The hotel was a decaying, dilapidated six-storey building in a relatively undeveloped area on a bay north of Jakarta. It took us forty-five minutes to get there in a taxi from the airport and it was dark and steamy by the time we arrived at around eight o’clock. Even though the hotel was on a main road, I’d been told that access was through a door down a short alley.
The reception area was tidy enough, but it all went rapidly downhill from there. The rooms had a decidedly weary air. The furniture was intact, but was old and scratched. The whole place had seen better days—but, by then, it was little more than a final dormitory for escapees from the Middle East who were waiting for the call of people-smugglers.
I’d estimate more than a thousand people were packed into that old hotel. The majority of them were middle-aged men of Middle Eastern appearance—all talking loudly and smoking—and Moslem women wearing traditional clothes. In general, the men looked like thugs—they had long beards, were wearing dirty clothes, with thongs on their cracked feet. Most of the women wore the standard hijab over their hair, but others were in the full burqa with even their eyes hidden from view. But you didn’t see them often. It seemed most of the women were largely confined to their rooms.
There was one group of women unaccompanied by any men—and they didn’t seem to fit in at all. The leader was a woman who appeared to be in her early forties. With her were three younger females, aged from early teens to early twenties, and a boy. The younger people were all dressed in Western clothes and clearly came from a much wealthier background than most of our fellow travellers.
This group turned out to be pivotal to my life. The oldest of the young women was wearing carefully selected fashionable clothes and Western-style makeup. She was twenty-one, and her name was Doha. Doha was travelling with her sisters, nineteen-year-old Noor and thirteen-year-old Mary Anne, plus their brother Ali, who was ten, and their aunt Hoda. The children’s mother, Hoda’s sister, had died from cancer at the age of just thirty-nine. Their father was still in Iraq.
When I think about the people in that hotel, with the benefit of hindsight, I now believe that a high proportion of them were from Iran. Certainly some, it later emerged, were Iranians posing as Iraqis because they thought it would boost their chances of gaining permanent residence in Australia. Most of the people I encountered at the hotel spoke Arabic. I got the impression they were from the south-west of Iran, where the locals are of Arabic origin. I suspect many of them were from remote rural areas and had very little experience of life outside their own villages. That would explain their intolerance to other ways to life—their lifestyle was the only way they knew and, through the traditions of hundreds of years, they followed an extreme religious interpretation of the world simply because they weren’t aware of alternative viewpoints.
Ali, Hussein and myself sat in the reception area while we were waiting to be allocated our rooms. There were four or five men sitting beside us. They all looked in their early thirties. Two introduced themselves as Raad and Raheem. They were very well built with massive, rough hands, like mechanics or labourers.
Raad and Raheem started talking about Doha and her family, as they walked through the reception area.
Raad was clearly disturbed by their appearance: ‘How can they walk around uncovered like that? I’d like to put my hands in some grease and cover their hair and faces in it,’ he thundered.
Raheem responded: ‘Don’t worry, they’re hookers.’
They carried on saying dreadful things about Doha and her family, speculating whether they were Iraqis or from the Emirates. Increasingly, I was thinking, ‘What on earth have I got myself into?’
Then Raad and Raheem began talking with us. They explained that the refugees mostly spent their days sitting in the reception area. In the evening, they would go to nightclubs or would get the receptionist to arrange for some prostitutes to come to see them. They told us some of the refugees had been at the hotel for two months, others four months. All waiting to get on a boat.
My heart sank—for the first time, the magnitude of what I’d become embroiled in hit home and it occurred to me that, in my ignorance, I’d made a big mistake.
They asked us which people-smuggler we were with. I was so naive I didn’t even realise there was more than one people-smuggler.
‘Is it Abu Ali or is it Abu Mustapha?’
I replied that we were with Omeed, even though we hadn’t met him at that stage.
When I mentioned the number of people in the hotel, Raad and Raheem said it had been even more crowded until the previous day when Abu Ali had taken about 300 people on a big boat. It turned out the boat in question was the largest vessel to arrive in Australia at that stage and, because of the huge number of refugees involved, had triggered the Australian government’s introduction of Temporary Protection Visas.
