An eight-year-old Iranian refugee whose plight ignited a bitter immigration row in Australia launched a civil suit this week against the government, claiming that he suffered severe mental health problems caused by his time in detention.
Shayan Badraie, who arrived with his parents and sister at Ashmore Reef, 830km west of Darwin, in March 2000, could receive a payout of up to A$1-million if he wins his case.
His mother, Zahra Badraie, told The Guardian that he was deeply affected when he witnessed riots being broken up by water-cannon in the Woomera detention centre.
He later saw one man threatening to throw himself from a tree, one threatening to cut his chest with a shard of glass, and another who appeared to be dead after slashing his wrists.
”He doesn’t like going out from his room, he doesn’t like talking with people, is not eating very well and he gets flashbacks of these things,” she said. ”In the night time he has dreams of these things, wetting his bed.”
A recent article in the Medical Journal of Australia found that his experience in detention had left him with acute, possibly chronic, post-traumatic stress disorder. ”He described bad dreams about officers taking his father to jail, and people cutting children with glass. The only drawing he produced in which the figures were not covered with bars was one of ‘the man who cut himself’,” the authors said.
More serious attacks are still triggered off when Shayan sees tall fences, men in uniform, news or other reminders of detention. He refuses to eat or talk and becomes convinced that immigration officials want to take him away.
The attacks often occur weekly and can take up to a week to subside.
One occurred several months ago when the family were shopping and Shayan saw a police car with wire riot-screens across the windows. ”He remembered when they took him to hospital in something like that car, and he was scared,” his mother said. ”He was depressed and for a few days he was very bad.”
Medical advice in May 2001 said that Shayan should be placed in a more normal environment and remain together with his family, but it was to be 15 months before the family was finally reunited outside of detention.
Their lawyer, Josh Bornstein, blamed Shayan’s situation on the intransigence of the Immigration Department.
”Incarcerating a five-year-old is an instance of child abuse of an institutional kind,” he said. ”There is a very strong theme running through the medical evidence that this boy will be scarred forever, attributable in particular to his age when he suffered the incarceration.”
The former immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, said his department had simply applied the law. ”The fact is that the Migration Act provides a basis under which people who enter Australia … without a visa will be dealt with,” he said.
Ruddock, who is now attorney general, announced plans on Monday to cut the rights of refugees to appeal against asylum decisions.
Shayan’s plight was brought to public attention when Dr Aamer Sultan, an Iraqi doctor detained in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre, smuggled a video camera into the camp for a TV documentary.
Broadcast in the week of the September 11 2001 attacks, and less than a month after Australia refused to accept a boat-load of 450 refugees during the Tampa crisis, it provoked a public outcry.
In an interview at the time about the family’s case, Ruddock insisted on referring to Shayan as ”it”.
Right-wing columnists castigated Shayan’s family, claiming that his father, Saeed, was a member of Iran’s revolutionary guards. In fact, the family had fled Iran after being persecuted for their adherence to al-Haqq, a Sufi creed regarded as heretical by the Iranian government.
Shayan was first put in hospital when he stopped eating and drinking in May 2001. Doctors decided to discharge him to Villawood after two months, feeling that the separation from his family was exacerbating his condition. But in the four subsequent weeks he was rushed to hospital six times, suffering from dehydration caused by refusing food and water.
After the broadcast of the documentary in September 2001, he was removed to the care of a foster family for four months — an experience his mother describes as being worse than detention.
She and his sister were finally allowed out of Villawood in January last year, and the family moved to a two-bedroom flat in western Sydney on temporary visas after his father was freed last August.
Jacqueline Everitt, a lawyer who has worked with the family since they arrived in Villawood, said that Ruddock was personally responsible for Shayan’s situation. ”All the way through this, Ruddock was able to exercise his power of discretion to follow medical advice and do what was best for this child, but he refused to do it,” she said.
Shayan’s case is the first lawsuit in Australia brought by a refugee seeking compensation for their experience in detention. But more than 200 children remain in detention, and activists say the case could be the tip of the iceberg.
”Imagine how many kids have been through this system in the past 10 years,” said Dr Aamer Sultan. — Â