Kosovars find New Zealand a world apart

A year after coming here, our country's Kosovar refugees are safe and well. But as GREG DIXON finds, they need a helping hand into jobs if they are truly to build a new life.

The spray of flowers is all sweet pinks and purples. Sitting in a simple glass vase in Teuta Fusha's Glendowie flat, the blooms hold pride of place among the living room's sparse and careful adornments. They are a burst of exuberant colour and a gift. Her workmates have remembered what many of us may have forgotten — that this week marked the anniversary of a new beginning for this 41-year-old and for others like her.

A year ago last Tuesday she and the first of New Zealand's 410 Kosovar refugees and migrants stepped off a plane and ended their flight from fear and uncertainty and death in a homeland haemorrhaging from war.

So the bouquet is no wreath. It is a small, human kindness, a gesture of friendship and so much more for Teuta Fusha and her four brothers, three sisters and parents.

It is a reminder of a year of warm welcomes, unlooked-for generosities and quiet peace in a new home.

"To be safe and not to have to think about what might happen tomorrow or what might happen tonight is wonderful," she says through her 28-year-old brother Bekim. "I am so grateful."

Gratitude seems a word too reticent to relate how this family feels. The 26 members of the Fusha clan now living in New Zealand — seven of whom have gathered this night to talk about their first year here — cannot thank us all enough for what we have given them.

We, through our Government, have helped this family and dozens more like them to begin to rebuild what war
had wrecked, putting roofs over heads, money in pockets, providing counselling for trauma and starting these ethnic Albanians on the path to English literacy.

The small Albanian community in New Zealand has opened its arms and opened social doors. Though the Kosovars' small Government benefits have allowed them to see little more of New Zealand than home, school or work.

Yes, they are grateful, says Sandy O'Brien, the Kosovar liaison and community worker for the Refugee and Migrant Service, and they are "very, very positive" about being in New Zealand.

Positive, yet there are seen and unseen negatives. This family, like all these families from so far away, continue to bear burdens behind beaming eyes and quick mirth. The spectre of a life lived in fear of death still haunts, is still so close to the surface.

"The fear is in our bones," says 22-year-old Mirdon Fusha. "And I am scared because [the fear] is not going. We are still traumatised. For example today, when I went to St Lukes, a truck hit its horn, and I was jumping. Everyone on the bus was looking.

"There is fear also when you hear anything that makes a strange noise or when the phone goes."

Though the family itself was untouched by the slaughter, Bekim says the family can never forget what has happened to friends and other Kosovar Albanians.

And their own stories bespeak the horrors of war. As Bekim tells his story of heavily armed Serb militiamen bursting into their house in the city of Podujeva last April, his steady eyes fill with tears as he talks of clutching his then year-and-a-half old daughter Albora to his chest. He grows still as he remembers what was and what could have been.

Even the youngest children still cope with daily fears. When police made a courtesy visit to the Mangere refugee centre shortly after Bekim, his wife, Flutra, and Albora arrived in New Zealand, Albora saw only the blue uniforms.

"Everybody began to cry when they saw how scared she became of the police," Bekim says.

Even now Albora has not forgotten. When her father leaves home to attend English classes at the Auckland University of Technology or lectures for a paper he is taking at the University of Auckland, Albora asks whether he will come back.

"It is terrible for me and for Flutra," Bekim says, "just terrible."

And so it has been a year of small and cautious first steps towards re-establishing a normal existence for this family which has lost nearly all it ever had.

But then rebuilding, too, is in the Fushas' bones. The clan patriarch, 71-year-old Muhamed Fusha, says history has delivered similar blows to his
family.

His grandfather was killed and the family's houses were razed by Serbians in 1912. His father and brothers built a new life only to suffer further deaths and destruction of their homes by Serb communists during the Second World War.

"This is the third time they have destroyed our homes and lives," says Muhamed, a retired primary school teacher, through his son Bekim. "It is history repeating."

A resilient people, then. But crucial to this family rebuilding for the third time in less than a century will be finding work in their new, English-speaking country.

The Government's education-funding body, Skill New Zealand, is taking care of the language business. It has stumped up $500,000 for English as a second language courses for 136 of the Kosovars for the year to June. It will invest slightly less than that sum (for 100 places in English classes) in the next financial year.

The money has paid and will pay for 18 to 24-week beginners and workplace English courses. Jobs, however, do not necessarily follow.

Although very many of the Kosovar refugees and migrants who have come to New Zealand in the last 12 months have had trades and professions in their homeland, only three or four have so far found jobs in New Zealand.

