was a common, but hidden, aspect of the offshore detention.

“Husbands and wives are separated from each other, parents separated from their children, brothers from sisters, fathers from their new babies, for no reason. The separations themselves, so often for medical reasons, have created further mental anguish.”

Rintoul said forcing families apart for months, even years, was deliberatively punitive.



“Family members are essentially being held as hostages on Nauru. In many cases the government has maintained the separation to try and force people to back to go back Nauru, although there is no future for them there.

“Some families have declined to be interveiwed for resettlement in the US, because their families are in Australia. For them the US deal is only a recipe for being permanently separated from their family.”

Jalal said his son’s condition deteriorates daily, away from his mother and sister, and without hope for his future.



“All I want to do is to join my family, I want them to be treated, I don’t want anything else.”