The way Raad and Raheem looked and spoke was extremely depressing. I realised they had been waiting in the middle of nowhere for months. I asked if they had the visas they needed to stay in Jakarta. Raheem responded, ‘No one asks any questions.’
The conversation soon turned to what sort of work I did. Which, because of my experience in escaping from Iraq to Jordan, was a very touchy subject. I was wary of telling anyone I was a doctor because I didn’t know what the reaction would be. But there was no need for me to be so secretive—Hussein told them anyway!
He added sarcastically: ‘This one’s not like us. He’s not working class. He comes from the Nestlé generation.’ In Iraq, the ‘Nestlé generation’ referred to people from the higher classes—they were supposed to be like chocolate, and would melt in the heat as soon as they saw hard times.
Once we’d been registered at reception, we were given the keys to two rooms. For some reason, Ali threw a tantrum and said he didn’t want to share a room with Hussein. So I shared with Hussein instead. Our room was on the top floor of the hotel and, although I didn’t learn this until much later, was next door to Doha and her family.
Then we just hung around, marking time, and waited for Omeed the people-smuggler to come and see us—if, indeed, he ever did. Raad and Raheem had told us not to hold our breath. They said there was no way he’d come and see us that night.
But they were wrong. Obviously, someone had told Omeed there was a doctor at the hotel.
A couple of hours after settling into our room, there was a knock on the door. When we answered, three men were standing there. One was in his thirties, the others in their twenties. The older man introduced himself as Omeed, the younger man was his brother Najad. The identity of the third man remained a mystery.
Omeed was neatly presented with a trimmed beard and moustache. He was shorter than me and of slim build. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers. The outfit is common and traditional attire for Shi’ite men to wear during Ashore, which literally means the tenth day and coincides with mourning for Hussein bin Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson who was killed at the battle of Karbala in the year 680. The others were in grey shirts and black trousers.
Omeed broke the silence. ‘Can I come in?’
I beckoned him into the room and he was followed by Najad and the third man. They sat down and straightaway Omeed declared, ‘I think I am a very lucky man. I prayed to God and God answered my prayers.’
Of course, we didn’t understand what he was talking about and I asked him to explain.
‘I prayed to God to provide me with two people,’ he said. ‘A doctor and an imam or a mullah. Before I go any further, are you a medical doctor?’
I confirmed I was.
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘And a mullah is flying in from Tehran tomorrow.’
In my mind I was thinking, ‘What on earth is this guy talking about?’
Omeed, Najad and their companion were completely ignoring Hussein. Yet Omeed was very talkative towards me.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said. ‘Are you Sunni or Shi’ite?’
It was a rather strange question under the circumstances and I told him so. Then I added more diplomatically: ‘However, if you insist on knowing, my family is Sunni, but I don’t regard myself as either.’
He responded with a backhanded compliment. ‘Eating Sunni’s flesh is halal!’
This comment can have two meanings. Obviously, one is that killing Sunnis and eating their flesh is allowed. The other is that eating what Sunnis eat as their food is okay. Initially, I didn’t understand what he meant and I thought it was offensive.
But he quickly explained himself.
‘I’m Khurdish from Suleimaniya,’ he said. Suleimaniya is one of the Khurdish provinces that is nominally Sunni but noted for being secular. ‘My family is Sunni, but then I saw the light and converted to the Shi’ite faith.’
Of course, because Saddam was Sunni, outside the country a lot of Iraqis pretended to be Shi’ite. Although I may be maligning him, I suspected that Omeed also became a Shi’ite to help forge closer links with the business community.
I interrupted Omeed’s chattiness and politely but firmly asked, ‘So what have you got for us?’
‘We have a boat leaving in three days for Australia. Would you be interested?’ he asked.
‘But I thought the waiting period was about three months,’ I said.
He snapped back, ‘It’s a lot longer than that. There are hundreds of people wanting to leave.’
‘So why is it possible for me to leave in three days?’
‘You can leave in three days if you agree to come on my boat because I need a doctor on board,’ he said flatly.
‘Well, of course, we would be interested,’ I responded with deliberate emphasis.
Omeed quickly cut in. ‘No, you are coming alone. The others have to wait.’
