Frontier Justice

by Andy Lamey

  FOUR

  THE FATAL SHORE

  MOHAMMAD AL GHAZZI HAS SHORT black hair and a caramel complexion. Lines that run across his forehead and down his cheeks look as though they have been chiselled into his face, while a small, trim goatee tapers to a point beneath his lower lip, and bobs up and down as he speaks. In a past life, when Al Ghazzi was in his early twenties, he owned a furniture shop in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Nasiriyah is a city where political life has long been tumultuous. In 1991 it was home to a revolt against the government of Saddam Hussein that was violently repressed. Al Ghazzi, however, shied away from politics, devoting himself to the furniture business instead. Sales were usually brisk enough for him to keep four people on staff, to help out with woodworking and upholstery around the shop.

  One night in 1994 Al Ghazzi was at home sleeping in the bedroom he shared with his raven-haired wife, Raghed. Their three-year old daughter, Reyam, was asleep in her own bedroom. At four o’clock in the morning the family was woken by the sound of their front door crashing in. The master bedroom was suddenly crowded with soldiers yelling “Stop!” at Mohammad and Raghed before they could move. Al Ghazzi was dragged outside, where there were more soldiers all along his street and on the roof of his one-storey house, acting under the command of an older man in civilian clothes. Al Ghazzi’s hands and feet were bound and he was pushed into the back of a utility vehicle that contained two other shackled men. As he was driven away, a soldier placed his shoes on Al Ghazzi’s head in a local gesture of contempt.

  Al Ghazzi was taken to a prison, where he was interrogated for over a week. The interrogations were carried out by the same older man who had directed the arrest, who turned out to be a general in the security forces, and who kept Al Ghazzi blindfolded throughout the proceedings. The general’s questions revolved around the Islamic Dawa Party, or Al-Dawa (The Call), a popular Islamic fundamentalist party that opposed the government; its armed wing had more than once tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Al Ghazzi had an older brother who belonged to Al-Dawa’s militant wing. He had disappeared four months previously, almost certainly at the hands of the security forces. While Al Ghazzi himself worshipped at a mosque affiliated with Al-Dawa and sympathized with some of its goals, he was not involved with its militant wing. His captor, however, refused to believe him, and insisted he was involved in an impending Al-Dawa operation.

  “Your brother came to your shop with his friend. We know you are Al-Dawa. What did you discuss?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We know they came to see you.”

  “I let them into the shop, but they had tea while I worked. I didn’t really talk to them.”

  “You were planning a suicide bombing. Where will it happen?”

  “Please, I don’t know … about Al-Dawa or any bombing.”

  The questioning continued for hours. To indicate his unhappiness with Al Ghazzi’s answers, the general had his men beat him. When that did not elicit the right responses, electric shocks were applied to Al Ghazzi’s tongue and penis. Al Ghazzi lost consciousness and was dragged back to his cell, left for an hour, then carried on a blanket back to the interrogation room. This time his blindfold was removed. After his eyes adjusted to the light he saw Raghed and Reyam sitting across from him. Raghed began crying when she saw his battered appearance.

  The general made it known that if Al Ghazzi refused to confess, the next round of interrogation would be carried out on Raghed. Al Ghazzi told the general that if he let Raghed go, he would tell him what he wanted to know. Raghed was taken away, and half an hour later one of the soldiers dialled Al Ghazzi’s number and thrust the receiver at him. After Raghed confirmed she had made it home all right, Al Ghazzi turned to his jailers.

  “Bring me a blank piece of paper. I’ll sign it, and you can fill in anything you want.”

  Every refugee journey has an unhappy beginning, but each beginning is unhappy in its own way. The events that set Al Ghazzi’s flight in motion began even before his arrest, when the general fastened on to the belief that he was plotting against the government. In keeping with this belief, the general made Al Ghazzi write out the details of the bomb plot that had featured in his interrogation. Al Ghazzi was then taken to another prison, 370 kilometres to the northwest, in Baghdad, where he was housed in a crowded cell with twenty other men. What little food prisoners received was barely edible, and dysentery and other diseases were rife throughout the prison population. Al Ghazzi’s situation was made worse by liver damage caused during his torture. His primary torment, however, was psychological: there was no way to let Raghed know where he was, or even that he was still alive. He slowly became disengaged from his surroundings, shuffling around his cell in a mute and lifeless manner when he bothered to move at all.

