And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  There was no doubt that the times were weirdly out of joint. In the ALP, senior figures would say in private that Kim’s words were just Kim’s strategy, that in victory a new generosity would emerge. But in public they said nothing, and the moral torpor that has so long affected the party shaded into a larger and unforgiveable cowardice. Public men have to be judged by public actions, and Beazley drifted through the election like a lost blimp in search of a guiding breeze.

  In Sydney the film of the moment was a meditation on trust and betrayal. Called Lantana, it posed the question of whether trust betrayed can ever be made whole again.

  In a room in that same city a father refused water because every time he drank it reminded him of the mouths of his three beautiful daughters filling with water, irrevocably, fatally. The man had a name: Ahmed Alzalimi. His dead daughters had names: Eman, eight years old, Zahra, six years old, and Fatimah, five years old. He had a wife whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when she was five. She survived the sinking and was taken back to Indonesia. And she too had a name: Sondos Ismael.

  The media told us Kim Beazley was a good man. But like John Howard, Kim Beazley did not think this man ought to be allowed to breach the conditions of his temporary protection visa by travelling to Indonesia to be with his grieving wife. Rules were rules.

  This is not my Australia, I wanted to say to that grieving father. I wanted to tell him things that were not possible: how if I could sing the sea out of his sweet daughters’ lungs and have them Australian, oh how I would have. To say that I was ashamed and lost and my country with me and no one any longer knew the way back from such terrible shame, this shame that was now ours.

  But words were cheaper than children’s lives in Australia now, and all were relaxed and comfortable inside their lounge rooms, curtains firmly drawn, and no one wished to venture outside to see the corpses that flecked the distant ocean like storm-tossed kelp leaves.

  The Age

  9 November 2001

  Postscript

  On 3 December 2006, minutes after the ALP caucus had replaced him as leader with Kevin Rudd, Kim Beazley was told that his younger brother had unexpectedly died. His brother had a name: David.

  At a press conference held shortly after, Kim Beazley was reported to have blinked back tears when he said, ‘Family is everything.’

  I FIRST MET Akif Lutfiu on a wintry Hobart night. The rendezvous was appropriately clandestine, arranged after a series of meetings with intermediaries, phone calls being considered too dangerous following previous Australian Federal Police raids.

  Snow was falling on the mountain above the house in which we filmed a two-hour interview that we hoped might form the basis of a documentary about this enigmatic fugitive.

  The story of how Akif Lutfiu, Kosovar refugee, fugitive and soon to be deportee, had become Our Keith, a cause célèbre in Tasmania, intrigued me. He was, as one caller to radio commented, a bushranger for our times, but his story was also something else—that of two communities seeking to regain a lost dignity, and of two nations that seemed to have lost their way in the world.

  Akif Lutfiu’s appearance was as much a surprise as his character. He was good-looking and dressed in fashionable street wear, more one’s idea of a New York Latino rapper than an Albanian Muslim. He had in consequence an odd presence.

  He was frustrating to interview, because his personality was as unexpected as his looks. Nothing about him fitted any preconceptions. His short life was an almost absurdly neat fit with the last torturous twenty years of Kosovar history, yet none of this overly interested Akif Lutfiu. He had stock positions about the Serbs, but his heart seemed not so much in stock denunciations as it had been with the Serbian girls with whom he had once gone out.

  He seemed to know little about his nation’s history and politics, beyond a determination not to be their victim. He was nevertheless fiercely Albanian and Muslim, and angry at what that meant his fate would be.

  He seemed to have little perspective on his life, as though he still lived in the shadow of the enormity of all that had befallen him. His stories were muddled and imprecise, and, one suspected, sometimes exaggerated. There was about him an undeniable sadness.

  Born in 1980, orphaned at the age of fifteen, he appears to have become a street kid, and lived for periods of time as an illegal immigrant in Turkey and Italy. By 1999 he was back living with his cousins in Pristina, listening to rap, the musical choice of young Albanians. The Serbs, he said, preferred techno.

