Tragedy in Nauru: dreams of a new life shattered
A year ago, the love of her life died a horrible and painful death after setting himself alight while on Nauru. Now Pari, a refugee in indefinite detention in Australia, tells Clair Weaver and Ben Doherty how their cherished dream of a happy life and futu
It began as a modern love story. A pretty 22-year-old fashion designer was driving to work in the city when a young man with a big smile pulled up next to her. Flattered but embarrassed by his lingering gaze, she gave him a light-hearted rebuke, “Hey, my friend, I think you should look somewhere else!”
Still grinning, the confident 20-yearold replied, “I’m going to give you my phone number. I hope you call. I think you will.”
So the romance between Pari and Omid Masoumali was born. On their first date, they talked for 10 hours. Love bloomed and they became inseparable. “I thought, ‘He is my perfect man’,” Pari* tells The Weekly. “He was completing me like a puzzle.
“Omid was very energetic, social and very outgoing,” she adds. “He had a good sense of humour. He was always the person you want to talk to … the best company.”
Convinced they were soul mates who’d grow old together, the couple made a home and committed to spending their lives with each other. Their future was bright, starting a family was on their horizon. “We wanted to have children when we were young,” says Pari.
Little could they have guessed how short-lived their newly found bliss would be. Soon they’d be forced to flee their comfortable life in Iran.
Three years on, Omid’s life would come to a brutal, premature end, screaming in agony after setting himself alight on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. And Pari would find herself alone in the world at 25, traumatised, isolated and trapped in a legal and political nightmare.
A desperate act
When disturbing footage of a young man engulfed in flames emerged from Nauru in April last year, the response ranged from abject horror to condemnation. Many were appalled that a genuine refugee who’d sought protection in Australia had felt driven to commit such a desperate act. Yet the Republic of Nauru government described it as “a political protest” and said “there is no value in such behaviour”.
Australia’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton sent condolences, but took the opportunity to stress that refugees sent offshore would “never settle in Australia”.
Irrespective of the highly charged politics brewing around Australia’s offshore processing policy, many uncomfortable questions remain over how a previously happy and healthy 23-year-old could die in such awful circumstances.
Today, Pari is ready to share their story for the first time, shedding light on the human experience behind the headlines and paying tribute to her partner’s memory. To protect her security and her family, she asked The Weekly not to publish details of the circumstances in which she and Omid left Iran, nor details of their journey.
“People have seen a lot of pictures of Omid in his last moments,” she says. “Those images are very painful for me. I want people to know who Omid really was. He was positive, intelligent, invincible. But after three years, even Omid was broken.”
Pari says she had no warning that he would self-immolate and believes it was probably a split-second decision fuelled by high emotion and despair after years of living in exile. Of course, that doesn’t stop her agonising over it every day.
“It was not a political act,” she says. “Omid was friends with a father who was charged by Nauru [authorities] for attempting suicide. He was so upset about this, he lost hope. I don’t know why he did what he did. All I know is that he went through so much pain. Every cell in his body must have been hurting.”
The Weekly understands there are serious concerns about the medical care Omid received at the Republic of Nauru Hospital, where he remained for more than 22 hours before being airlifted to Brisbane. A distressing video reportedly taken inside the Nauru hospital shows him dressed only in his underwear hobbling around and shouting in pain from third-degree burns all over his body.
It was more than two hours, media reports about his care state, before he was given pain-killing medication and staff were hampered by a lack of equipment, sufficient medicines and medical expertise in dealing with serious burns.
“I would estimate that it was two to three hours from when Omid arrived at the Nauru hospital before he was unconscious,” Pari says. “Throughout that entire time he was in pain and screaming.
“Omid … wanted to survive. He did not want to die. I stood beside Omid and talked to him while the Nauruan staff gave him some medicine to make him unconscious. Omid never woke up again.”
A shield from hardship
Until that day, Pari says Omid had always been a “pillar of strength”, the kind of man who always saw the glass half-full and made the best of any situation. “He was someone I could lean on, someone who supported me,” says Pari. “He was kind and patient – I felt like he was always carrying me on his
He was like a shield through the hardship.
shoulders. He was like an umbrella, a shield through the hardship.”
Omid loved listening to music and watching movies, Pari says, and he loved to talk. During the long and empty hours of their Nauru detention, she and Omid spent time enraptured in their own world of conversation.
Yet, most of all, Omid was thoughtful and loving, Pari says. “He was the person who gave you food before you knew you were hungry.”
Goofing around and pulling faces in selfie photos seen by The Weekly (which can’t be shown for legal reasons), they appear like any other young couple around the world. With her coloured hair in a trendy cut and their modern clothing, the couple doesn’t fit the crude stereotype sometimes portrayed of refugees.
Nor were they uneducated or unwilling to work. Pari was born and raised in a progressive family in Tehran. “I am the youngest child,” she says, “and my family was very focused on education, particularly for women. Most of my family are very involved and interested in the arts.” Pari holds two degrees and was working as a fashion designer when she and her partner were forced to flee. “All my designs and clothes are in Iran – when I left, I left my art behind,” she says.
Anything is possible
Watching the sun set on a tropical island may conjure up a moment of great beauty, optimism and serenity. For asylum-seekers and refugees living on Nauru, however, it was the most difficult part of the day, says Pari. People often cried while watching the sun go down, she says. “Every sunset was a symbol of another day lost.”
