FOCUS ‘Nothing to hide’
Maythem Radhi was accused of selling places on a rusted peoplesmuggling boat that sank with the loss of 353 lives. He, his wife and three children have been living here as refugees ever since. This week, the Supreme Court ruled the Government must decide
Maythem Radhi’s wife whispers a prayer, hands pressed together beneath her face in supplication. Her dark eyes retreat even further into shadow beneath a soft black cap.
She strokes the back of her husband’s neck; he runs his hand through his curly black hair before leaning one arm forward on the boardroom table of an Auckland law office.
They shiver. The air conditioning is running strong, and the solid leather chairs and dark panelling feel cold to the touch.
Or perhaps it’s apprehension. Radhi and his wife know they may have only 48 hours before he’s ordered to surrender for extradition and taken to the airport.
‘‘Today my life will change,’’ he says. Time slows to a crawl. The Supreme Court is about to deliver a ruling on whether Radhi’s case can be referred to the Minister of Justice.
Shortly after 10am, barrister Ron Mansfield strides into the room.
Radhi looks up, reading Mansfield’s face expectedly. He loses his grasp on English under pressure, and relies on people’s facial expressions to understand what they’re saying.
Mansfield beams as he exclaims: ‘‘We’ve won!’’
There’s an unintelligible cry from Radhi. He jumps to his feet and throws his arms around Mansfield, who returns the bear hug. Radhi grins from ear to ear when asked a few minutes later how he feels. ‘‘I feel so much better,’’ he says. ‘‘My heart nearly stopped!’’ But Maythem Radhi’s battle is far from over.
Accused by the Australian government of involvement in peopletrafficking, he could yet be extradited to face criminal trial.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) allege Radhi was part of a smuggling group that sent hundreds of refugees to their deaths in 2001.
Radhi adamantly denies culpability. Since 2009 he has fought extradition all the way to the Supreme Court, pleading that his family not be ‘‘torn apart’’.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court acknowledged Radhi risked being caught in ‘‘immigration limbo’’ if he were extradited to Australia.
He’s not a New Zealand citizen, meaning Immigration NZ could deny him re-entry regardless of whether a jury finds him guilty.
International refugee treaties mean Radhi could not be returned to his native Iraq, where he would likely face persecution, meaning he runs the risk of indefinite detention similar to that suffered by detainees on Manus Island.
The Supreme Court ruled his case should be referred to Justice Minister Andrew Little.
One potential work-around would be for Immigration Minister Iain LeesGalloway to grant a special visa to Radhi, guaranteeing his return to New Zealand – and to his wife and three children – regardless of any trial outcome in Australia.
It’s the latest twist in a decades-long saga that has thrown the Radhi family through a series of extraordinary hoops.
Maythem Radhi’s wife was bleeding out. She had been shot through the chest.
‘‘She was dying in my hands, and there was blood everywhere,’’ he says, during an interview at the family’s Mangere Bridge home.
The bullet was meant for her husband. Masked men had burst into their family home in Baghdad one winter night in 1996.
‘‘They ask for money,’’ Radhi says, ‘‘and because we didn’t pay, they start shooting’’.
The attackers fled into the night. They were never found.
Radhi cradled his wife as his brother rushed them to hospital. He took a wrong turn in the dark and got lost, losing precious minutes. Radhi could see his ‘‘lovely girl’’ was slipping away.
Finally, they rushed into an emergency ward. Radhi handed over his precious cargo, then collapsed on the floor in shock.
‘‘When I wake up again I see all my family, and I say, ‘what’s up? What’s up?’’
Surgeons discovered the bullet had missed her heart, and worked through the night to save her life.
By the time Radhi’s wife gave birth to their first child the following year she’d made a full recovery.
But the young married couple knew they had to leave. They were Sabean, a minority religious group, and there was
no place for them in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
‘‘If we stayed it was going to get worse and worse,’’ says Radhi.
‘‘We wanted to find a place where we were free to live like normal people.’’
Maythem Radhi left almost everything behind when he fled Iraq in 2000.
Together with his brother, wife, and young daughter, he escaped first to Jordan, then onward to Malaysia, and then Indonesia.
They were among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of refugees heading toward Australia.
‘‘Everyone there is coming to leave,’’ Radhi says. ‘‘It’s not that people are coming to Indonesia to stay. My family, we come there, and we want to leave.’’
