Content warning: this article contains mention of suicide.
Reemon Eisho spoke about the spectre and reality of suicide with casual ease, shrugging off the possibility he was in any way unique in that respect.
“All of us here are doing it tough. If I’d known I was coming for this, I swear I would’ve stayed in my country and just died there. Honestly, better for me than all this struggle,” he told Crikey.
The 34-year-old refugee from Iraq has spent close to five years detained in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre, where hundreds endure conditions worse than prisons, denied what’s theirs by international law.
Some people, he was quick to point out, had been there for more than a decade: “Twelve years just sitting here waiting for a visa, it’s no wonder they kill themselves,” he said, his voice trailing off.
On Sunday afternoon, reports that a 28-year-old Iraqi man at Villawood had died by suspected suicide rippled across Australian media. But little information beyond those particulars was released by the Department of Home Affairs, which merely expressed its condolences and confirmed an investigation into the man’s death had commenced.
Left unsaid, his 36-year-old cousin Muataz Awad told Crikey, was any reference to the mental anguish that led to his death, much less the reality that the situation in Villawood had been deteriorating for months.
Overcrowding occasioned by the influx of “501s” — non-citizens whose visas have been cancelled due to a criminal conviction — along with the violence and seeming ease with which some could obtain drugs, had materially worsened conditions.
“It’s stressful,” Awad said. “We feel like we’ve paid for our mistakes with our human rights, but they don’t listen to us, don’t care.”
Having spent the past seven years in Villawood himself, Awad said exhaustion and hopelessness were taking a toll. Suicide had almost become normalised, no longer reducible to tragic aberrations in the scheme of things.
“We were from the same village in Iraq, we were close,” he said of his cousin, pointing out he’d now lost five of his friends in the detention centre to suicide. “It’s just hard.”
Compounding this mental anguish, say human rights advocates, is the absence of any clarity around decisions to release detainees.
“Anecdotally, we know a number of people have been released since Labor was elected, but there’s no transparency about the circumstances of their release,” said Ian Rintoul, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition.
“Morrison’s ‘on-water matters’ code of secrecy still persists within Home Affairs and Border Force, and it’s mainly this that’s compounding [detainees’] uncertainty and bewilderment.”
According to the government’s most recent data, 480 people are currently detained in Villawood, with the average period of detention sitting at 774 days. By contrast, the average period of detention in the United Kingdom is 29 days. In America it is 43 days and in Canada it is 24 days.
In total, about 1300 refugees and asylum seekers across Australia are held in indefinite onshore detention — a reality rendered possible by a narrow High Court precedent set nearly two decades ago.
Rintoul said there was nothing standing in the way of the government taking a more humane approach, and one which removed uncertainty as the defining quality of being a refugee or asylum seeker in Australia.
“It’s a question of political will in the end, and whether [Labor] will continue to be paralysed by its own rhetoric on refugees,” he said.
Awad and Eisho, for their part, said that while they were grateful to see people they know released from detention, they too longed for freedom.
“We’re tired of not living,” Awad said. “We just want to be normal, live normal lives — nothing more.”
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636.
