THE CATHOLIC HERALD MAY 25, 2007

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FEATURES

INTERVIEW

JACQUELINE PASCARL WRITER AND CAMPAIGNER

‘A prince kidnapped my children’

possessed, and tells her story with such clarity and poise that it’s almost as if she were speaking to a public audience. None of her lobbying and campaigning made any difference, though. She did not see her children for the next 14 years. She wrote in her book Since I Was A Princess that it was “as if a giant apple corer had excised an enormous chunk of my soul”. When Pascarl met Prince Bahrin he was studying architecture in Australia and she was working as a ballet dancer (though Pascarl’s Australian accent meant that for a few days I thought she had been working as a belly dancer). Initially Bahrin seemed mildmannered and gallant, but after the marriage he turned into a bully. On their wedding night he beat her and raped her, leaving bruises only where it wouldn’t show in public. “It was all about possession and control,” she says, “and at 17 I thought that I’d done something wrong.” The prince’s uncle was crowned as sultan the next day, and Pascarl was woken up in the early hours of the morning so that her hair could be coiffed and the royal jewellery arranged appropriately. “I was decked out in far too many diamonds for 5am in the morning. I was dressed in red lace and looked like a very small red Christmas tree.” She had only about 45 minutes of royal etiquette instruction –“being told to whom I should curtsey and what my deportment should be” – before the coronation ceremony. Bahrin continued to hit her throughout their years of marriage. He did it as a form of punishment and would beat her if, for instance, she failed to supervise her staff. Pascarl never talked about it to anybody else. But she suggests that at the Islamic royal court it was generally accepted as a part of marital life. She never thought about escaping, “because when one’s self-esteem is eroded so thoroughly, with such precision –I didn’t know if I could make it on my own in any case”. After the birth of their two children Pascarl’s grandmother, who lived in Australia, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her hip. The sultan made sure Pascarl was allowed to return to Australia with her children to visit her grandmother in hospital. Bahrin had already married a second wife –a nightclub singer with a crew cut. At the airport he told Pascarl not to come back. “I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t have anything with me. I was a basket case on the flight.” Over the next seven years Pascarl went about rebuilding her life. She rediscovered her childhood, she says, while raising her children. “We climbed trees, played on the beach, wore corn

Jacqueline Pascarl’s life fell apart when her two children were abducted in 1992. She tells Mark Greaves what she did about it On July 9, 1992, Jacqueline Pascarl’s two children were abducted by their father. He had taken them away for the weekend on what was meant to be a routine access visit, but once they arrived at the hotel he drugged them, separated them and, with three accomplices, had them driven at speed from Melbourne to the northernmost tip of Australia. Here, they were whisked across the Torres Straits in a motor cruiser, and then –with the help of the Indonesian military –flown back to Malaysia. The father was, after all, a prince at the Malaysian royal court, and he had some useful friends. At the time of the abduction Pascarl was a high-profile journalist who read the news on Australian television. But nobody knew that years before, when she was only 17, she had married a prince and, for a while at least, become part of the royal Malaysian household. I meet her at the Groucho Club, where she has fallen victim to food poisoning. This morning’s smoked salmon sandwiches, it seems, are to blame. “I went from reading the news to being the news within 12 hours,” she says. When her children didn’t phone her over the weekend she called the hotel every hour for 24 hours until she talked her way into their hotel suite and discovered that the room had been empty, probably, for most of the weekend. The next day she called all of the major newspapers, thinking that her children were still in the country and that she had a chance of finding them. She woke up her own news director at 11pm and told him what had happened. “He thought I’d been drinking, he thought it was a joke –he didn’t know anything about my former life. So my own network missed the story.” Every day for the next few weeks she held press conferences and photo shoots at her house. She lobbied the government and made phone calls to the prime minister, but, she says, nobody would listen. The government was in the middle of negotiating a deal with Malaysia about a new air force base, and didn’t want anything to scupper its plans. “No one had any moral fortitude,” she tells me. Grief and panic had strange effects on her body. Her hair started falling out and she vomited constantly. “All I could do was attempt to function and get a news grab out there every time there was a fresh angle. I didn’t have the luxury of sobbing all the time: all I wanted to do was crawl into a dirty bathrobe and go to sleep until it was all over.” Pascarl doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who would surrender to grief. She is incredibly self

