HEARTBREAK AND JOY IN IRAN
ALISON AZER SHARES STORY OF BRIEFLY REUNITING WITH HER ABDUCTED CHILDREN
For more than a year, she ached, struggling to reach her four children. But when Alison Azer finally came face to face with the little ones her ex-husband had ripped from her arms and spirited across the globe, they were full of caution and mistrust.
Still, during the tightly controlled visits that followed in Iran late last year, Azer finally started to feel like a mom again.
In an interview, the mother whose children are now caught up in the Canada-Iran relationship shared the story of her fraught November trip for the first time.
It was August, 2015 when Azer’s ex-husband, Saren Azer, left Canada with the kids for a trip to Europe. When they didn’t return, a B.C. court granted full custody to his ex-wife and a warrant went out for his arrest.
They landed in a Kurdistani village in Iraq and eventually surfaced in Iran, from which Azer had fled to Canada in 1994, saying he had been tortured and securing refugee status.
Azer spent three months in Kurdish territory trying to track down her kids, to no avail. Back in Canada, she launched public campaigns urging the Canadian government to help bring them back.
A full 15 months after the abduction, Azer obtained a two-week visa for Iran. She was on a plane within 10 days with a close friend who spoke Persian and also knew her ex-husband.
Based on Iranian court documents, Azer knew the children and their dad had been living for several months in Urmia, in the northwest of the country. Iranian foreign officials were aware of Azer’s case and facilitated a onehour visit with her kids in Urmia on Nov. 21.
“My knees buckled and I couldn’t see straight. And they had to bring a chair over so that I could sit down. I couldn’t believe that after all this time, at the end of the day, I would hopefully see my children,” she said.
But there they were: the two older girls, now preteens, Sharvahn and Rojevahn; the two younger boys, Dersim and Meitan. They’d changed. The last time Azer saw Meitan, he was three.
The older children were especially guarded, she said.
Azer said parents of other abducted kids had warned her of an alienation effect.
“But nothing prepared me for the degree to which they withdrew from me,” she said. “It became clear to me that they had been told not to trust me.”
Sharvahn was “quite distant and quite reluctant,” Azer said. “My oldest daughter, she wouldn’t speak to me. But at one point she said, ‘Well, it sure took you long enough to get here.’”
The 12-year-old accused her mother of being a liar.
Azer found herself trying to “prove” to her children that she’d tried to come after them in Iraq.
Azer showered the kids with gifts she had shopped for in Canada. “Clothes, movies, stickers, books, art supplies.”
She bought Saren’s favourite chocolates, coconut Ferrero Rochers, as a gesture of goodwill, and perfume for his sisters, too. “Two huge suitcases.”
An INTERPOL red notice, similar to a warrant, is still out for Saren Azer’s arrest. But last summer, Iranian authorities cleared him of kidnapping charges.
Azer saw her kids several times over the course of a few days, including at their house, but always under supervision. “Saren let me know that there were listening devices in the house and that we were being followed,” she said.
On their way back to Azer’s hotel from lunch, on one of those last days, she said, the kids piled into the back seat with her as Saren drove. “They all wanted to sit with me. Nobody wanted to go into the front seat,” she said. Dersim wouldn’t let go of her.
Saren Azer asked his ex-wife to stay in Iran rather than go back to Canada. But he wasn’t willing to come back to Comox, fearing arrest, and she would not stay, not least because of the way Iranian laws limit women’s rights.
“I would be in better service of my children if I returned to Canada and kept fighting for them from here. And it was very clear that that’s what I had to do. And very hard,” Azer said.
Her only contact with the kids since then was a phone call on Christmas morning.
Last Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of a meeting between Azer and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, during which he told her the file would stay on his desk.
This month, according to Azer, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke on the phone with her counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, about the case. Canadian officials did not confirm or deny that the phone call took place.
Meanwhile, memories persist for Azer.
“I’m remembering what I wore, and what I ate, and my children, what their hair smelled like, how they felt under my fingers,” Azer said. “I am so grateful I was able to see my children and I’m more grateful that they were able to see me.”
IT BECAME CLEAR TO ME THAT THEY HAD BEEN TOLD NOT TO TRUST ME.