The way he said it made me feel awkward. He was quite aggressive. But I was insistent. ‘No, I came with these guys and I can’t leave without them.’
Initially, Omeed refused to budge, saying they couldn’t come on this boat because other people had been waiting for months. Suddenly Najad and the other man also became involved in the conversation, so all three were arguing with me. Meanwhile, poor Hussein could do nothing but stand there, listening in silence as his and Ali’s fate was being decided.
I stood my ground and eventually Omeed changed his mind. ‘Okay, it’s a deal. All three of you can get in the boat.’
Once the plan had been agreed, Omeed asked me what I needed for the trip.
‘How big is the boat and how many people will be on it?’ I asked.
‘It’s a decent boat,’ Omeed said. ‘I’ve just fitted it with a new six-cylinder engine. There’ll be about fifty people on board. I’ll provide some food, but you’ll need to let me know what medical supplies you want.’
Then came the devil in the detail. ‘There are three women in the late stages of pregnancy and one of them is in her last month,’ he added.
I became immediately concerned about what else he hadn’t told me, but explained what I would need, which included drugs and tablets to prevent seasickness and vomiting—as much as he could get me, I said—and 100 litres of saline fluid, as well as canulas, needles and syringes. Then I asked, ‘How are you going to get them?’ Most of these supplies were only available at hospitals.
But Omeed didn’t seem disturbed and, to my surprise, he responded that it wasn’t a problem. ‘Don’t worry. I can get them. I have connections.’
‘Can I see the boat?’ I asked next.
‘I’ll take you to see it tomorrow,’ Omeed assured me. ‘Now tell the other guys to get their money ready.’
Omeed left the room with Najad and their companion, saying, ‘Enjoy Jakarta!’ As events turned out, I didn’t see Najad again until he made the journey on the boat with us—though his identity as the people-smuggler’s brother was kept secret then. After our voyage, I didn’t keep in touch with Najad but I heard he was accepted into Australia then died in a car crash some years later.
Omeed charged me US$2000 for the boat trip. I don’t know how much he charged Ali and Hussein. The usual fee was between US$5000 and $10,000. Which meant, if they really were taking as few as fifty asylum seekers, the people-smugglers were making between US$250,000 and $500,000 for every boat. More people would, of course, mean even higher profits.
But it wasn’t Omeed who was making the big money; he would have been on wages. It was the overall boss who created an absolute fortune for himself out of people-smuggling. I never formally met the big boss, an Indonesian, but I saw him when he was taking the money from the refugees as we got on board the boat.
All the same, Omeed was still making a good income out of other people’s misery. I learned later that he had befriended Doha’s aunt Hoda and, over the month they were at the hotel, came to trust her. To such an extent that he went to their room, handed over a cloth bag and asked if Hoda would look after it for him for a few days. She thought it was curious, but agreed. At that point he said he felt as though they were honest people . . . and told her it contained $US500,000! He came back a week later to collect the package without blinking an eye.
Omeed was not a man of great sophistication. According to Doha this was adequately demonstrated by his choice of beverage. Omeed drank tea and coffee—mixed together!
To this day, I don’t know the name of the hotel or exactly where it was in Jakarta, but I do remember there was a nightclub called The Three Horses which was only a tuk-tuk ride away. Jakarta was full of prostitutes and The Three Horses was where the men at the hotel went to find them.
The majority of the men at the hotel kept themselves busy by going out and having a great time—alcohol and prostitutes were forbidden under Moslem religious traditions, but in that hotel in Jakarta, anything seemed to be fair game.
For those who couldn’t go wild on the town, house calls could be arranged. I heard a story that one of the men at the hotel was in his late eighties and was blind. He was with his two sons, who arranged for a prostitute to come and spend the night with the old man. Under Islamic beliefs, being with a prostitute isn’t acceptable, so she had to marry him for the time she was there.
It’s called Zawaj al Muta—marriage for fun. It’s accepted in the Shi’ite faith and allows a man and a woman to be married for a contractual period. All it needs is for someone—usually but not necessarily a religious person—to be there to witness that the two people have agreed to be married for a set length of time and for a certain amount of money.
