The Happiest Day Of Mushtaq's Life
Sun Herald
Sunday January 27, 2002
Few Australians would have celebrated Australia Day yesterday as joyously as new citizen Mushtaq Dadyar, who, despite the furore over asylum seekers, is proud to call Australia home. He told his story to Andrew West.
THE AIRPORT at Sydney is not really a pretty place. It'svery busy and surrounded by factories and warehouses. But to me, it's the most beautiful place in the entire world because of what it represents my freedom.
I came to Australia six years ago with my family from Afghanistan.
We were refugees who had left everything and arrived with nothing.
Today we are citizens; we are Australians.
We go to school, we work, we pay taxes, we are loyal to the country that gave us liberty and hope.
I am still a devout Shi'ite Muslim. I go to the mosque and observe Ramadan. Australia allows me and my family to be good Muslims because you protect freedom of religion.
We had no choice in 1996 except to escape from Afghanistan.
I was 16 and I had known only war. First the rebel war against the Soviet Union, which had invaded our country; then the rival war lords who were carving up Afghanistan; and finally the Taliban.
My father, who was an accountant for the government, was jailed first by the communists because he refused to work for the foreign occupiers and then by the Taliban because he was a leader of the Hazara community, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan.
The Taliban tortured him by beating him with clubs and whipping him with chains and electric cables.
Our lives everyone's lives were also miserable.
In our neighbourhood in the western suburbs of Kabul, there were almost no basic services.
You would turn on the tap and no water would run.
We stood in a line at the bakery for five or six hours just to get a few small loaves of bread.
There was never enough medicine and a shortage of doctors that only got worse when the Taliban seized control.
While my father was in prison the second time, for 18 months he got a message to my mother: escape, anywhere.
So in the winter, when the snow was so deep it was up to our thighs, mother took us myself, my sisters aged 13, 12 and 11, and brothers aged 10 and eight on a 25-day journey on foot across the mountains into Pakistan. We had a much older brother who had been in Australia for 20 years, working in the catering industry, and so we asked him to sponsor us.
Australia has not always been an easy place, but we think of it as heaven.
I had the chance to finish high school here, something I would never have achieved in Afghanistan, and now I am studying computer networking engineering.
I want to contribute to this country because that is the way of our culture.
In the evenings, I wait on tables in a steak restaurant to pay my way through college and help support my family. In Afghanistan, there is no welfare, so working hard, supporting our families and being productive is our tradition.
Because we are also people of faith, we have strong morals, so in my spare time I work for the Australian-Afghan Association, telling young refugees about the importance of staying in school and staying off drugs.
Australia is a multicultural country and its people are the friendliest in the world.
But after September 11, when some people found out I was a Muslim, I encountered some intolerance and hostility. But I quickly realised that is not the true Australian way and it did not dim my love of the country.
Even though I love Australia as a loyal citizen, I also weep for the plight of my Afghan brothers and sisters in the refugee detention centres here.
If you knew about our country how poor it is, how much war we have endured, how cruel our governments have been you would understand these people have almost nowhere else to go. They are desperate.
Like me, they hate Osama bin Laden, not just because he kills innocent people and breaks all the rules of Muslim compassion, but because he was an ally of their oppressors, the Taliban.
To sew their lips together is horrible, but it shows they have no choice, no other way to show their pain. It shows how much they want to be Australians.
I love the Australian people and I respect the Australian Government, but I ask Prime Minister John Howard and Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock to realise the Afghans in the detention centres can be just like me studying hard, working hard, helping build thecountry.
I remember very clearly the day I became an Australian citizen.
We all went to the Auburn Town Hall and stood with about 100 other people, some of them from Afghanistan, others from England and China, from almost every country I can imagine.
We had already learned the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, and we sang it proudly.
Then they asked us to hold up one hand and read out the pledge of allegiance to Australia, its people and its laws.
It was the happiest occasion of mylife.
© 2002 Sun Herald