Cancer least of battle for asylum-seeker facing return to Pakistan

Single mum Tahira Sajidis hopes Immigration Minister Peter Dutton can overrule her forced return to Pakistan.

Pakistani Refugees Tahira and Malaika

Single mother and asylum-seeker Tahira Sajid is battling ovarian cancer while living in abject poverty in Sydney’s southeast. But that is the least of her worries.

“My claim has been refused so I have to go back to Pakistan with my daughter by the end of next month, where I will have no support or protection,” the 45-year-old said.

“I will face harm if I go back.”

When Ms Sajid’s husband was threatened by the Taliban, the couple fled with their eight-year-old daughter Malaika to Australia in 2012.

Ms Sajid said that she was then pressured into agreeing to a divorce.

“Tahira has no financial support from her ex-husband or any other relatives and has the res­ponsibility of taking care of her daughter and school expenses,” friend Fukher Batool, who has helped out with her rent and groceries, said.

The parents have lived apart in Australia on consecutive bridging visas, but with Malaika they have now been refused permanent residency and will be forced back to Pakistan, unless Ms Sajid’s pleas are heard by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. “If I go back to Pakistan, my ex-husband will take Malaika away, I don’t have protection from anyone or the law there,” Ms Sajid said.

Louisa McKimm of the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre represented Ms Sajid and her daughter until their case was ­rejected by then assistant immigration minister Michaelia Cash, on September 18, before Senator Cash changed portfolios following the leadership spill.

“It was the saddest day of my career telling Tahira that she was refused,” Ms McKimm said.

Less than half of Pakistan’s women were literate and it was unlikely Malaika would receive schooling if she returned because she was female, she said, which meant Australia had obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to protect her right to education.

“You see that little girl and she is so bright and speaks perfect ­English and the thought of her not having access to the wonderful education we have here in Australia, just from a human perspective I found that difficult to deal with,” Ms McKimm said.

Pakistan’s Women’s Protection Act 2006 is rarely honoured or ­enforced and to be a divorced ­single mother would leave Ms Sajid in extreme poverty without protection from the statistically high risk of physical violence against women, Ms McKimm said.

“Tahira is not of a high class; we are dealing with a women who is going back to Pakistan single, her parents have passed away, she doesn’t have a great education and she is very weak physically from the cancer battle,” she said.

After surgery and an intensive course of combined chemotherapy and radiotherapy at Westmead Hospital, the ovarian cancer has been held at bay, but Ms Sajid said she would not get adequate follow-ups if she left Australia’s well-equipped healthcare system.

As for Malaika, there’s no doubt what she wants.

“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “I want to stay and learn.”