Ali, Hussein and I were much more moderate in our behaviour. Having started to reconcile themselves to the fact that they could be at the hotel for months, Ali and Hussein were thrilled by the prospect that we would soon be leaving. Safe in the knowledge that we would be gone in the next few days, we decided we would just go for a quiet walk through the streets near the hotel and look for something simple to eat.
That turned out to be a lot more difficult and dangerous than we thought. As we walked along, we spent the entire time dodging the stampede of motorcycles in the street. Then, even though there were hundreds of street stalls, I couldn’t find anything appealing to eat. It was a very rundown area and most of the stalls sold only rice with a few unappetising additions—everything looked particularly questionable to me. Eventually, Ali and Hussein took a chance and ate something, but not very much. Even they were dubious about the food on offer.
In the morning, Omeed turned up with the medical supplies. To my great relief and astonishment, he’d managed to get everything I had ordered. Clearly, his connections were every bit as good as he’d suggested the previous day.
Then Ali, Hussein and I went to a supermarket in the shopping centre nearest to the hotel and bought boxes of Coke and tinned tuna and baguettes as supplies for the boat journey. It was all going smoothly and looked promising as Omeed took me to inspect the boat that afternoon.
From start to finish, the drive to the boat was very scary. Omeed was at the wheel of his Jeep and beside him was the unidentified man who had come with him and Najad to my room. I sat in the back with the mullah, who had arrived the previous night. It dawned on me that my whole future was in the hands of people I didn’t know and, frankly, had no reason to trust. They were nothing more than shady, scheming criminals. All I could do was hope we wouldn’t be caught; I had no more control than that. But if I wanted to get to Australia, I had no choice but to put my life in their greedy hands.
The tension was matched by the discomfort. There was no roof on the Jeep, the tropical heat was clingingly humid, the atmosphere was dusty. It was thoroughly unpleasant.
Throughout the drive, Omeed avoided main roads as much as possible and kept checking the rear-view mirror to make sure no one was following us. Whenever we were forced to travel on a main road, Omeed was noticeably anxious. I suspected that he was known to the police and could be chased by them if he was spotted.
As though that wasn’t sufficiently unnerving, he also kept reassuring me that he was very well connected—clearly implying that things could go wrong at any instant, but that he may be able to talk his way out of a difficult situation.
At the end of the drive, we arrived in the Penjaringan waterfront in the north of Jakarta and parked the vehicle in a slum area around the dock. Omeed quickly located the wooden boat that was to take us to Australia, one of dozens of almost identical and nondescript Indonesian fishing boats moored at the jetty. It was about 15 metres long, its old flaking paint light blue-green and white in colour, with a single deck and a covered area that stretched for the aft third. The food would be stored on a shelf in the covered area, which would be reserved for the women and children. Near the back of that covered section was a toilet—a 60-centimetre-square hole in the deck with a bucket, with two flimsy walls and a door for privacy.
Below deck was the engine room and a storage area for fish when the boat was being used for its original purpose. On our voyage, this would be used to house some of the catch of the day—refugees.
The boat was obviously tiny and ill-equipped for the journey ahead and I instantly realised that all of us who stepped onto it would be taking our lives in our hands. And from my point of view as the only medical professional, the fewer people who were on board, the more manageable the journey would be. I again asked Omeed how many passengers we’d be taking.
‘Oh, about fifty people,’ he repeated, trying to sound reassuring.
Omeed clearly thought this was an entirely reasonable number. I was horrified! I pointed out that it would be heavily overcrowded with that many people on board. But Omeed was confident the boat would comfortably cope. Only later did I find out why he was confident it would handle fifty people so easily.
We walked around the outside of the boat and Omeed asked the mullah to bless the vessel. During the ceremony, I reflected that we would need all the blessings we could muster.
When we got back to the hotel, Omeed informed me the boat would be sailing that night to the south of Java, to a secret location where the passengers would be boarding the following day. We were to leave the hotel on a bus between six and seven in the morning. He said I should take one small bag of belongings, plus my passport, but definitely no other documents. I paid him the money for my place on the boat, then after Omeed left my room to collect money from the other passengers, I spent the night restlessly preparing myself—mentally as well as organisationally—for the journey of a lifetime.
