How Australia's immigration detention regime crushed Fazel Chegeni

For a man who was stateless, who lived his life belonging to nowhere, the foothills of Kabir Kuh, the great mountain of western Iran, are as close as anywhere Fazel Chegeni knew to home.

Now, he is, finally, home.

Flown from Australia last week, the body of the refugee who died in November on Christmas Island has been returned to his family in Ilam province in western Iran. Chegeni was buried on Saturday in the soil of the country where he grew up.

He was laid to rest just a valley or so away from Reza Barati, a man he never met, but another who died in Australian immigration detention. But whereas Barati died a sudden violent death, in the madness of one night of harrowing violence, Chegeni was killed slowly by the machinery of detention itself.

His death was the inexorable crushing of a man trapped in a bureaucracy that did not, and could not, care for him.
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Guardian Australia has obtained more than 700 pages of Chegeni’s immigration department file, and has spoken to more than a dozen people who knew him, inside the detention system and out. The documents detail Chegeni’s brutal torture, including rape, at the hands of the Iranian regime, the alarming deterioration on his mental health in detention, and the repeated requests for intervention from health professionals that were not acted upon.

The testimony of those who knew him say they saw a man’s will steadily eroded by an incarceration he couldn’t see a way out of, a detention that was potentially indefinite.

Chegeni’s wretched existence in Australia’s detention regime exposes the inefficiency and incompetency of a system that was legally obliged to look after him, but utterly failed to do so.

His fate was entirely predictable to those who knew him, and knew his history. Over four years, scores of people within Australia’s immigration department pleaded on Chegeni’s behalf for him to be helped.

His bulging departmental file shows that on at least a dozen occasions, immigration department officers suggested, requested, and finally pleaded, for senior management to intervene in the case of a man clearly headed for catastrophe.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/21/how-australias-immigration-detention-regime-crushed-fazel-chegeni