Teuta Fusha, a technician at the diagnostic medical laboratory Medlab in Panmure, is the only Kosovar to have a job using existing skills.

Another who is in work, an engineer, now — and happily so — has a job as a car groomer.

It remains moot which of these two experiences will prevail for the Kosovars when and if they find work.

Certainly research done by the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust is not encouraging.

In a study the body made of Sri Lankan migrants to New Zealand, it found that 75 per cent were in professional jobs prior to migration, that 96 per cent had a tertiary qualification and that over 92 per cent were fluent or very fluent in English.

Yet 32 per cent were unemployed, and only about 60 per cent remained in the same professions they were qualified in and more than half were employed in less senior positions.

Worse still, 47 per cent felt they'd faced discrimination while trying to find work.

The barriers to employment, the EEO Trust discovered, were considerable.

They are: the lack of New Zealand experience of applicants, a lack of understanding by local employers about job applicants from other countries, a lack of New Zealand qualifications,
non-recognition of overseas qualifications and, worryingly, a bias from employers.

These are hot, shameful facts — and there is still no infrastructure in place to break such barriers down.

"The systems just aren't there to assist these people far enough," says the Kosovars' Refugee and Migrants Service worker Sandy O'Brien.

"We've meet those initial needs as they've come in. We've housed them, they have their furniture and so on, their children are in schools, they are getting English lessons but there is that next step — and it is a critical next step — these people need to work. These people need to become self-sufficient, they need to become independent of government assistance."

For many of the Kosovar men, not finding work soon could pile trauma upon trauma, O'Brien believes.

"It is extremely depressing for a man — and a woman — [to not have work] but I think we will look at the men first because they see themselves as the primary breadwinners.

"So many men have said to me that 'I will work for nothing for a company, I will work for nothing to show them my skills.'"

If the jobs don't come, says O'Brien, many may return to Kosovo. Certainly the Government's announcement last week that its assisted passage home will end in June next year, will focus thinking.

"People will now be able to really consider their options. Should we stay or should we go? I really think it will revolve around work. For many people, if they see that there is absolutely going to be no possibility to get work, then the only choice will be to go home."

Which about 63 have already done, according to Mazhar Krasniqi, the president of the Albanian-New Zealand Civic League. Most who have returned have been academics and those recalled by the United Nations for work in infrastructural organisations such as hydro schemes and coal-powered power
stations.

"They have gone," Krasniqi says. "But I saw with my own eyes the children of these people screaming at the airport. They didn't want to go. All the children now want to come back. Even the families now want to come back. But, you know, one chance is given, the second is not."

It is, then, the quality of that first chance which matters. Labour's Minis-ter for Immigration, Lianne Dalziel, says that the previous Government spent too many years worrying about the quantity of refugees and migrants entering New Zealand and not enough time concerning itself with the quality of settlement.

"The only way to measure the success of an immigration policy is to measure the success of settlement and resettlement," Dalziel says.

"When you take a refugee situation, they are always going to look back on their previous lives with sadness. But in some ways what I want is for them to look to their future with gladness. That's what we should be able to do with the resettlement process."

So what is to be done? Dalziel says that a recent Non-Government Agencies report on refugee resettlement policy in New Zealand has provided a sharply focused view.

Among its many recommendations on gaining employment for refugees and other issues, the report suggests that a nationwide campaign to educate and help change employer attitudes must be part of any plan.

"I don't like to put the racism label on matters like this because I do think it is based on ignorance," Dalziel says.

"There is a lack of information about the skills and qualifications of these individuals. That's what I really see as the roles of myself, the Race Relations Conciliator and the EEO Trust, [that] together we can work to break down some of those barriers."

Next month's budget may offer a new direction, however Dalziel will not pre-empt any new strategies that it may contain.

"I can't say a lot in the lead-up to a budget, but we have taken on board the concerns that were raised, particularly in relation to the need to get the best possible outcomes given the fact that refugees do arrive in the worst of circumstances."

In the meantime, confidence is high among the Fushas and they are here to stay, they say. (Right now they can only contemplate a visit home when the homeland is completely free of war).

They say the sense of community is strong among those who have come to New Zealand, and the Kosovars spend much time in each other's company at school, at home and at social gatherings.

But now they must be self-sufficient, they say. Bekim believes his family's menfolk are feeling "embarrassed" that they are reliant right now on government benefits to live, and it is making their desire to find work here even stronger.

"A year ago we thought only to get safe and to be in a safe place. But now we must work."