Claudia Tazreiter is a designer at the Sydney Morning Herald. She has just completed her PhD, a comparison of asylum seeker policy in Germany and Australia. She volunteered her services to the Edmund Rice Centre free of charge to research the fate of asylum seekers deported from Australia

In July this year I was part of an Australian research team commissioned to gather information on asylum seekers who had been deported from Australia. We knew that many of these people had voluntarily left Australia after their claims for protection had been turned down. Some were deported against their will. That’s all we knew.

We travelled to Syria, a country to which people had been deported from Australia for at least two years. We knew that several nationalities were represented in this group of deportees: Iraqis, Kuwaiti Bedoons, Palestinians and Iranians. We knew little else of the lives these people lived after they had been deported to Syria from one of Australia’s detention centres.

We filled in some of these gaps in the next ten days, heard some disturbing allegations about the conduct of Australian officials and learned of the everyday lives that deportees live.

All the people we met and interviewed had spent considerable time in immigration detention in Australia. They spoke of loneliness and isolation, of the desperation they felt at not knowing their fate, and of the futility they felt at passing their lives behind razor wire.

One man, a member of the Kuwaiti minority Bedoons, had spent two years in detention in Port Hedland, told me he had never met an Australian woman until he met me in Damascus. Bedoons are a persecuted minority, unable to gain citizenship, or the right to work, education, or even to be married. After asking Australia for protection for two years, this man was deported from Australia on a temporary travel document which allowed him to stay in Damascus for three months. He has been there for over a year, living a half-life in the shadows, “illegal”, just as he was for the two years he spent at Port Hedland. He has no right to return to Kuwait and is stateless. He feels in constant danger, venturing outside only to buy food and to keep in touch with other deportees who are his only support system.

This man, along with another deportee, an Iraqi man, invited us for a meal. Despite their evident poverty the generosity of these men was breathtaking. I felt a little uneasy at first, thinking they must surely bear a grudge against Australians. But this was not the case.

They told me they understood that not all Australians agreed with what the government was doing. The Iraqi man surprised me with his conciliatory tone. He was thinking of the future and had hopes of one day working in the media when real peace was established in Iraq. He imagined a dialogue between like-minded people from his world and from the parts of Australia he imagined were sympathetic to his people. After all, Australia had been part of the coalition that went to war to defeat a dictator he hated, who had caused him to flee his homeland and seek safety elsewhere.

He was a living example of the inter-cultural dialogue between East and West, between the Christian world and the Muslim world which might effect a real and lasting peace. In his situation I imagined I would feel angry at lost years and frustrated dreams. This man had not seen his children for some years as the Australian government deliberated over his protection claim, while they kept him in detention and finally decided he did not engage Australia’s protection obligations.

In the past few weeks the research team returned to Damascus to conduct more interviews. Some of the findings of this research have been released this week in Sydney and in Geneva, where the Executive Committee of the UNHCR is meeting.

No doubt over the next weeks and months the politics of the people smuggling and false passport allegations against DIMIA will play out in the corridors of power. But I think instead of the everyday lives of the people I met in Damascus. People with very ordinary aspirations, for a job, for education, to be able to live their lives without constantly glancing over a shoulder, without having to speak in hushed tones in public places, without having to wonder about the fate of their loved ones.

I left them on my Australian passport, the document that allows me unhindered passage.

Sister Carmel Leavey’s personal story of making a difference is at Desperate and stateless – plight of the deported.