Et Al Events: Fundraiser for Afghanistan, 2 March

It's at the Yarras too

I first encountered Mustafa Qamari in 2021. The Taliban brought us together. He was a journalist in Afghanistan; I was a journalist in Australia. He needed to get out of Kabul; I wasn’t sure I knew how to help him, but knew I should, and somehow managed it.

You can read about it here. Look at those masks. Remember COVID? Ugh.

Since then, Mustafa has lived in Melbourne and become a good friend. But his story, and that of others I have come to know, has fanned my interest in the predicament of benighted people of Afghanistan. Pete and I have already held one fundraiser for UNHCR’s Batting For Afghanistan; now we want to do something for Mustafa, who has family members marooned in Kabul and Tehran, and is at the dubious mercy of the department of home affairs. Which is why Cricket Et Al will be holding a special fundraising event at scenic Como Park on the afternoon of Sunday 2 March. You can buy tickets here. Go on, it’s easy. There are three options, allowing for donations also.

It will be great to catch up with Pete after his eventful trip to Sri Lanka. We’ll also be joined by some special guests, including our colleague Sam Perry, of The Grade Cricketer, and Greg Baum, emeritus sportswriting doyen of The Age. We’ll have the barbecue on, the bar stocked, auction items available for sale, and a backdrop of cricket at the Yarras, where our D Sunday team will be hosting. You don’t want to miss Cricket Et Al’s first Melbourne engagement.

It’s an important time for our charitable cause too. Australia will just have played Afghanistan in the Champions Trophy, to the chagrin of those calling for an international cricket boycott in view of the Taliban’s draconian decrees against women. A contingent of their displaced women’s cricketers recently played a well-publicised game at Junction Oval also. But if it is important that women from Afghanistan be free to play cricket - which, of course, should form part of their basic freedoms - they have a much better chance of doing it here than there. So the issue lies in Canberra as much as Kabul: since the Taliban’s return, more than a quarter of a million people have lodged applications to come to Australia, and not 20,000 applications have been granted. Worse, Australia has a deep-rooted tradition of demonising refugees as workshy benefit cadgers and fifth columnists.

Mustafa gives the lie to this. For the last three years, he has worked seven nights at week in a warehouse in Dandenong, including twelve-hour shifts at weekends - he gets a day off every fourteen days. Out of his earnings he supports his parents, aunts, wife, sister and five brothers. He also remains active as a journalist for London-based Afghanistan International. At Junction Oval, for example, he became the first journalist from Afghanistan to interview the women’s cricketers. Except that these days he stays off camera, because everytime the Taliban notice him on the ‘infidel media’ they menace his brother Bait Ullah.

Not even Hutchy sends letters like this.

Three years ago, I supported Mustafa’s application for humanitarian visas for Bait Ullah, his sister Hamida and then fiance Zakira. They had then fled to Pakistan; when their situation became untenable in Islamabad, they fled to Tehran, where they rent a tiny two-room and wait. And wait. And wait. Nobody will update them on their applications; nobody can advise where they are in ‘the system’. We ring numbers that don’t answer; we write politicians and receive boilerplate. Mustafa has since married Zakira. Now he wants to upgrade her visa application to partner status; there is also a visa option called a Community Support Programme we’re considering for Bait Ullah and Hamida. The cost runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, and it’s still a minimum six-year wait with only a narrow chance of success. It’s beyond me where a warehouse worker is meant to come up with such sums, disgusts me that Australia treats people this way. Thus our idea of an Et Al fundraiser at the Yarras, as something practical rather than symbolic, that in some tiny way makes the world better. We hope you’ll support us.