Kazem, a refugee from Iraq, arrived in Australia by boat from Indonesia in October. University educated and with a family in Iraq, he hoped to make a new life in Australia, free from constant fear. He planned to bring his wife and children out to join him in Australia.
After landing in far north WA, he and his 110 fellow travellers were taken to Curtin Detention Centre where he was imprisoned for eight months before being set free. He told Green Left Weekly's SARAH STEPHEN about his experiences. This is his story:
Since Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party came to power 30 years ago, there has been increasing persecution of anyone who opposes his regime. Opposition figures — particularly those identified as communists, Kurdish people or Shi'ite Muslims — are regularly kidnapped and killed, many of them hanged, some thrown in tubs of acid.
Most Iraqi people send their children out to work rather than to school, because they cannot survive without the extra money. After the Gulf War, peoples' suffering increased enormously. Some people were so desperate to eat they would be forced to sell all their furniture and belongings, even their doors.
There are no formal channels to apply for refugee status to Australia or any other country. Every embassy in Iraq is monitored by the government. They know about everyone who visits. To go to an embassy and apply for political asylum would be putting your own and your family's lives at risk.
Only option
I escaped from Iraq to Syria by road, using a false passport. This is the only way to get out of the country, the only option I had. From Syria I flew to Indonesia, then came on a boat with 110 other people on board. They were mostly from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and some from Palestine.
We were on that boat for a week, and it was a frightening experience. The waves were enormous, and we were worried the captain didn't know which way we were going. Two boats before us had sunk, and another had lost its way and food had run out. It was a long and exhausting journey, and we were very excited to see land.
When I was a little boy, I used to dream about Australia. I used to imagine what beautiful weather it had. I used to dream that one day I would live here. It seemed like a special place to me.
I expected to be welcomed when I arrived, I expected that the government would give me freedom and safety after all I'd been through. I planned, after a few months, to also bring my family here.
One night, we heard a helicopter overhead. The next day we saw land, and a small plane. We started shouting and waving to make sure we'd been seen. Two people came and asked us who we were, where we were from and what we wanted. They confirmed we had arrived in Australia, and told us to sleep the night on the boat.
The next morning a navy ship sent six soldiers to again take our names and information. Our boat was towed to the coast, where detention centre officials were waiting for us with buses.
We were all confused. We were happy because we were alive and on dry land, but we didn't understand what was happening. We asked the woman driving the bus where we would be going, whether she was driving us to the nearest city. She told us it was just desert, that we wouldn't see any people.
Scared
As our bus drove through the gates of the Curtin Detention Centre, guards lined the drive. We arrived at the detention centre on October 11. There were 100 people already there. All new arrivals were lined up like sheep and over three days were individually questioned by the department of immigration, who asked us about why we had come.
We were then spoken to as a group, assisted by an interpreter. The immigration department representative used very harsh language. He told us that Australian people didn't welcome us, that we weren't civilised people. After half an hour of this, we started to feel scared. They told us that they could arrange it for anyone to return straight away if we wanted to.
We asked for lawyers, but they didn't let us talk to anyone before October 23. We later found out that was when a new law was passed through parliament restricting refugees who arrive unauthorised to a three-year temporary visa.
There was deliberate collusion between the government and the detention centre to deny us our rights in the two weeks before that decision was made by parliament, and the refusal to give us access to legal advice meant that we couldn't exercise our rights as political refugees to permanent visas.
When we arrived, four of us were put to sleep in a two- by two-metre room, two in beds and two on the floor. The mosquitoes were unbelievable. There was nothing to stop their stings, no repellent. We had bites all over us, many of which got infected. The children suffered the most, crying all the time.
There were also snakes in the detention centre grounds, lots of them. People were bitten by them, but the guards told us it would be wrong to kill them. We just had to look out for them and put up with it.
Hunger strike
While I was there, 600 of us went on hunger strike. We were desperate, we wanted to do everything we could to push the application process ahead.
Some people injured themselves, others sewed their lips together. We were left for seven days until people started to faint, then they started to force feed us and remove the stitches.
The hunger strike won us some new privileges. For the first time we could contact our families. This was four months after we had been detained, and even then we had to buy phone cards. For four months our families hadn't known whether we were alive or dead.
We also got some access to newspapers, although they were censored. Some articles were cut out before we could read them. We couldn't watch TV or listen to the radio.
We had to do work inside the centre in order to get money, things like cleaning the showers, clearing rubbish. An hour's work would earn us $1.
The private security guards would find a pretext to search our things, saying, "We hear you have a syringe, we need to search". They sometimes stole things from us. A friend of mine discovered his ring was missing. We blamed each other because we didn't realise it was the guards.
Over time, we started to get sadder, more depressed and demoralised. They deliberately tried to make this process worse.
There were 1250 people in a centre designed to house 300. People were mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria and Syria. The detention centre staff tried to break down social contact and solidarity as the centre got more and more crowded.
They separated each small building from the others by erecting barriers between them. They intimidated us if we tried to communicate with friends in another block. People attempted suicide, others slowly lost their mind, developed nervous conditions, started shouting.
We had the same routine every day — shower, eat breakfast, go back and sit in our rooms, come out for lunch. We were told what time to go to sleep, and when we could and couldn't leave our blocks. It was very cold and wet, and we had no clothes except what we came in. I spent the entire eight months in a t-shirt.
We had no progress reports on our applications throughout the months we were there. Only 45 days before our release did a number of us finally get confirmation that we would be granted three-year temporary visas.
I was to be released with a group of 60, but 12 of us were held back for a further two weeks. Perhaps we were identified as troublemakers. We were told by immigration officials not to tell anyone what we'd seen, how we'd been treated. They told us it would be bad for us in the future if we spoke about the detention centre.
Before we left, they searched our bags. They took back all sheets, blankets and towels, then put us on a bus to Perth. We were taken to a $50 a night hotel, and had been given only $204. We were left with very little information about how to survive.
My options over the next three years are not very happy ones. I can go back to Syria but never back to Iraq, or I will be killed. I can't bring my family to Australia because we couldn't survive on the money I'm eligible for.