Robin de Crespigny - The people smuggler : the true story of Ali Al Jenabi, the Oskar Schindler of Asia

THE TRUE STORY OF
ALI AL JENABI,
THE OSKAR SCHINDLER OF ASIA

VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

I began the long journey of writing this book when refugee advocate Ngareta Rossell came to me in 2008 with the idea of writing a film script based on the life of Ali Al Jenabi. The epic breadth of his story is so great, with its cast of thousands, military conflicts, desperate mountain treks, boats on highs seas, and a journey across two continents and at least six countries, each with its own unique culture and language, that I somewhat gratefully took the suggestion of screenwriter John Collee to tell the story in book form first.

Thus began an expedition of more than three years working intensely with Ali. He is an Arabic Muslim man and I am a Western agnostic woman. Gaining each others trust, especially after what he had been through, meant that initially we focused on the events and not the internal story. What fascinated me most was not only Alis moral fibre and strength of spirit, but the depth of his self-awareness. This was accompanied by an infectious sense of humour that seemed to transcend even the most severely traumatic incidents. In truth, despite Alis remarkable memory, it was tremendously hard for him to dredge up the details of his life for months on end.

We met every few weeks, often over lunch at Ngaretas home. I recorded all our conversations, then spent long hours meticulously transcribing them. By the time I had mapped out the complex sequence of events in his story we had grown to know each other better, so returning to the start I asked more personal questions, and bit by bit we traversed the emotional depths of his odyssey. For me the meat of the story is the life-changing moral choices he faced while carrying so much responsibility for others, and the internal process by which he made his decisions.

As we went deeper I found the emotions involved were ones we can all identify and empathise with. In this way I believe it is a universal story about one individual in the storm of life, and that by travelling with him we can understand the bigger picture of why people make the choices they do to get on leaky boats, and how none of it is black and white. This is a story not so much about people smuggling, as about a man who happened to become one.

Half a lifetime of extraordinary events with hundreds of encounters has demanded some truncation of incidents and merging of minor characters. Also some names have been changed or omitted. This is particularly notable in the chapter dealing with the hearing in the Darwin Magistrates Court. The Commonwealth DPP refused to agree to co-operate with the lifting of a suppression order on witnesses, despite the relevant details being freely available on the internet.

Like all refugee stories where trauma is a daily fact of life, it has not always been possible to tie down exact dates, and very occasionally I have had to reconstruct incidents with the fragments of memory available, offsetting them where possible against more certain recollections, or lining them up with known historical incidents. However, the tone and emotional experience is always accurate.

I made the decision to write this book in the first person to enable the reader to experience Alis life at first hand by being placed in his shoes. Until Ali reached Australia he spoke Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi and Indonesian, but very little English. So the voice is essentially a construct of him and me, in the English language as he might have used it. As all the events are through his eyes, the view of those events reflect Alis recollections.

I feel privileged that Ali has allowed me to preserve his story and pass it on to the world.

The Middle East

South-East Asia