PESHAWAR, June 2: A resident of Kurram Agency, who has recently been deported from Australia, has drawn the attention of the human rights organizations towards the plight of illegal immigrants languishing in Australia’s notorious Woomera camp.

For Akhter Gul, a resident of Kurram Agency, who remained at the Woomera detention centre for about 10 months, his stay was no less than a nightmare. A father of four, Akhter was among the 40 illegal immigrants — probably the only Pakistani — who managed to slip from the detention centre in March this year when human rights activists protesting against the arrests, clashed with the security guards.

Once out of the detention centre, Gul was again taken hold of and was sent to a camp in Perth. A local court issued orders for his release after he paid the surety amount of 500 Australian dollars and was deported to Karachi.

The 36-year old Gul, who ran a shop in the Kurram Agency before his departure for Australia, had arrived at a deal with a group of human smugglers in Karachi, who agreed to smuggle him to the land of Kangaroos via Indonesia for only Rs300,000.

Sailing on a rickety boat for 10 days in the Indian Ocean along with 200 other people — all illegal immigrants from the developing and under-developed countries — Gul surrendered to the Australian coastguards when the boat reached the Australian waters.

The security personnel took the immigrants to Woomera, Australia’s largest detention centre for illegal immigrants, situated in a remote desert, about 350km from Adelaide. The camp was established in 1999 to cope with the growing number of asylum seekers, coming from the Third World countries.

Fluent in Pushto and Dari, Akhter Gul destroyed his green passport in Jakarta and posed to be an Afghan to get refugee status in Australia. But he got exhausted due to the harsh environment inside the Woomera camp and told investigators about his Pakistani nationality.

“Hunger strikes, bodies cut with blades and drinking shampoo were a common sight in the camp. Parents stitched their children’s lips to register their protest. The harsh weather further added to their miseries,” Akhter Gul said, while narrating his ordeal. The camp inmates were not even allowed to interact with the human rights activists and United Nations workers, because the Australian government declared the camp a prohibited site.

“Sher Khan, an Afghan refugee, jumped from a tall tree in the camp when he was not allowed to meet a group of human rights workers,” he said, adding that the Afghan citizen received serious injuries in the incident and was sent to the hospital in a precarious condition.

Another immigrant, an Iraqi Kurd, sustained serious injuries when he got entangled in barbed wires while attempting to escape from the centre when the human rights workers clashed with the camp’s security forces on March 29 to release over 600 detainees, he said.

He said that the world human rights bodies and the UN agencies should focus on the inhuman policy of the Australian government and the miserable conditions of people, stranded in various islands of Indonesia.