by Andy Lamey
Al Ghazzi spent several days on Christmas Island. He knew something was not quite right when he was not allowed to contact his family. Then he and the other arrivals were herded onto a plane and flown to the mainland. As it prepared for descent, Al Ghazzi could see that they were landing at a remote location. They were transferred onto buses and driven through the desert until they came to a ramshackle collection of trailers surrounded on all sides by barbed wire and a vast expanse of red earth. Curtin Detention Centre, as it was called, was a converted air force base. Al Ghazzi and the other residents soon discovered that many of its basic facilities were broken: the fencing did not keep out snakes and the toilets and showers leaked, creating flows of open sewage. The camp was also located in one of the hottest parts of Australia, and lining up for food and other outdoor activities required standing for hours in the relentless sun.
When Al Ghazzi arrived the atmosphere in the camp was tense. Curtin was run by Australasian Correctional Management, or ACM, a U.S.-owned firm that operated half a dozen immigration detention facilities in remote parts of Australia. ACM camps had many features of a prison, including that of detainees being referred to by number rather than by name. Detainees were also frequently searched during the day or woken up at night, when flashlights were shone in their eyes during head counts. Most troubling to Al Ghazzi was that detainees were not allowed to make contact with the outside world, even to let their families know they had survived the journey from Indonesia.
Curtin had come into being three months before Al Ghazzi’s arrival. Its rationale was to deter “unauthorized arrivals,” those who tried to enter Australia without visas. Ninety percent of its occupants were Iraqi, the rest predominantly Afghan. Most of them had been seeking refuge in a country that would not return them to persecution. Curtin, however, was no one’s idea of a refuge. Unlike convicted criminals, who know the length of their sentences, the inmates at Curtin were not told how long they would be detained. This created an environment of powerlessness, which manifested itself in various ways. Parents in the camp were unable to provide for the needs of their children, and would succumb to depression. After seeing their parents lose interest in their surroundings or release their stress through violence, child detainees lost their ability to concentrate or to trust adults. As one Australian psychiatrist later put it, “You couldn’t really design an environment more destructive to child development than immigration detention.”
The stress and uncertainty of indefinite detention were exacerbated by ACM staff. Although detainees were interviewed upon arrival to determine whether they were eligible to make refugee claims, ACM employees would routinely not tell new arrivals that they had been found eligible. In other cases they would withhold crucial information, such as the fact that a detainee had a right to legal assistance. Many new arrivals were able to glean such information only after speaking to camp residents who had already filed their own claims. Even when detainees were able to lodge a claim, they were often not told what was happening with their file. Questions would be met with insults and criticisms of their religious beliefs. Those who pressed for information were threatened with being returned to Iraq or Afghanistan, a terrifying prospect for those like Al Ghazzi who were fleeing persecution.
Curtin was set in an extreme landscape where wind and erosion had long ago removed most of the soil and vegetation. Over time, something similar happened to the sanity of the people made to live there. Gradually, it too was stripped away. The longer people were incarcerated, the more unwell they became. Eria Clapton, an Anglican minister who worked with detainees, observed that large numbers of them needed to be medicated in order to perform daily tasks. “By the time they have been in detention for six months they are probably taking sleeping pills and tranquillizers,” Clapton noted. “Longer than 12 months and they are seriously at risk; they may be suicidal and suffering extreme anxiety symptoms … because they are in such a state of mental and physical anxiety about being sent back.”
Three months after Al Ghazzi arrived, a group of Iraqi detainees decided they could not put up with camp conditions anymore. They organized a hunger strike that quickly grew to include about three hundred people. Participants sat in the yard under a large banner they had created depicting Saddam Hussein. He was shown thanking Australia’s Immigration Department for jailing his critics. Occasionally a member of the group would rise and begin a chant: “Where are human rights? Where is freedom? We want freedom!” The most committed participants, a group of twelve to twenty men, jabbed sewing needles through their lips and sewed them shut to symbolize their helplessness.
To defuse the crisis, the government brought in a prominent member of Australia’s Muslim community, Dr. Mohammed Taha Alsalami. After travelling nine hours from Sydney, Alsalami was shocked to see Curtin’s “subhuman” conditions. As he walked around, the camp residents besieged him with over four hundred messages to pass on to their families. He tore pages out of his diary for people to write phone numbers on, while others passed him addresses scrawled on pieces of discarded cardboard. Alsalami would later contact the Sydney-based family of a Kuwaiti detainee, who collectively broke down in tears. After not hearing from their relative for months, they had assumed that he had died during the crossing from Indonesia, and had held his funeral ten months earlier.
Conditions improved after the hunger strike. Al Ghazzi and other detainees were allowed to fax a form letter to their families informing them they were alive. Detainees were also granted local telephone access, the toilets and showers were fixed, and children were allowed to leave the camp for volleyball outings. New arrivals, however, continued to be denied information that would allow them to file a successful refugee claim, and stress among detainees remained high. Camp residents swallowed bleach or tried to hang themselves in four separate suicide attempts.
