How I brought my girls home
EXCLUSIVE: Sandra Lee
February 25, 2007 12:00am
Article from: Sunday Herald Sun
COURAGEOUS mother Melissa Hawach has revealed how she got her young daughters out of Lebanon after their father abducted them from Australia in July.
Only 18 hours after she returned to Canada with her beloved daughters, Hannah and Cedar, Melissa told how she was reunited with her girls on December 21 and spent seven weeks in fear of being caught -- and of losing them again -- as they moved between safe homes in villages across Lebanon.
The Canadian-born mother, whose girls have dual Australian and Canadian citizenship, is relieved to be safe at home after a seven-month custody ordeal over three countries.
"I was scared to death over there," Melissa said yesterday in an exclusive interview at a secret location in Canada.
"I was never worried about being arrested. I couldn't have cared less if I was thrown in jail.
"But I knew that if I was caught, my children would get turned back over, I wouldn't know where they would go and I would never see them again.
"My greatest fear was losing them again."
Melissa, 32, retrieved Hannah and Cedar, then five and three, with the help of four former members of the elite Australian and New Zealand Special Forces, who conducted an undercover surveillance operation 30km from Beirut at a resort where the girls' Australian-born father, Joseph Hawach, 32, had taken them.
With the girls in her custody, Melissa cut her blonde hair and dyed it black to avoid standing out as she moved between four houses that were found by a network of trusted Lebanese friends.
"My children are half Lebanese and these people took me into their homes. They treated me like their family," a grateful Melissa said.
Her lawyers worked to secure her children's safe exit from their father's homeland.
On February 17, mother and daughters returned home from an epic journey that took them via Syria and Jordan.
"I knew, as scared as I was, there was no other option for me," Melissa said.
"There is nowhere to rest your head when your children aren't in their beds at night. You can't stop, you just can't. I wouldn't want them to think that I gave up. Ever."
Melissa's ordeal began on July 15 when her estranged husband, a dual Australian-Lebanese citizen, disappeared with their daughters part-way through an authorised three-week holiday to Sydney to visit his family.
Two days later, distraught Melissa was told by one of his family that Joseph had "gone to the Middle East with the girls and I don't think that he is coming back".
Canadian authorities confirmed Hawach had taken his daughters across the Syrian border to Lebanon on July 22 -- a day after a Canadian court awarded Melissa sole custody of her children and 10 days into the Hezbollah-Israeli war in Lebanon.
Hawach was charged with two counts of child abduction. International warrants were issued for his arrest.
Weeks later, he made a phone call to his wife of six years from Lebanon. He demanded sole custody of Hannah and Cedar in a "parenting agreement" that would return them to Australia and prohibit them from leaving until they were 16. Only if she agreed, he said, would she see her children.
"He was just cold," Melissa recalls. "This wasn't a typical parental abduction -- you just don't get phone calls back and demands. It became like a kidnapping negotiation rather than an actual parental abduction."
The anguished mother spoke to her oldest daughter for the first time since she and her little sister disappeared.
"She was confused. (Hawach) told them I had left them. Hannie seeks the truth. She knows when she is being fed malarkey," Melissa said, her voice choked with hurt, but with pride at her daughter's strength of character.
"So it wouldn't have made sense to her that Mummy had left them when she had gotten on two planes and gone to a country where she didn't even speak the same language.
"I just wanted her to know that I loved her and I said, 'Make sure you tell Cedar that I love her and miss her'."
On December 13, Melissa and her father, Jim Engdahl, flew to Lebanon to have the local courts recognise her Canadian custody rights and investigate a tourist's tip-off that her daughters were at al-Rimal resort in Jounieh.
When the courts failed her, Melissa hired an investigator, who discovered Hawach's uncle owned a unit at the resort.
She also had the help of a Canadian private investigator with the Missing Children Society of Canada, a team of local lawyers and Brian Corrigan, an Australian former soldier with 3RAR parachute regiment in Sydney.
Corrigan teamed with NZ-born former SAS trooper David Bruce Pemberton and put the resort under surveillance. They soon found that Hannah and Cedar were there with their father.
On December 20, the men smuggled Melissa into the resort. She watched her daughters playing unsupervised for four hours.
But her lawyers in Beirut advised her to do nothing, fearing her husband's reaction, and she left, crushed, without Hannah and Cedar.
"I cried all night," she recalls. "I just kept saying that was such a mistake, I have made the biggest mistake of my life if I've lost them now, forever."
Melissa was shattered but determined to retrieve her girls. She went back with Corrigan, Pemberton and two other former NZ Special Forces soldiers.
Hannah and Cedar returned from their school with Hawach about 4pm and about 4.30pm they appeared outside to play.
Melissa was sure Hawach would be lying down watching TV upstairs.
"I just walked out, slow as you please, and stood there watching for a little bit," their mother says calmly, while re-living her elation.
The ex-soldiers stayed in the background and were not involved, she says.
"Then I called to Hannie, 'Hannie, Hannie', and she turned and looked at me.
"I had Hannie in my arms and was holding Cedar's hand, and I said, 'We're gonna go now, we're gonna go visit Bumpy (the girls' grandfather)' and we're going to talk to Dad a bit later. I'll tell Dad later'. "And that was it. There was no rush, no grab. It was unbelievable, actually, how smooth it was. We walked out and got in the van and left.
"They were as good as gold. They were so happy. It was just like everything we had planned for and hoped for. It all came together all at once.
"It was just surreal. It was absolutely surreal. It was just amazing. "There were no tears. "My kids were in my arms."
That night, Melissa and her girls went into hiding.
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