INTERVIEW:Next week, the High Court is due to decide whether Nigerian woman Pamela Izevbekhai and her children can stay in Ireland, but the battle won't end there, writes SUSAN McKAY.
‘WHAT NOW?” This was what Pamela Izevbekhai’s shocked father asked her a year ago, when she told him on the phone that she had lost her appeal against being deported out of Ireland and back to Nigeria. “I said I didn’t know,” she says. It was their last conversation. Six days later, her brother rang her in the early hours of the morning to tell her their father was dead. “He’d had a heart attack after I spoke with him and went into a coma,” she says.
Pamela fled Nigeria four years ago to save her daughters, Naomi, then aged four and Jemima, who was two, from being forced by her parents-in-law to undergo female genital mutilation. In 1994, Pamela’s first-born daughter, Elizabeth, had bled to death after the brutal ritual. She was just 17 months old. Pamela’s application for asylum in Ireland was rejected, and in November 2005, the then minister for justice, Michael McDowell, signed deportation orders for the family. Since then, Pamela, her lawyers and a growing band of friends and human rights organisations have been fighting the system for her to be allowed to stay. They have also appealed to the current Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, to exercise his right to offer her sanctuary here.
However, she still doesn’t know the answer to her father’s question. Her case returns to the High Court next week to review the Minister’s refusal to consider offering her “subsidiary protection”, but even then, the outcome may not be decisive. The European Court of Human Rights is considering a separate hearing of the case and has asked the Irish Government not to deport the family “until further notice”.
“I’ve been living one day at a time for four years now,” she says. “I’m living and I am not living. I am in limbo. If I was on my own, I would just cry all the time. But I am a parent. I have to be strong for my children.” She says that on her way to our meeting, Naomi, who is now eight, suddenly said that she missed her little dog, Timmy. “I asked her if she remembered what he looked like,” Pamela says. “She started to cry. She said, ‘Do you know the worst thing, Mummy? I can’t even remember what Daddy looks like.’ Then she asked me, ‘Why hasn’t Daddy come?’ I didn’t try to stop her crying. It is the only way she can express herself.”
Pamela was born in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. “My family was not rich, rich, rich,” she says. “We were comfortable.” Educated by Irish nuns in primary school, she went on to study secretarial administration, and to work. She met Tony Izevbekhai after she gave his aunt a lift to work and he asked to be introduced to her. “Everything was fine. We dated, got married and had our son, Adrian. Then we had Elizabeth and my mother-in-law said she was to be circumcised. I asked her what she meant? How could you circumcise a girl?” Tony’s mother told her that the baby’s clitoris would be cut off at a family ceremony. Pamela was horrified, and refused to allow the mutilation. Her mother-in-law told her she did not have a choice. She had merely been the boat that carried the baby.
“In the Nigerian context, you don’t just marry the man – you marry the family,” she says. “The son is regarded as theirs. You are just a stranger. It is easy for families to encourage their son to get out of a marriage especially if they find out they can’t manipulate you. They look for every reason. I was an uncircumcised woman. To people whose culture includes female genital mutilation, the woman who has not gone through this rite of passage is not a real woman. She pollutes the earth she walks on. I was an outcast.” Tony’s parents are Catholic but when Pamela and Tony asked a priest to intervene and talk to them, they told him to go and mind his sheep and to keep out of family traditions.
The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 140 million women are currently living with the consequences of FGM, as it is known. In Africa, where it is widely practised in various different versions, three million girls a year are at risk. The mutilation is performed without anesthesia. It can, as in Elizabeth’s case, cause death. It frequently gives rise to infection, pain, sexual difficulties, and complications in childbirth. It is officially outlawed in Nigeria.
Under relentless pressure, Pamela and Tony eventually agreed that their baby daughter would undergo the horrific procedure. Pamela finds it deeply upsetting to describe what happened. Elizabeth was held down. A razor was used. The child shrieked in agony, blood pouring from her little body. She shivered and went pale. “I knew I had done wrong,” Pamela says. “I brought her to the hospital but it was too late.”
The time that followed was bleak. “I hated myself. I hated my husband,” says Pamela. While her parents in law were remorseful, they rationalised what they’d done, claiming that Elizabeth’s death was predestined, that it was her fate. Pamela felt that she was not worthy of being a mother and for six years she did not want another child. Her husband swore he would protect any further daughters they might have. The girls were born. Tony’s parents demanded that they be circumcised.
“In 2004, they attempted to kidnap the girls. They thought my husband was away and they came to our house and said he had sent them to take the children because I was a prostitute and he no longer wanted to be with me,” Pamela says. “Thank God for our neighbours. Thank God for our son. I began to scream and the neighbours came out. I sent Adrian to get his father from where he was working. My husband came back and there was a terrible fight.”