Eleven months after he arrived, Al Ghazzi was sitting in his trailer when he was called outside. The camp manager told him he had been granted a temporary protection visa and would be allowed to leave. Al Ghazzi felt no relief or excitement at the news. In Iraq, at least, he never placed any hope in the government. In Australia he had allowed himself to hope for better, only to have his expectations dashed. “[Curtin] destroyed us from the beginning,” he says. “Honestly, I feel dead. I’m not active anymore, not existing in this life.”
Al Ghazzi moved to Perth, the largest city in Western Australia. During his first phone call to Raghed she broke down at the sound of his voice. Then Reyam came on the line. Al Ghazzi had hoped his call would have a reassuring effect on her, but she sounded withdrawn. He asked what was wrong. “You lied to me,” she said.
Al Ghazzi was stunned. What had he possibly lied about?
“You said that when you got to Australia we’d be together. We’d have a normal life.”
Al Ghazzi tried to convince her that it wouldn’t be long now. But inwardly, he was crushed. No matter how bad things had got in Iraq and Syria, his daughter had never lost faith in him. If Curtin took that away, it would break him in a way even the general had not. It was if he was sinking into the sand again, and could feel it rising above his head.
Perth is a quiet city of sprawling suburbs. After settling there Al Ghazzi resolved not to succumb to despair. “I said look, this is good reason to live again. Is good point to start again.” He got a job as a farm labourer and then as a kitchen hand. His overwhelming preoccupation was Raghed and the children. During long-distance calls to Syria, he and Raghed would discuss how the family could reunite. She insisted that she and the children had to make their own boat crossing. Al Ghazzi was shocked to hear her suggest it. He had barely made it travelling by himself. The thought of Raghed doing it with the children filled him with fear. “Are you crazy?” he snapped at her. “It’s dangerous.”
But Raghed would not be swayed. “You know what Syria is like,” she would say during their many conversations. She told him that the situation in Damascus had deteriorated. The security forces had finally caught
up with her family. Policemen had come around to the apartment and told her they knew her husband was gone, and threatened her with extortion. As a result, she and her sister were now planning to spend their life savings on a collective voyage to Australia.
Mohammad begged her to reconsider. “Please. Think of the children. You could all be killed.”
“If it’s a choice between living this way and dying, then I would rather die.”
Al Ghazzi was torn, but eventually stopped trying to talk her out of it. “Part of me accept it, and part of me refuse it, but I have no way to stop it.” When Raghed asked him to borrow money to help finance their trip, he reluctantly agreed.
Raghed did not know it at the time, but the Indian Ocean was not the only thing standing between her and Australia. In August of 2001, a Norwegian cargo ship, MV Tampa, responded to a telex from Australian coastal officials. The telex directed the Tampa to rescue 438 asylum-seekers from a floundering Indonesian vessel near Christmas Island. After the last member of the predominantly Afghan group was hoisted onto the Tampa’s deck, the ship’s captain, Arne Rinnan, made course for Indonesia. This immediately caused a protest from his passengers, some of whom threatened to throw themselves overboard if he continued. They had seen Indonesia, they said, and knew they could not survive there. In response, Rinnan set a new course for Christmas Island. He soon received a call from Australian Immigration officials, who told him he would be prosecuted for people-smuggling if he did not turn around and resume course for Indonesia. When Rinnan stopped the ship just outside Christmas Island’s twelve-mile exclusion zone, it triggered the exchange of many angry words between Australia, Indonesia, Norway and the Tampa’s bridge. Finally, three days after picking up the asylum-seekers, with food and medical supplies running low, Rinnan entered Australian waters. His ship was soon boarded by Special Air Service commandos who brought it under Australian control.
Australia’s prime minister at the time was John Howard. In justifying his government’s actions, Howard said he wanted to send a message to people thinking of coming to Australia. “We simply cannot allow a situation to develop where Australia is seen around the world as a country of easy destination.” Two weeks later, Howard stepped up his efforts. He announced that Christmas Island and other remote territories would be “excised” from Australia’s migration zone. People who arrived on Christmas Island or other excised places would not be permitted to apply for any type of Australian visa. If they filed a refugee claim, they would be sent to places such as Papua New Guinea and Nauru, a desolate Pacific micro-state, where their claims would be processed and those deemed refugees resettled in third countries. If such a claim were rejected, unlike those filed within Australia, there would be no way to appeal it.
Howard’s new policy was called the Pacific Solution. By the time it was announced in September of 2001, Raghed and her siblings had already bought tickets to Malaysia. Even if they had wanted to turn back, it was too late. Raghed thus left for Malaysia as she had planned. Travelling with her was her sister as well as her brother and her brother-in-law, who had recently made their own flight to Syria from Iraq. Between them the four adults had ten children in tow. Mohammad coached them on what to expect in Malaysia and Indonesia, and kept them in his thoughts as they landed in Kuala Lumpur. From there, unlike Al Ghazzi, they had to reach Indonesia by boat. Al Ghazzi was in constant touch with Raghed on her cellphone as she and her family made the dangerous crossing to Indonesia and waited for a second boat in the port city of Bandar Lampung. Finally, the night before they were scheduled to sail for Christmas Island, Al Ghazzi had a nightmare in which he saw the children drowning at sea. He awoke with a start and called Raghed in a panic. This time, he was the one in tears who needed reassurance. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, “we’re still here. Don’t worry, we’ll be together soon.”