  Two years after his arrest, Al Ghazzi was sitting in his crowded cell one day when the door swung open. The guards dragged him outside and took him to a processing area, as if they were going to release him. Al Ghazzi assumed it was a trick. But after he and several other prisoners were rushed out into the streets by guards yelling “Go, go, go!” he found himself blinking in the unfamiliar Baghdad sunlight, wondering if he might actually be a free man.

  “Are you from the prison?”

  A cab had stopped on the busy street. The door was open and the driver was addressing him. Confused, Al Ghazzi wondered how he knew where he had come from. Eventually he realized that his prison clothes, not to mention his dirty and unshaven appearance, made it obvious.

  “Yeah, I was in prison.”

  “Then get in.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have any money.”

  “Just get in!”

  The driver had taken pity on him. Al Ghazzi directed him to the other side of the city, where one of his brothers lived. He would later discover that his release was due to the United Nations, which had imposed sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions were meant to force Saddam to abandon his chemical and nuclear weapons program, but a secondary goal was to pressure Iraq about its human rights record. In order to improve appearances on that score, the government decided to release 390 political prisoners who had been accused of belonging to Al-Dawa and another militant Islamic group, Hezbollah. To underscore their president’s magnanimity, the government released Al Ghazzi and the rest on April 28, 1996, Saddam Hussein’s birthday.

  Al Ghazzi returned to Nasiriyah for a tearful reconciliation with Raghed. In prison he had felt a paralyzing numbness, as if he had been buried up to his neck in sand. Seeing Raghed and Reyam again, it was as though the sand began to drain away. Later, after he and Raghed had a second child, a boy named Ali, it felt as though normal life was on the verge of returning. But then the general who had arrested him appeared in the doorway of Al Ghazzi’s shop. He announced that Al Ghazzi would need to start paying him if he wanted to keep the business. Al Ghazzi felt a bolt of dread at the thought of working for his torturer. But he reached his absolute breaking point when Raghed was taken in for questioning. She was interrogated about a brother who lived in Washington, D.C., which the general took as a sign she opposed the regime. After Raghed was released, shaken but unharmed, she and Al Ghazzi began planning their escape from Iraq.

  Al Ghazzi’s brother put them in touch with a people-smuggler. After taking a taxi to Baghdad, Mohammad, Raghed and the children had a late-night meeting with a Kurdish man who piled them all into his car and drove them to the northern, predominantly Kurdish part of Iraq. After a brief river crossing, they were able to slip into Syria and make their way to the outskirts of Damascus, where they rented a tiny apartment, living off savings and money sent to them by Raghed’s brother in the United States.

  Although Raghed had a sister in Syria, permanently relocating there was not a real option. Syria was controlled by the same Baath Party that ruled Iraq—“left and right of the same shoes,” as Al Ghazzi puts it—and the Syrian government was notorious for returning refugees to Iraq. Refugees lived in constant fear of “the intimidating presence of all-powerful state
security forces and an omnipresent intelligence network,” as one refugee agency put it. Even if Al Ghazzi and his family avoided deportation, the Syrian government did not grant Iraqis residency visas. Having no visa meant Mohammad and Raghed could not legally work and Reyam and Ali could not go to school. The Al Ghazzis thus lived with one eye constantly over their shoulder, petrified of attracting the attention of the authorities. When Raghed had an unplanned pregnancy and gave birth to their third child, Mohammad Jr., their situation became even more precarious. As Al Ghazzi recalls, living illegally in Syria in a state of permanent uncertainty felt like nothing so much as “waiting for death.”

  There was one possible way out. It was to travel to the West and make a refugee claim. This was a dangerous option involving many unknowns, but Al Ghazzi heard about other Iraqis who had managed to leave Syria that way. They sent word back about the people-smugglers they hired and the routes they had taken, and Al Ghazzi heard second-hand reports about Iraqis being accepted as refugees in Canada, Australia and Scandinavia. “I heard about Canada but it’s too far, it costs too much,” he says. The more he heard about Australia, though, the more it appealed to him. “They appreciate people, respect people … I heard something is special about Australia.”