I woke early and clearly remember thinking that I had better eat breakfast because I didn’t know when the next meal would arrive. Two fried eggs and toast, with a cup of tea—and it was all cold! Which seriously worried me because the risk of food poisoning was very real. And that was the last thing I needed in the middle of the Indian Ocean on a cramped and rotting old boat.
Outside the hotel was an equally unreliable-looking, ageing, dark blue and yellow single-deck bus. Omeed directed the passengers, about fifty of us, onto the bus and once everyone was seated on board, he left and we set off.
There was a strange atmosphere on the bus as we headed south from the hotel—a natural excitement among some of the passengers, as their dream of a new life in Australia was becoming a reality, and at the same time, a deep anxiety about the voyage we were about to undertake. And, indeed, how, where and when that voyage might end. I don’t know about the others, because few of them would ever have been in a boat before, but I was well aware of the dangers and the fact that our lives were in the lap of the gods. The tension was palpable. We were heading into the complete unknown.
Even though everyone had a seat to themselves, the bus was crowded. The drive south was tortuous. The bus journey from the hotel to the bay where we would meet the fishing boat took about three hours—but we were on the bus for the whole day. We reached our destination twice before we finally stopped there. I can only imagine that either the boat wasn’t ready or it wasn’t safe to stop on the first two occasions.
Third time lucky, we arrived and started to disembark.
By that stage, day had given way to evening and then night. It was pitch-black apart from the searchlight that the fishing boat in the bay had firmly trained on the bus.
Omeed was there in his Jeep when we arrived. He was accompanied by an Indonesian guy in a brand new Mercedes Benz, who I assumed was the leader of the people-smuggling operation. He certainly seemed to be far wealthier than anyone else associated with the network. Alongside the two organisers were two security guards—armed with automatic weapons. They were wearing civilian clothes, but there was no doubt they meant business and wouldn’t hesitate to open fire.
To my astonishment, before long we were joined by two more busloads of refugees from different locations. Another 100 or so people to be crammed onto the fishing boat which I believed would be overloaded with just fifty! Clearly, the medical supplies that I had intended for fifty would be completely inadequate for 150 or more people.
The depths of the ordeal we were about to face were becoming terrifyingly obvious.
The people-smuggler’s henchmen started collecting money from the refugees who’d arrived in the last two buses. If the refugees didn’t have enough money, they were stripped of jewellery, rings, watches. Anything of value that could be quickly sold. For anyone who didn’t have enough cash or belongings with them, the people-smuggler’s heavies started negotiating and finding out whether they had money coming to them. A deal would be haggled for the people-smuggler to be paid later. I’m not aware that anyone was prevented from getting on the boat—but probably that was because no one would have been allowed on the buses if they couldn’t provide evidence of their ability to pay.
Once we were off the bus, we had a ten-minute walk through the scrub to the sandy bay. It was remote and isolated and there were few signs of habitation apart from two or three fishermen’s huts. The night was still and quiet around us.
There was no jetty in the bay, so the boat was moored in shallow water. Everyone had to be shuttled from the beach to the boat in a small tinnie, a handful at a time. Once the tinnie reached the fishing boat, we had to climb up a small ladder on to the deck. As it turned out Doha was the first person on the fishing boat—completely inappropriately dressed in her stylish top, pencil skirt and soaring platform shoes!
Doha and her family had been so horrified by the conditions in the hotel that they’d decided to take matters into their own hands for the boat journey. They assembled the creature comforts they thought they would need—a portable gas cooker, bottles of water, teabags, hand wipes, toothbrushes and toothpaste, face towels and even a refresher spray for their faces. I don’t know what sort of voyage she thought she was embarking on, but I think it had closer connections to a luxury liner than the shabby fishing boat that confronted us.
Women and children were ferried to the fishing boat first and they huddled under the covered area at the back. Almost all the women were dressed in black hijab, with just their faces and palms exposed, in the traditions of rural Iraq and Iran. The mullah’s wife was the only one in full burqa. Doha and her sisters were the only females in Western clothes—throughout the journey, the traditional Moslem women kept warning the three young women to stay away from their men, adding to the tension.
After that the men boarded and it was every man for himself. Mostly wearing shirts and jeans but with some of the older among them in traditional long, black robes, they jostled for the best spot as more and more people arrived.
