Seeking asylum from behind bars

Australia keeps its asylum seekers behind razor wire

By Dominic Hughes BBC Correspondent in Sydney

This week memories were stirred in Australia by the return to the country of the captain of the Norwegian freighter the Tampa.

In August of last year the ship was at the centre of an international incident when Australian troops boarded the vessel to stop more than 400 asylum seekers, rescued from a sinking boat, from reaching Australian soil.

The detainees are bored and frustrated - attempts at suicide and self harm are frequent.

Most of them are still being held on the island of Nauru, awaiting a ruling on their claims for asylum.

There are many hundreds more asylum seekers who did manage to make it to Australia, and remain locked away in detention centres, most of them in remote areas far from the prying eyes of journalists.

But sometimes the system cannot stop the most determined of refugees from trying to tell their message.

Working from a home office, various news stories often intrude into my domestic life.

Like most overseas correspondents, it is quite common for the phone to ring at odd hours with requests for stories.

What is less likely is for people who have featured in stories to ring up after I have interviewed them, just for a chat.

It is very rare that one of them will ring because they are lonely or desperate.

Distressing conversations

But Bilal Agha Said is being held in one of Australia's detention centres for asylum seekers, and he has no-one else to call.

The Tampa refugees are now on the island of Nauru

A colleague put me in touch with him, and I interviewed him over the phone for the BBC.

But after the piece had been broadcast on the World Service, Bilal called me back one night, while I was curled up on the sofa watching TV.

It was first of a series of distressing conversations.

Bilal, an Afghan, is in the Curtin detention centre in the far northwest of Australia.

It was the scene of a recent standoff between detainees and security guards from the private company that runs the centres for the Australian government.

Detention 'sounds dreadful'

His story is bizarre. His claim for asylum was rejected, he told me, because he had failed to declare his membership of the Democratic People's Party in Afghanistan during his initial application.

It is a dreadful place, terrible

Detained asylum seeker Bilal Agha Said

But when life in Curtin became too much to bear, and Bilal appealed to be sent home, he was told it was too dangerous for him to return.

Apparently it still is. He has now been held for three years.

And all because he tried to exercise his legal right to claim asylum in Australia, under treaties the Australian government has signed up to.

Bilal's account of life in Curtin certainly sounds dreadful.

He says it is 40 degrees centigrade most days, with little shelter from the sun.

Complaints

There is nothing to do during the day, and at night it is too dangerous to leave the stuffy confines of the huts because of the snakes.

400 refugees tried to reach Australian soil on the Tampa

The detainees are bored and frustrated. Attempts at suicide and self harm are frequent.

Bilal himself is on medication for depression.

He told me the recent riots started after security guards entered the mess area and beat two detainees after staff computers were vandalized.

But the man who had damaged the equipment was apparently already in custody.

Bilal claims that in the wake of the riots the detainees are being fed a diet of rice and limited vegetables.

The guards, he says, are racist - taunting and insulting the asylum seekers, ignoring their requests, preventing them from socialising with each other.

Complaints to government officials are ignored.

Bilal says the detainees are given little information about their cases or what will happen to them.

Ring of truth

Of course, none of this can be verified. Journalists are banned from the detention centres, and are only ever let in during carefully managed media visits after a riot.

Then weapons used by the detainees are displayed to show the need to keep the asylum seekers locked up.

Those phone conversations haunt me

Name Here

But just imagine if a only small part of what Bilal has told me is true - that he is being detained by a system that says he is not a refugee, and yet it is too dangerous for him to return to Afghanistan; that hundreds are being fed a meagre diet; that private security guards operate an inhuman, brutalising and racist regime on behalf of Australian taxpayers, and presumably with government knowledge.

Government ministers will deny all of this of course.

But I have now met enough asylum seekers who have been through the Australian detention system to know that Bilal's account of life in Curtin has a ring of truth about it.

And in our conversations over the phone he sounds like a traumatised man - his voice is leaden, going over the same points again and again, unable to understand what is happening to him.

"It is a dreadful place, terrible," he said to me the last time we spoke.

Those phone conversations haunt me, and I think of the contrast between us - me in my comfortable Sydney apartment, Bilal in the grim confines of Curtin detention centre.

Anonymous

And there are hundreds more like Bilal - men, women and children who took terrible risks to reach Australia, and now find themselves being held in detention centres like Curtin around the country.

Even more anonymous are those who remain in camps on the island of Nauru and in Papua New Guinea, where the Australian government is paying millions of dollars to finance what it calls it's Pacific Solution to the people smuggling problem.

Again, journalists have not been able to get anywhere near these camps.

I do not know if or when Bilal will call again - it is impossible for me to call him.

But I hope he does - it is good for journalists to remember that the stories we make our living from involve real people, living sometimes very difficult lives.