  His exile from his homeland began in a Serbian roundup of Pristina residents on 1 April 1999. His description of that event has chilling parallels with other round-ups in ghettos in other times.

  According to Akif Lutfiu’s account, JNA soldiers went through the streets calling through a megaphone upon residents to leave or be killed. Pristina, he said, was like a hell.

  He recalled joining a great river of people being forced to the railway station. Bodies lay dead or dying on the road, shot or beaten. To look down or halt to help was to risk the same fate. In the crush of people at the railway station a woman handed him a baby and asked him to look after it while she found her other children. The baby was dead.

  Akif Lutfiu spent a month in a refugee camp in Macedonia, and then, though wishing to go to Germany or Sweden, he ended up coming to Australia, one of four thousand Kosovar refugees belatedly admitted into Australia by the Howard Government. When accepted for Australia he was unsure even as to what language was spoken here.

  Four hundred of these Kosovars were sent on to Tasmania and settled at the old Brighton Army camp on the outskirts of Hobart’s northern suburbs. The Brighton camp abuts the housing commission suburbs of Bridgewater and Gagebrook. Outside of Aboriginal settlements, according to Anglicare, these are some of the most deprived and impoverished areas in Australia.

  It might have been expected that Tasmanians would ignore, or even grow hostile to, the government-sponsored refugees, given how the island is routinely portrayed as redneck and reactionary. Yet when one beleaguered community looked into the eyes of another worse off, it perhaps saw something familiar. The response from ordinary Tasmanians was, according to Stefano Lufi, one of three Albanians living in Hobart, ‘utterly extraordinary’.

  The Brighton Kosovars were flooded with offers of help and gestures of friendship. Businesses provided them with free clothes, free food, free meals, free tours. Cinemas gave them free weekly tickets. The state Labor Government became strong supporters, as did the local Brighton council. The Hobart newspaper, The Mercury, ran articles in Albanian. A commercial television news broadcast began with an introduction in Albanian. Far from being outcast, the Kosovars were taken in.

  At first Akif Lutfiu, who had not properly washed since he left Pristina, spent hours standing under hot showers at the camp. Then he began to make friends in Hobart, started to work, started to buy things and went dancing every Saturday night in local clubs.

  When Akif Lutfiu says he fell in love with Tasmania it is difficult not to believe him. In Kosovo he had carried a gun. In Kosovo he was bound by the obligations of the blood feud. In Kosovo difference demanded conflict. Akif Lutfiu was unprepared for what he found in Tasmania. ‘Here in Tasmania, I am with twelve people, every- one different, different religion, different faith, it doesn’t matter. I have Chinese friends, Japanese, Filipino, Italian, Bosnian, Croatian. Everyone I have here. Everyone different language. Everyone is Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim. Every- one is one man.’ His Tasmanian friends called him Keith. He called himself ‘a Tassie boy’.

  ‘My heart will stay here in Tasmania,’ Akif Lutfiu told me that night as snow fell low on the mountain above us, ‘they can only take my body back.’

  He wanted to live his life in Tasmania. His dream was to get work, a car licence, go to TAFE and learn computers and pay back his friends their generosity. H
e never thought the Australian government would force him or other Kosovars to go back.

  His life shaped by the evil of idiotic nationalisms, he refused to be defined by any idea of national sovereignty. From Akif Lutfiu’s point of view every white person in Australia was, as he put it, ‘an illegal tourist’. For that reason he didn’t understand why John Howard wouldn’t say sorry.

  ‘You’re in their land and you don’t say sorry—come on, man.’

  He wished he had been born five hundred years ago and could travel anywhere he wished.

  ‘I am a man of the earth,’ he said. ‘I was born on the earth. I was not born in Mars or Jupiter. I can live everywhere in the world. I am a man. I am a man, I have hands. I am not evil. I can live anywhere.’

