I WAS in Woomera for 10 months and Port Hedland for four months. Woomera was like nothing I’d seen before.
It was a completely new experience. There was nothing to spend your time on – no access to books, written material, TV, radio. I tried counting the weeks. There was nothing else to do. The time seemed endless.
There were 74 of us on the boat – different people, different backgrounds, different nationalities. We joined the boat in Lambok in Indonesia. We came from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, from many parts of the troubled world.
When we arrived we were treated as though we were one, like a unit in an army, as if we were wearing a uniform. Our individuality, our life experiences, our knowledge were denied.
In my early days in detention I was sent some books – very ordinary books, books about philosophy. They wouldn’t give them to me. I was banned from reading them.
I couldn’t believe it. I still find it hard to believe. This was my most disturbing, torturing experience of detention.
If I force myself I suppose I can understand why people are sometimes handcuffed, why there has been tear gas, why there’s razor wire. But I can’t understand the policy that says you’re not allowed to know anything. The Iranian Information Ministry and the security forces were restrictive about information. But it wasn’t as harsh as what I experienced in Australia.
Some people in Woomera thought they were part of a human experiment. Because of Woomera’s history they thought that they were part of an experiment to assess the effects of radiation on humans. That fear was fairly widespread, even among some educated people.
You see, there was no information. So it was understandable that people could draw conclusions like this.
Being in detention is worse than being in limbo. There’s no hope. We didn’t even know which part of Australia we were in. We thought, ‘Does everywhere in Australia look like this?’
That lack of communication was similar in some ways to being in solitary confinement. It’s a solitary experience. And you’re imprisoned in that situation. You can’t get out of it.
Solitary confinement in Iran was a lot more acceptable to me than detention here. I could understand why extremists in Iran treated me the way they did. I still can’t understand why Australians do this.
My primary problem wasn’t detention. My detention told me that everything I’d thought about modern societies and Western civilisation was wrong.
We were treated like commodities. It was as if we had no souls. We had been imprisoned and tortured – but there was nowhere to express our feelings.
I had many conversations with guards and managers. Like, ‘Okay, you were tortured. So what?’ They seemed to treat torture as something normal. It was horrifying.
We were counted every night. It was all done by numbers. On your detention card you had a photograph, a number and a bar code – no name. It was annihilating our personalities.
I would never show weakness to the Iranian guards. I would cry in solitary confinement, but not in front of them. They would knock on the door of my cell and come in and blindfold me to take me somewhere else. I’d do everything possible not to let them see my fear.
I didn’t bow to them, in spite of the fear of atrocities. But the psychological pressures in detention were very great. The Iranians could not break me. But I was defeated by the policies and the treatment in Australia. I didn’t survive them.
In Iran I was fighting for democracy. In a way, for me, democracy was just a theory from books. Then I saw democracy in Australia. A democratic country imposed this system on us. I wondered: If we had achieved democracy in our country, would we be doing this to people? Would we have had the same attitude to refugees?
You know, we’ve had millions of refugees in Iran – 2 million Iraqis, 3 million Afghanis. In 1991, the first Gulf War, in about 24 hours, 300,000 refugees crossed the borders from Iraq.
My brothers, my friends and I collected blankets, knocked on doors and appealed for bread, packed up cars and went to them. We didn’t stop to think why we were doing this. It was just an instinctive human reaction.
We had very little means. But we were able to deal with those 300,000 refugees far more smoothly than you deal with refugees in Australia. We were much more open to people fleeing from disaster.
Being on a temporary detention visa is an extension of detention. It’s like putting detention inside you. When you’re a TPV you don’t know if you’re free or not. You don’t know if you’re part of the community or not. I’m in a much better situation that many others. I can communicate with people. I can understand them. But then I think of people who don’t speak English – and you can be a well educated person and still not speak English.
I find it hard to remember what normal life is like, what it’s like to be a citizen of a country. I’ve lost any concept of permanency in my life. You’re told: ‘You’ll be here for three years – and then see what happens.’