  A willingness to admit refugees was not the only special thing about Australia. Al Ghazzi discovered that smugglers took people there via Malaysia. An officially Islamic state, Malaysia granted visitors from other Muslim countries short-term visas upon arrival. This made all the difference for someone in Al Ghazzi’s position. If he tried to fly directly to the West he would be asked to present a visa at the boarding gate at Damascus airport, which he would be unable to produce. Getting on a flight to Malaysia, on the other hand, would require only a fake Iraqi passport. And those were not hard to find in the back streets of Damascus.

  Late at night in their tiny living room, Mohammad and Raghed had an emotional conversation about what to do. Al Ghazzi thought that he should try to reach Australia on his own and then bring over her and the children. They had no idea what would happen, and he wanted to bear the risk of going first. Raghed hated the thought of their being apart, but the idea of staying in Syria equally filled her with terror. Their conversation ended with her weeping at their lack of positive options.

  Reyam overheard her mother crying and came out to ask Mohammad what was going on. He tried to explain his plan in a way that would not alarm her, but all she understood was that he was going away.

  “Does this mean we’ll never live together again?”

  “No, honey. We’ll never be apart again, once I get to Australia.”

  With some effort he managed to convince Reyam not to worry. Raghed took longer, but eventually she agreed to his plan as well. He threw himself into making the necessary arrangements. He knew two other Iraqi men in similar predicaments, one from Nasiriyah, the other from the smaller city of Kut, and the three of them decided to make the journey together. When they arrived at the airport they saw another group of Iraqis in line for the same flight, and realized they would not be the only refugees on board. Al Ghazzi and his companions soon discovered that the other group had been given the same vague instructions that they had: look for smugglers at the airport in Malaysia, with whom they could make arrangements about getting to Australia.

  Al Ghazzi was nervous from the moment the flight set down in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s sprawling capital. When he presented his passport at customs, the officer eyed it with suspicion and ordered Al Ghazzi out of the line. He was taken to a detention area, where he was soon joined by seven other Iraqis from the same flight. After two hours he was taken to an interview room and questioned by customs.

  “Why are you in Malaysia?” the officer asked.

  “Holiday.”

  “So you have money, then.”

  Al Ghazzi produced the wad of American dollars he was travelling with, money that had been given to him by his American brother-in-law. Eventually he managed to convince the officer that he was not planning to stay in Malaysia, and was free to go. Soon he was joined in the airport’s vast arrivals hall by all but one of the Iraqis from his flight, who had been held back for using a fake passport. Looking out at the unfamiliar surroundings, Asian business travellers striding past advertisements for Samsung, the thought of finding a people-smuggler here seemed extremely unlikely. If he had managed to convince Raghed and Reyam that his plan made sense, he had never really convinced himself. Now he realized just how desperate it had been. As if there had ever been any chance of his reaching Australia when his real fate, he now realized, was to lose his mind inside an airport in Malaysia.

  A Middle Eastern man stepped out of the crowd and strode toward them. “Australia?” he asked in Arabic. Al Ghazzi was overcome with relief and joy and an overwhelming sense of gratitude directed at no one in particular. He fell into negotiating prices and travel plans as if he were haggling over furniture back in Nasiriyah. Everyone negotiated their own price individually. In Al Ghazzi’s case, the smuggler eventually agreed on US$2,000. As Al Ghazzi and the other arrivals from Damascus followed the man out to the parking lot, they passed knots of other Iraqi Arabs and Kurds outside the airport, making similar arrangements with other Middle Eastern travellers. Rather than a place of terror, the airport now struck him as a gateway to freedom, where people like him could start to live again.

  Al Ghazzi’s group was taken to an apartment maintained by half a dozen Iraqi smugglers. It was crowded with dozens of other Iraqis who were also trying to reach Australia. After Al Ghazzi’s group arrived, one of the smugglers collected their passports and left. When he returned a few hours later, each passport had somehow acquired a stamp that would allow the bearer to enter Indonesia. The next day, Al Ghazzi and his companions were on a flight to Jakarta. Acting on the smugglers’ instructions, they each placed fifty American dollars in their passports before presenting them at Indonesian customs, which allowed them to pass through without incident. After clearing customs they were met by a Kurdish man named Omid, who took them first to a Jakarta hotel where they stayed for six nights, and then to a small port town on the Indonesian peninsula of Sumatra.

