Hazara Nation

Sarah Stephen
Green Left Weekly

Malyar and Sayar Dehsabzi are migration agents and interpreters, a lucrative business which attracts many money-hungry carpet-baggers who want to make an easy buck out of people's desperation and their ignorance of the law.

In a article in the September 25 Australian Financial Review, Julie Macken revealed some damning information about these Afghan-Australian brothers, who are from Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. Members of Australia's Afghan community told Macken that in New Delhi in the mid-1980s the brothers worked for Afghan warlord and Osama bin Laden supporter Ghulbuddin Hekmatyar. The AFR was told of the brothers' expressed hostility to Hazaras.Despite his background, Malyar Dehsabzi was employed by the immigration department as an interpreter at Australia's refugee detention centre on Nauru, handling appeals for asylum by Afghan Hazaras. An International Organisation for Migration officer who worked on Nauru at the time told the AFR: “Interpreters were assigned 15 or so cases at a time. Malyar would regularly declare 10 out of his 15 to be Pakistani. Other interpreters found either none or one at most.”

Macken pointed out: “The consequences of a declaration of ethnicity could prove fatal to an asylum seeker's chances of finding protection in Australia, because these remarks would become part of the application process.”

The Dehsabzi brothers did far more than just interpret. In the second half of 2002, with the government's launch of its plan to voluntarily repatriate Afghan asylum seekers with the lure of $2000, “Malyar began sending emails from Afghanistan to various people on Nauru telling them how peaceful and safe the country was”.

Green Left Weekly spoke to Hazara refugee Riz Wakil, who had Malyar as his interpreter when he was detained in Curtin detention centre in 1999. “Malyar was very helpful for me, but later on he contacted one of my friends and told him: `Any Afghan from Afghanistan is okay, but any who have lived in Pakistan, I would never help them'.”

In Wakil's view, when the government cranked up its propaganda that refugees were not genuine or were not from Afghanistan, the Dehsabzi brothers started trying to convince the government that many refugees weren't from Afghanistan.

“They did their best to try to create hurdles and make it as hard as possible for Hazaras to get refugee status”, said Wakil. “Now they see that we're getting visas, that they can't stop it, they're trying to cash in on it.”

Starting in February this year, when the government began reviewing temporary protection visas, Wakil thinks the Dehsabzi brothers realised it was a good time to make money. They began offering their services to the Hazara community again, charging $3500 to help submit a new application. Wakil recalled that some of his friends came to him and said they had handed over $1000 or $2000, only to realise that “this guy doesn't know anything”.

The Dehsabzi brothers rate as perhaps the most outrageous example of making money out of the suffering of migrants and refugees, but they are not alone. Wakil recounted an example of a Hazara translator who charges asylum seekers $200-$350 for each typed page.