Pari says she would often feel sad and occasionally angry, too. “But, every evening, Omid would sit with me and talk to me about all the things we had to look forward to: children, friends, freedom. I would sometimes get really frustrated and say, ‘Omid, you are forgetting where we are. Those things are unrealistic!’ But he would just smile and say, ‘We are young, we are together, anything is possible.’”
The couple would sometimes allow themselves to imagine a different existence. “We used to daydream about [what life would have been like if we had been settled in Australia],” she says. “We wanted a home with children, we wanted to explore Australia – to see the bush areas and go to the beach.
“Leaving Iran, the place where we were both born and raised, was very hard for us. But we had no choice. We hoped that in Australia, a country we knew was welcoming and with many different people, we would have the chance to build a life together.”
At first, they lived in locked detention in Nauru’s Regional Processing Centre, located on the site of an old phosphate mine in the centre of the island. “Conditions were awful,” she says. “Being imprisoned in a camp with big fences and guards was so humiliating. We lived in a tent, surrounded by other tents filled with sad, frustrated people. I wondered what Australian people must think of us to allow us to be treated this way. We were all innocent people who hoped for the same, simple thing – a chance to rebuild our lives.”
In December 2014, Pari and Omid were granted refugee status, meaning it had been recognised by immigration authorities that they had fled “a well-founded fear of persecution” in their homeland and were legally owed protection. It would be illegal for either Nauru or Australia to forcibly return them to Iran. On Nauru, their refugee status meant they could leave the confines of the centre, which has since become an “open” facility, and live in community housing.
“We were still prisoners on the same island in the middle of nowhere,” says Pari. “Every second was still difficult. I couldn’t understand. We had been accepted as refugees, why were we still being left here waiting? What was the plan – to leave us stuck on this island forever?”
Omid, whose father is a retired airline executive, found work on the island fixing up old motorcycles to sell. Fearful for her own safety and unwilling to be separated, Pari would stay with him as he worked. To raise their spirits, she says Omid would invent games to take their minds off their situation and uncertain future. They’d pretend they had regular lives and jobs, getting ready to go to work in the morning. “He was always determined to make the best of a bad situation,” says Pari. “He would look for things for us to do – games to play, things to talk about, places to walk – little things to pass the time and to try to forget where we were. Omid was the strongest, most positive person.”
Life now
Since Omid’s death, Pari has been under the guard of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in Queensland and then Melbourne. When The Weekly meets her at a detention centre in Melbourne’s west, she is escorted by an unsmiling guard who directs her to a small numbered table under the omniscient gaze of a bank of surveillance cameras.
She is petite, wearing a denim skirt and black tights and top, her hair dyed a brilliant blonde. In conversation – Pari speaks English flawlessly – she has a habit of pausing to consider questions, as she fixes her interrogator with her large brown eyes. “They tell me I am a high-risk detainee,” she says, laughing at the absurdity of her tiny person posing a threat.
Yet the categorisation has had serious ramifications. She has been shunted through three detention centres since her partner’s death, moved without warning or explanation. In Brisbane, she was physically shaken awake at 2am and dragged from her room, put in handcuffs and moved to Melbourne. She was not allowed to say goodbye to her roommate, nor pack her belongings, which were sent to her later. When she asked why she was transferred, Pari was told it was for “operational reasons” and that she had no right to know why she was being moved. When an infection in her mouth required hospitalisation, Pari was taken to a public hospital and walked through the wards in handcuffs by three guards, “as though I am a criminal, as though I am a dangerous person”.
For Pari, a year of indefinite detention has become a series of numb rituals: of being told when to eat and bathe and sleep; of waiting for secured doors to be opened; of being escorted down the labyrinthine corridors of the detention centre that, for all the future she can foresee, is her entire world.
Behind the high metal fences, hers is a lonely existence. Friendships are deliberately shallow, a protective mechanism. Having lost the one she loved most, Pari sees danger in being attached to anyone. “Tomorrow,” she says, “I might be gone.”
The traumas of her flight for safety, her experiences on Nauru and then watching her lover burn himself to death, combined with the uncertainty of indefinite detention, have left Pari acutely unwell, suffering “significant traumatic grief”, according to one psychiatric assessment.
Mental health professionals have pleaded with the Australian Border Force’s Chief Medical Officer for Pari to be released into the Australian community, where she can begin to rebuild her life. One assessment noted, “Her ability to connect with others and form trusting and stable relationships is essential to her wellbeing and recovery, however, this has been extremely limited by her ongoing detention. Held detention is an extremely unsuitable living environment for Pari.”
However, there is no indication she is being considered for release.
Her detention is indefinite. The Chief Medical Officer, Dr John Brayley, was “not available for interviews”, The Weekly was told.
Pari is terrified at the prospect of being sent back to Nauru. Not only would this mean living with constant reminders of the trauma of her partner’s death, but also in an environment where self-harm and high levels of mental distress are prevalent. A psychiatric report presented to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection states, “Returning Pari to Nauru is predicted to have a highly detrimental impact upon her mental state and her risk of suicide would become very high.” She tells The Weekly, “I cannot go back to that island.”
The name Omid means “hope”, but Pari, alone, heartbroken and in utter despair, has lost both. “I will forever miss Omid,” she says. “I will miss how he made me feel safe and looking forward to a better future. I wish I could feel that way again. [Now] every second of my life feels like a year. I don’t have any hope or any vision. I would give everything to have him back, even for a moment.” * Pari’s identity has been protected by
The Weekly for legal reasons and for the safety of her family.
I will forever miss Omid. I’d give anything to have him back.