  Omid was friendly and talkative. “We’re going to get a big boat for you,” he would often say. When asked when they might leave, “tomorrow, tomorrow” was always his answer. But when tomorrow would come, nothing would happen. Every five or six days the smugglers would move Al Ghazzi and the other Iraqis to a new apartment, a step they said was necessary to avoid detection. Al Ghazzi and the others were strongly discouraged from going outside, and with nothing to do they grew increasingly irritated and argued with each other. Finally, after a month of waiting, Al Ghazzi’s group was woken before dawn and driven to a harbour where carloads of Iraqis were being assembling into a group of 180 people. There Al Ghazzi saw the “big boat” they had been promised: a broken-down fishing vessel that was barely seaworthy. People rushed on board, jamming themselves into the cabin and filling the deck before still more passengers climbed onto the crowded roof. As they cast off and slowly began chugging out of the harbour, they were accompanied by an Indonesian navy vessel, one of several signs to Al Ghazzi that, despite the smugglers’ claims to the contrary, they were working hand in hand with the Indonesian authorities.

  After half an hour the navy ship turned back, leaving the fishing vessel’s small Indonesian crew to guide the boat out to open sea. Their destination now was Christmas Island, an Australian Indian Ocean Territory located 1,500 kilometres northwest of continental Australia. According to Michelle Dimasi, a Swinburne University PhD student who does fieldwork there, Christmas Island’s unusual status has long been a pull factor for its Australian residents. “People will come to maybe escape a bad marriage or something that’s happened to them. It’s a good change because it’s still part of Australia, but it’s not.”

  In the early 1990s Christmas Island began to exert a similar pull on asylum-seekers. Between 1992 and 1998 an average of 115 people arrive
d there every year in treacherous boat crossings similar to Al Ghazzi’s. At first they came from Vietnam, Cambodia and other parts of East Asia. But in 1997, following the rise of an “Iran for Iranians” movement, Iran clamped down on its large refugee population. As a result the boats increasingly began to carry people like Al Ghazzi, Muslim refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan whose only avenue of escape was via Malaysia. The number of boats also increased, so that in 1999 the number of people arriving at Christmas Island rose to 906, its highest number to that date. The smugglers who organized the crossings scrambled to meet the rise in demand. Al Ghazzi overheard someone say that Indonesian fishermen were offered as much as US$1,000 to work as crew. That was enough to make the journey worthwhile to them even when they were caught, which they usually were, and ensured there was no shortage of boats.

  During Al Ghazzi’s crossing the ocean was rough. Many passengers vomited with seasickness, and as the journey progressed the ship took on dangerous amounts of water. Al Ghazzi was packed so tight with other people that he could neither move nor fall asleep, and children screamed every time the boat was rocked by a wave. At night the swells grew so great that the boat nearly capsized, and Al Ghazzi feared for his life more than once, wondering why he had ever embarked on such a dangerous voyage. “Honestly, when I think about it, [boarding] was like someone commit suicide, but in different way.”

  The next day the sea was calm. Early in the afternoon, thirty-six hours after departure, the crew brought the boat to a halt. They told the passengers it was too rocky to go all the way to Christmas Island. Instead, they would remain offshore and attract the attention of the Australian military, which patrolled the area. The passengers began waving their arms and yelling, “Help, refugees!” Within half an hour they had boarded an Australian navy vessel that took them to Christmas Island. Al Ghazzi and the others were taken to a sports centre where a hot meal and a cot were waiting for each of them. Al Ghazzi marvelled at how the Australians seemed to know in advance exactly how many meals and beds to provide, until someone told him that their boat had been tracked by satellite. When he drifted off to sleep, it was with a feeling of exhaustion and relief. He had taken the biggest risk of his life and survived. Raghed and the children were not with him but they would be in time. His crossing was the low point. Everything from here was up.