ESCAPE FROM SAUDI ARABIA
Bangkok, 5 January 2019
A few days into the New Year, Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi international airport was heaving with holiday travellers. Amid the throngs of tourists sinking beers and families rushing to their gates, one young woman was on the run. Eighteen-year-old Saudi citizen Rahaf Mohammed al Qunun filed nervously off her Kuwait Airways flight. The petite teenager clutched a small backpack, all she was taking to what she hoped would be a new life in Australia. On the plane, Rahaf had abandoned the black abaya (a floor-length cloak) she was forced to wear by her family and was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Her dark hair sat in a jagged bob, cut in a defiant move that had seen her locked in her room for six months as punishment.
Growing up under Saudi Arabia’s state-sanctioned gender apartheid, Rahaf, like every other Saudi woman, had to obtain permission from her male ‘guardian’ for the simplest of tasks – to study, travel, even attend medical appointments. Under the archaic system, the male guardian is normally a father or husband, but can be a brother or even the teenage son of a middle-aged woman. A man controls a Saudi woman’s entire life.
Desperate to escape her controlling, abusive family, Rahaf had seized the opportunity of a family holiday in Kuwait, where women are allowed to travel unaccompanied. A month earlier she’d successfully applied online for a tourist visa to Australia. With a copy of the visa saved to her phone, Rahaf had woken at dawn that morning and while her family slept, had snatched her passport, booked a flight to Bangkok and taken a taxi to the airport. It had all happened so quickly, she hadn’t even booked her onward flight to Australia. She’d made it through customs and the seven-hour flight and, as she disembarked in Thailand, wondered fearfully whether her family had raised the alarm.
Rahaf walked casually up the ramp with the other passengers, trying not to betray how fast her heart was beating. Suddenly an Arab man in a suit appeared. “Miss Rahaf al Qunun?” he said. Rahaf was flooded with panic, making it hard to breathe. She’d already decided that she would kill herself rather than be forced back to Saudi Arabia.
Sydney, 6 January 2019
It was Sunday afternoon and for once the house was quiet. The kids were camping with their grandparents and my husband was at the Sydney Cricket Ground for the fourth day of the Test match. I’d planned to get some writing done but, as usual, the first thing I did when I opened my laptop was browse Twitter.
I follow