After this, Pamela’s in-laws said they wanted a reconciliation, and called a family meeting. However, Tony was warned by someone within their circle that his parents’ intentions were not benign. “He was told that if he loved us, we should leave the country,” Pamela says. This was swiftly arranged. Tony stayed in Nigeria, as did Adrian, then 14. Pamela and the girls arrived in Dublin in January 2005. “It was very cold and I was so stressed. I was miserable and sad and alone and afraid,” she says. “The children were clinging to me. The man who helped us put me in a taxi to the Department of Justice, wished me well, and said, ‘You are on your own now’.”
After filling out forms, Pamela and her daughters were brought to a hostel in Dublin for a few days, and then to Globe House in Sligo. They have lived there since. Under the system of “direct provision”, asylum seekers live in such hostels while their case is considered. They are given €19 a week. “We share a room in a row of rooms. You can’t cook your own food. You have to go to a dining room where they serve Irish food. You aren’t allowed to work. I thought I would go mad,” she says. “But when you are in a situation, you have to make the most of it.”
From the start, she loved the landscape of Co Sligo. “It was like being drawn into something much bigger than yourself,” she says. She learned that she could do voluntary work, and was soon working with a local project, organising courses and outings for the residents of Globe House. Naomi started school, then Jemima, and other parents and children welcomed the new family. “I now have a lovely circle of friends,” Pamela says. “I am in a drumming group and I go to the Elim Pentecostal church and sometimes the Catholic church. The Elim church is like family – they look out for you.” She speaks softly, and her accent has a tinge of Sligo.
Pamela is clearly an exceptionally strong, generous and imaginative woman. Not everyone manages so well during the asylum seeking process, she has found. “Being in this situation is horrible for some people,” she says. “If they are quieter and don’t make friends easily, it is very difficult for them, especially for men. My goodness – how do you expect a man to sit in a room with his family 24/7? You see violence come into it.
“Most people in Ireland just don’t know what it is like. They think asylum seekers are lodged in a hotel and they get given all sorts of allowances and everything. But it isn’t like that at all. No one wants to live in limbo, not able to work or make a home, eating strange food . . . it is like being in prison, except that the food in prison is better.”
She knows this because she has been a prisoner here. After the orders to deport were served in 2005, she panicked, and went into hiding. “I was afraid. I was trying to get help. My children were taken into care. I didn’t see them over Christmas and the New Year. Jemima had chicken pox. After a while I couldn’t take it any more and I went to see them. Things didn’t go well and I was picked up by the police.”
She was brought to Dochas, the women’s prison at Mountjoy. “That was an experience,” she says, and laughs. “I have to say the people there, the prisoners and the prison guards, were very nice to me. They already knew who I was and they were sympathetic. Some of them signed petitions for me. You were allowed to cook, though you had to use plastic cutlery.” After 15 days, a judge ordered her conditional release while the High Court considered the validity of the deportation orders.
Pamela had not told her parents the full details of her situation until she had been in Ireland for some time. “My father would have done anything for us, and we were afraid this would turn into a full-scale family feud,” she says. “My mother had a stroke some time ago and she is in a wheelchair.” But she had broken it to them by the time last January that the court reaffirmed that the family was to be deported. That was when her father asked, “What now?”
His death hit Pamela hard. “I am the eldest in the family and it was my responsibility to bury him,” she says. “But I couldn’t go home. I got so sick. I lost a lot of weight. But I did do a little thing for him. I had a wake for him in Sligo. So many people came! It was a beautiful night. I made a wreath and placed it under his photo. Then, a while after the ceremony, I was at a friend’s house. They have a lake at the end of the garden. I placed the wreath in the water. I buried my father in that moment and let him go.”
It is four years since Pamela saw her husband, Tony. “I would say I married my father when I married Tony,” she says. “He has been so strong for us. My granny used to say that love conquers all, and so far, that is true. But it is extremely difficult as a couple. There are nights you are on the phone and you are talking but you are not talking. There are so many things you could say but you know you can’t go there. There are nights I just cry and cry. Tony says he can see behind my smile in the photos I send him. He can see the sadness in my eyes.”
Her son, Adrian, refused to speak to her for a year. “He couldn’t understand why I left him behind,” she says. “When he was 16, my husband told him. One day I called, and someone with a deep voice answered the phone. I said, ‘Can I speak to Adrian please’, and he said, ‘Yes, Mommy’. Then it dawned on me, his voice had broken. I went up to my room and cried. I thought, my son has grown up and I am not there. I asked myself: Does he have a girlfriend? Does he practise safe sex? Does he have a beard?”
The girls are bright as buttons, playing with their mobiles, racing around, declaring with wide eyes that things are, “COOOOOL!” “Naomi can sense my mood,” Pamela says. “She knows when I am sad and she tries to comfort me. Jemima is our dreamer.” The notion that either of them might be forced to undergo genital mutilation is simply appalling, but that, Pamela is convinced, is what awaits them in Nigeria.
“I am just hoping that all of this will come to an end,” she says. “Today. Tomorrow. That the European Court will find in our favour. That the Irish system will stop relying on bad information. That people within it will come to understand FGM. It is like rape, tearing a person apart, invading their soul. That the Minister will have some compassion. That my family can be together and we can just be ourselves.”