The operation took about four hours, but before we had all boarded the fishing boat, the drama started.
One of the Iranian refugees had been a member of the Badr Brigade, defeated Iraqi soldiers who changed their allegiance and fought as a vicious militia for Iran in the war of the 1980s. They were savages, notorious for torturing Iraqi prisoners-of-war. My cousin’s husband has no teeth or fingernails after being tortured by the Badr Brigade. He tells the story of three times being buried up to his neck in sand while they pulled out his teeth. He feared he would be decapitated a number of times—but they always stopped just short of killing him.
While we were waiting to board the fishing boat, the ex-Badr Brigade soldier had a fit. He was suffering from a high fever, so I gave him an aspirin injection—a treatment that isn’t available these days but, at the time, it was all I had. Happily, he recovered. But, as can happen, it all came back to haunt me later. The same man I’d helped save went on to cause me no end of problems in the coming months.
Doha’s sister Mary Anne, who was just thirteen, was at the centre of the other major incident. She was dressed like the innocent kid she was—in a casual one-piece top-and-shorts outfit with the cartoon character Tweetie on the front, showing her legs and with no head covering. The mullah was outraged and said if she got on board dressed like that, the boat would sink. Which, of course, sparked a good deal of panic among a group of people who were already close to their wit’s end with worry about what the future held for them. Doha’s aunt and I had to intervene and pressed the mullah by asking him how he could possibly consider splitting up a family. Eventually he agreed that Mary Anne could come on board.
With such small numbers being taken in the tinnie each time, it was a protracted process; it wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that everyone was on board. At that point, the appalling conditions became all too obvious. We had about 160 people on a boat that would struggle to carry fifty—and we had to share the limited accommodation with old fishing nets.
The women and children under the shelter at the back were sitting cross-legged, crammed in shoulder to shoulder. Across the rest of the boat, there was literally no space for anyone to sit down and stretch out. At the beginning, everyone was standing up on the open deck and in the hold below. It was jam-packed with people as tight as sardines in a can.
Everyone seemed to be shouting, trying to find their travelling companions and wanting to know where the doctor was. The atmosphere was frantically busy and charged with anxiety.
I was one of a few people who decided the best place, with the most space, was on top of the canopy over the rear part of the deck. Because many people were scared to go up there, we had a little more room to ourselves.
Beyond the crush of the overcrowding, my main concern was how I would be able to deal with any medical emergencies on board. I had enough medical supplies for fifty people but I was facing the prospect of dealing with three times that number. And on top of that, of course, there were the three women in the latter stages of pregnancy.
There and then, it dawned on me what sort of human and medical catastrophes I could be dealing with. It was a shocking realisation and I knew we were all in for a horror of a journey. You didn’t need to be a medical expert to figure out this was a recipe for disaster. We didn’t know what the future would hold—and, frankly, even if we had a future.
We had heard on the news when we were in Jakarta about a refugee boat that had left a few days before ours and had sunk. No survivors. So our tenuous grip on life was extremely high in our consciousness.
All we had was some basic food, scant medical supplies and scarce water; no life rafts, no emergency beacons if the boat succumbed to the ocean and no escape or evacuation plan. There were a few life jackets on board. Adequate for the standard small crew of fishermen perhaps, but nowhere near enough for a passenger list of 150-plus people. Although, in fairness, I guess a life jacket wasn’t going to be much use during a violent storm in the middle of the ocean anyway. In the event we had to abandon ship, it was almost certain death for everyone on board. Few, if any, could even tread water to keep themselves afloat, let alone swim.
And it wasn’t only the boat that was a concern. The crew amounted to a short and skinny Indonesian fisherman who was the captain, plus two young Indonesian kids, one of them probably fourteen, the other maybe twelve years old. To get us to Australia, they were equipped with an extremely rudimentary navigation system which wasn’t even as sophisticated as the average portable satellite navigation system many of us have in our cars these days.
It was almost dawn on 7 November 1999 when the captain finally started the engine and we gradually began to move. I felt a mixture of excitement and anticipation that, at last, we were on our way—coupled with sheer terror at the dangers, traumas and potential disasters we might face.