Kurds from Iran and Iraq head new wave of boatpeople

SHAHAB Melickshahi is the face of the new wave of boatpeople coming to Australia. Mr Melickshahi, 43, heads one of three family groups who sailed a tiny fishing boat from the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok last month into Australian waters. They almost died after the engine failed and the food and water ran out. There were 40 refugees on the tiny craft -- nine of them children -- when it was seized by Indonesian police last month after hobbling back to the far-eastern island of Sumbawa. They included his wife, Busra Hassan, and their four children, all of whom are now locked up in a detention centre reachable only by potholed and muddy roads far outside the provincial capital of Makassar, on Sulawesi island. The effort cost him more than $US22,200 ($34,360) -- at least $US3700 a person -- paid to people smugglers in Malaysia and Indonesia. Many of the asylum-seekers are, like Mr Melickshahi, stateless ethnic Kurds born in Iraq and Iran. Several lived in Australia for a number of years before returning to their homeland to visit family after the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled; some, including Mr Melickshahi, had gained temporary Australian residency permits. To prove his credentials, Mr Melickshahi produces a NSW driver's licence that expired in 2003 and a photocopy of an old Australian travel document. Others from the disparate group who spent 10 tense days at sea last month included Iraqis from the southern city of Basra. They, too, paid thousands of dollars each to a mysterious African in Bogor, the major city south of Jakarta from where people-smuggling operations ran hot until the Howard government's Pacific Solution curtailed their activities. One of the Iraqis, Mohammad Amin Hussein, left his wife and two children in a hotel in Bogor before joining the doomed fishing boat from Lombok, hoping he could have them follow him once he reached Australian shores. Among the group of angry detainees at Gowa, there are many who had already been waiting for several years in Jakarta, before making their decisions to take the people-smuggling route across international waters to Australia. Frustrated with the inaction of Indonesian and UN officials, they decided in recent months to take matters into their own hands. "We had to go and meet the man (in Bogor). He had various names; he never used his real name," one said. "He's Mohammad Arab, or Mohammad Tunisi, or Abu Abbas. He says he's African, or Tunisian. You never know who he is. It's too dangerous to know. You go and meet him for a drink in a bar, you talk about this and that, then you talk about how much he will get paid." More money was given to contacts on arrival in Lombok, from where the Kurds and Iraqis set off. Now they grow increasingly weary of their fate. They complain about the poor food and the poor treatment at the hands of Indonesian officials with whom they can barely communicate. "When we're sick, there's not even a doctor," Mr Melickshahi said. "It's not for us, but for the children. We have a lot to give Australia, and every single one of us here has relatives living in Australia. We deserve better than this."