Refugees pooled their resources and pitched in to help each other.
Australian police allege Radhi became involved during this time with Abu Quassey, an infamous peoplesmuggler. They say Radhi worked as his right-hand man, gathering fares for the doomed SIEV-X voyage.
Radhi tells a different story.
‘‘It’s all the people helping, it’s not only me,’’ he says. ‘‘They ask, ‘which smuggler is good?’ Just because we are talking does not mean we are smugglers.’’
Radhi and his family planned to leave Indonesia on that fateful voyage, which set off in the early hours of October 18, 2001. At the last minute they heard they might be considered for asylum in the UK – a brother already lived there – so they did not board.
‘‘And then we heard the ship had sunk.’’
There’s a deathly silence in his living room. His wife and children have sat silently through Radhi’s recounting of the horrific migration. They hang on every word.
They’ve heard the story many times, but the enormity of it hasn’t changed.
Parents watched in horror as their sons and daughters screamed and thrashed in the oily, sharkinfested waters.
Their cries gradually faded away as they weakened and drowned.
Just 45 people survived when their vessel, old, leaky, and hopelessly overcrowded, capsized that afternoon. Most of the 353 who perished were women and children.
One woman gave birth as the disaster unfolded. Later, her body was seen floating in the ocean near that of her newborn, joined together in death by an uncut umbilical cord.
The boat later came to be known as SIEV-X – a clinical Australian designation of Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, yet to be assigned a tracking number.
Maythem Radhi knew many of the victims.
‘‘My friend was there and died, and really we cried,’’ he says. ‘‘My wife kept dreaming about him every day for two years.’’
Yet survivors pointed to Radhi as one of those responsible for the disaster. He was arrested by Indonesian police.
‘‘I have nothing to hide from,’’ he says. ‘‘I didn’t do anything wrong, so I went with them.’’
Then in his mid-20s, he spent four months behind bars in Jakarta in early 2002 before being released due to ‘‘insufficient evidence’’.
Australian police fought long and hard in their quest for justice. SIEV-X mastermind Abu Quassey was arrested in Indonesia and repatriated to his home country of Egypt, where he was sentenced to five years and three months in prison.
Fellow smuggler Khaleed Daoed was found in Sweden in 2003 and extradited to Australia for prosecution, where he received a prison sentence of nine years.
However the AFP failed in its attempts to haul Maythem Radhi before the courts.
The Australians kept a warrant out for his arrest, but suspended their investigation in 2003 when they realised it would not be possible to extradite him from Indonesia. The trail went cold.
During the following years, Radhi appealed to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to help build a new life.
A UNHCR report found the former goldsmith was a refugee ‘‘in continuing need of international protection’’, and in 2008 it recommended him as a suitable candidate for resettlement.
In 2009, the Radhi family was accepted into New Zealand as part of the annual refugee quota.
Australian authorities were astounded to learn of Maythem Radhi’s arrival in New Zealand, and have been fighting to extradite him ever since.
Maythem Radhi has come to see New Zealand as his home. It’s a ‘‘beautiful country’’, he says, ‘‘and the people here are really nice. Nobody asks you about what is your religion, and what is your race.’’
Radhi wants to become a citizen, and says he can’t wait to be rid of the cloud that’s hung over his head for so many years.
‘‘My children are first. We just want to try to give them a nice life,’’ he says.
And his mum. He hasn’t seen her since he fled Iraq, and she’s now living in Europe with his sister. He can’t risk leaving New Zealand to visit.
‘‘She can’t travel here, and she’s very sick,’’ Radhi says. His voice chokes as tears well in his eyes. ‘‘I wish I can meet her again one day.’’
He’d never go back to Iraq. Since he and his wife left, their family has suffered an agonising trail of bloodshed.
In 2003, his uncle was shot and killed while driving along the street. Two years later, his father was shot dead when he tried to save another son from being kidnapped.
An uncle was tortured to death in 2014, and a cousin and brother-in-law were kidnapped and killed the same year, even though their family paid the demanded ransom.
Iraq is no longer their home. New Zealand is their home.
‘‘The place that protects you is your home,’’ says Radhi. ‘‘If a place does not protect you, it is not your home.’’
She was dying in my hands, and there was blood everywhere.
Maythem Radhi describes the day his wife was shot in front of him in Baghdad