Jacqueline Pascarl with her two children, Shah and Iddin, before they were abducted by her former husband Prince Bahrin of Malaysia

flake boxes on our heads pretending we were robots,” she recalls. But she also had a successful career as a presenter on television and radio. This agreeable existence was shattered when Bahrin kidnapped the children. The next 14 years, it seems, were shaped by her efforts to overcome her grief –or, at least, to put it to some use. She produced a documentary on children abducted by their fathers; she did humanitarian aid work, and eventually became an ambassador for the global aid organisation CARE International. She also became an expert on parental child abduction and advised the European Union and the American and Australian governments. Pascarl didn’t want to become an ambassador who only “did media and spouted briefing notes”, she explains. She wanted to have first-hand knowledge of the field, “to drive trucks and dig latrines and do trauma and rape counselling”. “I still gave a good cocktail party,” she adds, “and

went with a dress and a pair of heels for formal receptions with presidents and prime ministers.” Pascarl explains that as she travelled around the world she would always seek out the oldest cathedral she could find. Here she would find peace, and, though she would not pray –Pascarl has not been a regular Mass-goer for years –she would light candles as if it were a ritual. Candles in a place of worship, she explains, seemed to offer the hope that her children would some day come home. For whatever reason the candles seemed to represent “that first step towards civilised behaviour”. After she left the cathedral, she would always send a postcard to her children in the hope that “someone really stupid” would deliver the post without it being censored. (Her children never saw any of the postcards.) Pascarl’s favourite church is St Martin’s in the Fields in central London. But she says the most “beautiful and soothing” place she knows is Notre Dame de Saint

Rémy, a Trappist monastery in Rocheforte, Belgium, built almost entirely out of white sandstone. The monks’ Gregorian chant is “spiritually transporting”, particularly in Latin. Sadly, she says, Gregorian chant is “light on the ground” in Australia. More than 10 years after Pascarl’s children were abducted she received an e-mail from her daughter, Shah. Her children had researched about her on the internet and discovered that she wasn’t the “devil incarnate” that their father had made her out to be. Phone calls followed, and then, finally, Prince Bahrin gave permission for them to visit her in Australia. Now they spend a lot of time together as a family, along with Pascarl’s two other children and her current husband. She explains that, since she has missed all the formative years of their lives, she sometimes doesn’t have the basic knowledge she needs to understand their actions. But the “most wonderful” time of her life was watching her four

children around the dinner table and cooking a meal for them. “It’s not about giving your children the new PlayStation or slaving away for the luxurious holiday. The memories that stick with a child are the times when you stop being engrossed in the grown-up world and give time to your children. Stop reading the newspaper and sit on the floor and speak to them. Be stupid occasionally, take a risk. That’s what brought my children home.” She adds: “I’ve had to make a decision, too, of not lamenting the last 14 years. If one spends the next 14 years looking back, and raging, and being bitter and twisted, you’ll fall over your future. You won’t participate in your own life and in all its possibilities of joy and happiness. I don’t intend to lose another minute.”

Since I Was A Princess is published by Mainstream Publishing. To order go to www.mainstreampublishing.com

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AFRICAN DIARY By Fr David McLaurin

Amember of a religious order went to the bank in the middle of Nairobi the other day: nothing unusual about that, you might think. He took out a considerable amount of cash, and then on his way back to his car made a few other calls. The car was parked in the compound of the Holy Family Minor Basilica, the cathedral, which has security men on its gates. When he got into the car, a man in a smart suit tapped on the window, and, when it was lowered, took out a gun and told him to hand over the cash. When he had done so the thief and his accomplice, also in a smart suit and tie, told him to put his head on the steering wheel and keep it there – which he did, until he heard other voices and thought it safe to look up. It is assumed that the thieves had followed him from the bank, where they had seen him make the withdrawal. It was a good thing that the brother in question was not harmed physically – though he might easily have been shot dead had he resisted the thieves. He will only have to deal with the trauma of having a gun pointed in his face by criminals, criminals who have the reputation of being very trigger-happy. The money can be replaced. Besides, it is only money; a life can never be replaced. I have been thinking

about this quite a lot. There are several rules one always follows if one goes out. Never take anything that you would not be prepared to lose. Never carry more money than absolutely necessary. Always carry some money or something valuable that will placate the thieves, such as a watch or a mobile phone, so they do not get annoyed and shoot you; never ever resist – if you do you risk death. Best of all, never make large withdrawals from the bank – though of course sometimes you have to do so; just as sometimes you have to carry your passport with you, a document it would be a nightmare to lose. Some correspondents have wondered if I do not discuss crime too much in this column. As a matter of fact there are many incidents that I have deliberately not mentioned; I have mentioned murders, but not many thefts, and few if any street attacks, and no rapes – but these things take

place, and happen to people I know. Kenya’s crime rate is high, whether as high as South Africa, I am not sure, though I would not trust the statistics. But what is the point of mentioning all this? First of all, people do not want to discuss it, which is hard for me to understand, because a problem denied is not a problem solved. The second point is that words do not solve problems, action does. Of late the police have been patrolling in cars, something I have not noticed before; road checkpoints have increased; several notorious gangsters (or presumed gangsters) have been shot dead by the police. A few people have objected to shoot-to-kill, but most, including the leading daily paper, have welcomed it. I personally do not think this is the right way forward. How can we be sure the right people are shot? Besides, I am against the death penalty, as are almost all the Kenyans I know. My own humble suggestion is to call in the man who turned around New York, Rudy Guiliani, or some smart cop from the Big Apple. I am serious. That is foreign aid that would work.

Fr David McLaurin is a missionary priest in Kenya

d40mclaurin@hotmail.com