When Raghed and her relatives finally made their way to the beach where they were to depart, they saw that the boat the smugglers were using was a rotting old fishing vessel. It was in even worse condition than the one Mohammad had described. It was also going to be even more crowded. The smugglers had promised two boats but delivered only one, onto which they were now herding two boatloads of people, more than four hundred passengers from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. After seeing the ship’s cracked and decaying condition, some of them tried to get their money back. Their protests resulted in Indonesian police pointing guns at them. Working under the smugglers’ command, they ordered the protestors aboard the barely seaworthy vessel.
When the boat departed, it was so low in the water that the crew had trouble drawing anchor. The boat smelled of fresh paint, which made some of the passengers sick. Everyone had been promised life jackets, but there were only enough for sixty people. Several hours out of port, a group of two dozen passengers flagged down a passing fishing vessel. They were so convinced that the boat was going to sink that they paid the fishing boat captain US$100 to take them back to Indonesia. As the remaining passengers watched the fishing boat pull away, more than one prayed to Allah for reassurance that they were not making a terrible mistake.
As the ship cleared the Sundra Strait and reached the ocean, the waves grew rough, and it started to rain. Then, thirty hours from port, the engine broke down. The water pumps it had been powering were now dead. The crew told the passengers to throw their luggage overboard. People began frantically bailing water using their hands, dishes, anything. The boat was pounded by waves and lashed by hard sluices of rain. Then there was a roar as the ship flipped and broke apart. People were clutching each other, praying and screaming. Some managed to jump clear of the wreckage, but hundreds of others were trapped inside the hull. Among them were three pregnant women, one of whom went into stress-induced labour as the ship went down.
A hundred people survived the breakup of the ship. But as day turned to night, most of them gradually succumbed to exhaustion and were pulled beneath the waves. Those who could find pieces of wood or bodies to clutch onto spent hours treading water. One survivor later said it was as if the gate to hell had opened beneath them. Bodies bobbed to the surface after being bitten by fish. A shark came into view, only to swim away. The body of a baby floated among the wreckage, still attached to its mother by the umbilical cord.
Twenty-two hours after the sinking, an Indonesian fishing boat came across the passengers’ luggage. Its crew realized there had to be a sinking nearby, and spent hours looking for survivors. But as the fishermen came across bodies floating in the water, most of them turned out to be dead. In the end, only forty-five survivors were recovered. Al Ghazzi’s family was not among them.
When he heard the news, Al Ghazzi had a nervous breakdown. He can recall being hospitalized, but not what happened after that. “I didn’t see for seven days, eight days. It’s like a big hammer on my head. I don’t see anything. I feel everything is dark; everything is gone.”
In the aftermath of the sinking, Al Ghazzi asked Immigration officials if he could go to Indonesia. Like many people who lose relatives in large-scale disasters, he wanted to speak to the remaining survivors to find out exactly how his family died. Eyewitness accounts are known to make survivors feel closer to their loved ones and to help the grieving process begin. Four unidentified bodies had also been recovered from the wreckage. If they were members of his family, Al Ghazzi would be able to identify them and arrange a Muslim burial.
Al Ghazzi’s temporary visa did not permit return travel outside Australia, but he hoped the government might make an exception given his circumstances. His request was denied. If he left Australia, he was told, he would not be allowed to return. Al Ghazzi was thus left to try to stave off despair as best he could on his own. Among other tasks he set for himself was to stay busy with work and to try to learn English.
Through these and other projects, a new social network began to form around Al Ghazzi. An important early member of it was Sue Hoffman. Hoffman, who wears glasses and has a frizzy mane of dark brown hair, is a form
er investigator for the Western Australian tax office. In 2001 she grew “bored and fed up with accounting,” as she puts it, and started doing community work with refugees, which she found she enjoyed. Al Ghazzi was just another one of the refugees she had met until she helped arrange an interview he gave to a newspaper reporter. The day of the interview saw Hoffman sitting beside Al Ghazzi on a café patio as he spoke to the reporter through an interpreter.
As she heard Al Ghazzi talk about his tragedy for the first time, Hoffman was struck by its scope. His family had died fifteen months previously, and Al Ghazzi was clearly still in mourning. “This overwhelming grief was palpable, and you just wanted to take it off him,” Hoffman recalls. Yet she was equally struck by the polite and respectful way he dealt with people. If anyone had an excuse to become self-absorbed or bitter, Al Ghazzi did. Yet he had refused to allow that to happen.
Hoffman and Al Ghazzi eventually struck up a friendship. After one of the smugglers who ran the syndicate responsible for Raghed’s voyage was arrested in Sweden and brought to Australia to face charges, Hoffman raised enough money for her, Al Ghazzi and two other Iraqi men whose families had drowned to fly to Brisbane to watch the trial. The trial resulted in a conviction, which Al Ghazzi welcomed, but it did not bring a sense of closure. “They don’t do it for us. They do it for themselves,” he recalls. “They talking about law: ‘They break law, they break law.’ … They don’t say anything about us.”
