Afghan family seeks Irish refuge from violence and tragedy

The blue skies and blossom of the Balkan spring remind Fatima Bakhshi of Kabul, the city she fled in fear with her mother Nadia and two young sons.

Last April, they were in a refugee camp in Athens, and the Afghan women must have watched Ahmed (4) and Shoaib (9) play in the sunshine as they planned the rest of their risky voyage towards the dream of a future with relatives in Ireland.

Now in Serbia, Fatima’s eyes still follow her boys everywhere, but their destination remains distant and their journey has taken a terrible turn.

After nine frustrating months in Greece, Fatima and Nadia joined neighbours in the camp in paying smugglers to take them north, through Balkan borders officially closed to refugees and migrants.

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In the early hours of December 29th last, they were among 15 people crammed into the back of a Volkswagen Passat as it raced through Serbia. Later, one Iraqi man would recall that the smuggler was drunk and drove at terrifying speed.

“The car went across the road, left, right, left, right. We were scared,” Fatima (26) recalls quietly in broken English. “Then the next thing is the hospital, doctors around me. And this.”

She gestures towards her legs, which now end above the knee following an emergency amputation; Nadia was among three refugees killed in a horrific car crash, Ahmed suffered a broken leg and Shoaib a head injury.

Home for disabled

Fatima and her boys now share one room in a home for the elderly and disabled in Doljevac, a small, remote town in southern Serbia.

The staff are friendly, but communication is difficult and the facility provides little more than basic accommodation and food, and cannot offer the kind of care that is urgently required by a young family that has undergone deep trauma.

“The truth is that she is in an institution. It’s not a good place for her or her kids,” says Tamara Simonovic, director of local NGO Indigo, which provides psychological and other support for the family.

“She needs to get to a place with all the resources for physical and psychological therapy that she and her children need. They need conditions for the kids to settle down and get used to the fact that their mum does not have her legs anymore . . . There couldn’t be any better support than her family.”

As Fatima faces up to her bleak present and daunting future, she is again pinning hopes on the dream she shared with her mother – of making a new life in Ireland with the help of dozens of relatives.

“There is a big support network waiting for her here,” says Dr Zekria Bakhshi, a registrar at Tallaght hospital in Dublin.

“Nadia was my cousin, and there are about 50 other relatives in Ireland – doctors, pharmacists, teachers, engineers – all ready to help. We want to do everything we can to stop them ending up in a nursing home in a strange country. We want them to join their family here, we want to get prostheses for Fatima – it is what’s best for her and the boys.”

Dr Bakhshi arrived in Ireland in 1999, having fled the threat of Taliban reprisals for his work as a translator for BBC correspondent John Simpson.

Adoptive homeland

He became an Irish citizen shortly afterwards, retrained at Trinity College Dublin to allow him to practise medicine in Ireland, and has raised five children in his adoptive homeland.

Dr Bakhshi last saw Nadia two years ago in Kabul, and recalls the brutal treatment that she and Fatima suffered at the hands of their husbands.

“Nadia’s husband was a mullah, a terrible man who beat and abused her. Fatima’s husband was also violent. We sent them money, but when I heard about their tragedy . . . I was so sorry we hadn’t done more.”

Fatima says her father stopped her going to school and forced her to marry a man 10 years her senior when she was 16 years old.

“I had a younger sister. She saw what happened to me, and she didn’t want to marry,” Fatima recalls. “She burned herself, set herself on fire, and died. She was 14 years old.”

Nadina Christopoulou, who got to know the family in Athens, said the tragedy made Nadia determined to help Fatima escape Kabul. Arriving in Greece after travelling through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, they were inseparable.

“When we managed to send someone to see Fatima [after the crash] she didn’t ask for anything other than to find out where her mother was,” recalls Ms Christopoulou, co-founder of the Melissa Network that assists migrant women.

“‘I don’t care any more about losing my legs, I just want my mother, my mother is my legs,” Fatima said, shortly before finding out about her mother’s loss.

Limbo future

Fatima is desperate to move to Ireland with her sons, and her relatives are ready to help care for them, but the complexities of the asylum system have left them stranded in Serbia with their future in limbo.

Dr Bakhshi hopes that Minister for Justice and Equality Frances Fitzgerald will grant special dispensation for the family to come to Ireland.

“This was a hugely compelling case even before the accident,” says Nick Henderson, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council.

“If family members in Ireland are willing to provide for them, then let’s try to resolve the situation and ask the Minister to use her discretion.”

For now, Fatima relies largely on Shoaib, who helps her in and out of bed and pushes her everywhere in her wheelchair.

The responsibility makes him seem far older than his years. Only when Fatima has a trusted visitor does Shoaib briefly become a carefree nine-year-old again, chasing off after Ahmed, who squeals and runs as fast as his bad leg will allow.

But Shoaib does not play for long. Soon he returns to stand close behind his mother, his fingers wrapped tightly around the handles of her wheelchair.