The odyssey
In an immaculate house on a quiet suburban street in Christchurch, Habib Hussaini draws his knees close to his chest.
“Everyone just sits, like this. There is no room, it is so crowded. We are in the middle of the sea, in a circle of ocean. At night it is so dark. People are crying and praying.”
In Auckland, Assadullah Nazari recalls the silence of the stilled engine. “People were trying to find a way to fix it. We were saying, ‘That’s it.’ This is our life, we are done. We didn’t know what was going to happen but the boat was sinking.”
In his new book After the Tampa, Abbas Nazari (not related) remembers the small boat being tossed on the waves “like a bath toy at the mercy of an insolent child”: “Timbers cracked and split. Nails ripped away from boards. Water crashed over the deck … With every toss of the boat we were helplessly thrown about, crushing one another in a sea of bodies.”
It is 20 years since 433 Afghan asylum-seekers and five crew members huddled on the stricken Palapa 1, a small Indonesian fishing boat stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Twenty years since the Tampa, a Norwegian cargo ship en route to Singapore, set a path towards the sinking boat in response to a distress call. Twenty years since 131 asylum-seekers, including the 37 so-called ‘Tampa boys’, arrived in New Zealand.
For Habib Hussaini, Assadullah Nazari, Abbas Nazari and the other survivors, there would be no celebration to mark their escape from certain death or their arrival in New Zealand two decades ago. This year the anniversary of their rescue fell during Muharram, a time of solemn remembrance of the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. The lockdown was confining New Zealanders to their bubbles. And on 15 August, footage of
