MELBOURNE — Feminist and socialist activist SURMA HAMID, from the Committee in Defence of Iraqi Women's Rights, has been active in the campaign to close Australia's immigration detention centres. In February, she was detained by Greek immigration authorities when she attempted to visit her brother, despite having valid travel documents. She spoke to Green Left Weekly's TONY ILTIS about her ordeal.
"Four months ago my brother fled Iraq and reached Greece, so I travelled to Greece to see him. We have not seen each other for three years. I used a [legally valid] travel document, as I am not yet eligible for an Australian passport", Hamid explained.
"On February 14, I flew to Greece. As soon as I arrived at the airport in Athens, I was arrested by the police. They took my travel document because, they said, it was no longer accepted by Greece. They put me alone in a very small room. I was scared because I knew that in many cases refugees were imprisoned for long periods without anybody knowing anything about them. I remembered that 66 Iraqi and Afghani refugees had been jailed on a Greek island. After 3-4 months the Federation of Iraqi Refugees found out about them by chance."
Hamid told Green Left Weekly that the Greek authorities threatened to deport her to Iraq because they believed she had went there directly from Iraq to apply as a refugee.
"I knocked on the door very hard. When they opened the door, I asked to see one of the officials but they insulted me and said I do not have the right to speak to anybody at all. After three hours, they put me in a car. They behaved as if I were a very serious criminal. I tried to explain that I had come from Australia and was not going to become a refugee in Greece. They told me to keep quiet.
"They took me to a detention centre. It consisted of three halls, each divided into five or six very small rooms. In two of the halls, each room contained 10-15 people. Another hall was for families."
Hamid was shocked at the conditions the detainees were kept in. "They put me with an Iranian family. They all were sick. They were vomiting and had fever and skin rashes. The toilets were very dirty. The hall too smelt very bad too and there were a lot of insects. The family had been in the detention centre for 27 days. They were told that they would be deported to Iran. They had escaped Iran because they were wanted by the Islamic regime. They paid $1200 to a smuggler, who took them to Turkey and then to Greece. As soon as they arrived in Greece they were arrested."
The guards were particularly harsh on black African detainees, Hamid said. "A woman from Ghana was there. She had permanent resident status in Greece for five years. When she fled to Greece, she left her one-year-old daughter with her mother. Last year, her mother died and she arranged to go to Africa to pick up her daughter. When she returned to Greece, because she brought her daughter who does not have resident status, she was arrested. She had been held for five months.
"She was physically abused everyday. In the two days I was in the centre, once I saw fore cops beating her and dragging her by her hair. A few times they had tried to deport her but at the airport, or on the way to the airport, she lost consciousness so they had to return her to the centre. They did not provide this lady and her daughter with food.
"I also saw police beating an African man very badly. The refugees told me that in general the treatment of the dark people was very brutal and much worse than the treatment for other refugees."
The majority of the detained refugees in Greece were from Iraq, with many others from Afghanistan."The majority have fled Iraq because they were persecuted by Saddam's regime or the Islamic and [bourgeois} nationalist groups in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some left Iraq because they had lost hope that they could live normally under the sanctions [imposed by the West], which create uncertainty and poverty", Hamid said.