  But then in April of this year the Federal Government made clear its intent to repatriate all refugees to Kosovo and Akif Lutfiu was no longer a man of the earth but, as so many of his people have been over the last millennium, an Albanian on the run.

  ‘That make me very, very sad,’ Akif Lutfiu said. ‘I feel like I am running from the Serbs. I feel like someone can kill me. And in my heart you know what I feel? That I can kill myself.’

  At dawn of 2 May 2000, armed federal police raided the Colebrook home of Colin Parramore, a bus driver who had worked at the Kosovar refugee haven at Brighton. Wearing bullet-proof vests they broke locks on sheds and turned the house over searching for Akif Lutfiu.

  But Akif Lutfiu had left the day before. He was now a haunted as well as hunted man. His dreams altered. On the run he dreamt of being caught by immigration officers, and that he would push and push them to make them shoot him, and that then, dead, he would finally be free.

  The raid made front-page news in Tasmania. The public mood, which had been highly pro-Albanian, now swung solidly behind Lutfiu.

  The following month Tony Foster, the mayor of Brighton, the municipality that covers the working- class suburbs of Bridgewater and Gagebrook, returned from visiting Kosovo with Tasmanian Albanian Ray Duraj. At his own expense, Foster had visited as many of the Brighton Kosovars as possible, and set up a sister-city relationship between Brighton and Ferizaj, a city of 130,000 people. What he found was many of the former Brighton Kosovars living in what he described as impossible situations.

  ‘I have never before felt so ashamed to be Australian,’ he said on his return. ‘How could we send people back to this?’ He found former Brighton Kosovars such as Refik Zuzaju contemplating suicide. ‘I think I might go up to a high bridge,’ said Zuzaju. ‘We have no future.’ Zuzaju’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Valbona, clung to Ray Duraj’s arm when the two left, sobbing and crying, begging him, ‘to put her in his pocket and take her back to Tasmania’. Foster was so upset he vomited shortly after leaving.

  Foster found families whose children had played with his, with no money, no jobs and no homes, living in tents or squalid, unfurnished rooms, families in transit centres where the only food supplied was rice and spaghetti, and showers were allowed only once a week.

  And Tony Foster found that the Kosovars had not forgotten Tasmania.

  ‘It was almost embarrassing the way people begged us, day after day, to tell everyone how much they appreciated what Tasmania and Tasmanians had done for them.’

  Foster’s comments were prominently reported and made a deep impression on many in Tasmania, and heightened the sense that Akif Lutfiu was being unfairly persecuted. Public comments from friends that the fugitive—who now spent his days in safe houses watching television and playing computer games—was deeply depressed and that they feared for his wellbeing, only fuelled this sentiment.

  In Hobart’s Gatecrasher nightclub, at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, ninety-nine days after he went on the run to avoid being deported back to Kosovo, Akif Lutfiu was arrested by four police officers. For the second time since he had been on the run, he had taken the risk of going out to a bar. The fugitive made a run for it, but was grabbed and held at the door by a bouncer until the police were able to secure him with handcuffs.

  Following his arrest, Akif Lutfiu says he was stripped and left naked in a Hobart cell on a cold winter’s night, shivering and crying and feeling, he said, ‘like a mad, mad dog’.

  In a state that is losing one thousand people every year, the one man who had declared a determination to stay was hunted down like a dog by armed police with orders to arrest and deport him.

  His arrest once more sparked front-page stories and lead items on television news. The feeling on the part of most Tasmanians appeared to be one of anger tempered by a shame that this had happened in their own community. A television phone-in poll showed 68 per cent of respondents believed the fugitive should be allowed to stay. The acting premier, Paul Lennon, weighed into the fray promising that the Tasmanian government would consider backing legal action in support of Akif Lutfiu. Stefano Lufi’s family store filled with strangers offering money for Akif Lutfiu’s legal costs.

  Commenting on Lutfiu’s probable fate, Brighton mayor Tony Foster said that he would in all likelihood be begging in the streets of Pristina within a few days of his return.

  Why could we not take those of the Kosovar refugees who wished to make a life here? Why does Australia, unlike the United States and Canada, do such a thing to these people? Why can we not organise our affairs such that places that want more people, such as Tasmania, and the people who wish to live there, such as the Kosovars, be allowed to make common cause?

  For a moment, Akif Lutfiu became a symbol for something much larger than his own sorry tale. In his plight a battling community saw the chance to assert a fundamental humanity that no longer is deemed of value or significance. He came to stand for an idea of an Australia that was open, generous and good, an idea for which there is no longer political voice on either side of national politics.

  How could he have known that the country that he had found so tolerant and friendly, so large and so generous, in which he so wished to make his life was shrinking before his eyes into something so small and pinched, so uncaring and mean-spirited?

  When last I spoke by phone with Akif Lutfiu he was in the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. He was, as ever, mildly precocious, and complained about the way he had been given only cordial to drink, but not Coca-Cola.

  ‘I need Coke, man,’ he said. ‘I feel sick. I have stress. It is good for my stomach, Coke. Feel bad. Coke, you know it?’

  I had forgotten how the story of Akif Lutfiu was now so much bigger than Akif Lutfiu; that he was only an orphaned child soon to be sent back to a country on the brink of collapsing into its old patterns of violence, a spiral of revenge and hatred that, for a short time, Akif Lutfiu had the vanity of thinking he might be allowed to escape.

  Five hundred years after he wished to be born, the man of the earth was to return to being a victim of history.

  The Age

  22 July 2000

  THIS IS A TALE ABOUT LOVE and change in the heart-shaped island that lies far to your south, and it ought to perhaps begin with that island, which most Australians presume they know, but about which they mostly know nothing.

  Tasmania is a state of the much trumpeted federation, but you don’t have to sit long at a battered bar in Hobart, say, or wander far into its clearfell-scarred heart, or stand for more than a moment beneath a ninety-metre-high regnans awaiting chainsawing in the Styx Valley of the Giants, to realise this is also another country, and it was to this other country that a troubled young man with a penchant for snappy suits came to work as a doctor in 1972.

  The doctor had an affinity with the odd individuality of places unknown to others; after all, as a teenager in Armidale hadn’t he carried a sticker calling for New England to be a state separate of New South Wales? He also had desires that might be unfairly termed political, but were perhaps more those of a young man with an excessive sense of duty: he had been an adm
irer of Menzies and royalty, and his contemplation of a future career as a Liberal politician had got him as far as the front door of that party’s Sydney office in order to join up, only to find the office closed for the day. But a larger sense of confusion and uncertainty as to who he was, and what he might be, meant he never returned.

  These confusions were many and not easily, perhaps not possibly, reduced to any single matter. There was the matter of career, which as a doctor in the 1970s ought simply to have meant an acceptance of privilege and wealth, but which somehow didn’t satisfy him. There was the matter of his sexuality, which saw him voluntarily submit to electro-shock treatment to rid himself of the desire he felt for men. And there was a passion to identify with something larger than himself, other than himself, a project of self-abnegation that sometimes looked like self-loathing.

  Once in Tasmania he began the first of a number of metamorphoses, setting out on various missions, the best word for which is perhaps quixotic.

  He spent all his savings paying for an advertisement in national papers. Headlined ‘Tasmania—World Epitome of Man’s Destructiveness’, it detailed the disgraces of the island’s history from the Black War through to Lake Pedder. There was a search for the thylacine that turned up only emaciated greyhounds, and an impassioned letter in the wake of the international crisis precipitated by the 1973 Yom Kippur war to editors of all the world’s major newspapers, from Pravda to the New York Times to the Launceston Examiner, calling for ‘a revolution in human awareness’. ‘The only means of this saving grace,’ wrote the doctor, ‘lies with the individual.’ The letter went, unremarkably, unpublished.