tragic story of an asylum seeker in Australia

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Registered Users (C)
A tragic quest for refuge

* Mary-Anne Toy, Shenzhen
* June 21, 2008

BILL Zhang, a Chinese teacher who became a dissident after being swept up in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, killed himself last Saturday night. He threw himself off the sixth or seventh floor of a friend's housing estate in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong because he had lost the will to keep fighting to return to Australia.

Zhang (not his real name) lived in Sydney for eight years while he sought political asylum, driving a bottle-recycling truck in Botany Bay and applying repeatedly for a protection visa. He was refused six times — the refugee tribunal doubted his story — and ended up in Villawood detention centre before being deported to China last year.

Back in China, he spent his first 15 days in jail after Australian immigration officials handed him over to Chinese immigration officials who returned him to his home city. There he was immediately arrested, beaten and tortured for "shaming" China by accusing its Government of human rights abuses in articles he had written in the Chinese language press in Australia.

Zhang said the police in his home city (which we have not named to protect his relatives) had all the information about his family and associates, his protection visa claims in Australia and his activities there, which included a hunger strike at Villawood in support of Chinese human rights defenders and a previous suicide attempt.

He was handcuffed to the wall of a cell by one arm, held up high and in a kneeling position during the day, except for meals, and questioned every third day, or about four or five times, each time by a different group of three police.

He was terrified. The object of the interrogation was to punish him for speaking out against the Chinese Government, to "torment and frighten him", and to get him to admit he had done something wrong, he said. When he insisted he had done nothing wrong and committed no crimes, he was pushed, slapped, beaten and repeatedly asked why he stayed in Australia for 10 years and why he applied for a protection visa.

At one stage a police officer stomped on his hand, breaking the middle finger. "Whether you are guilty or not, this is just to make you remember. You are so bold in Australia protesting against the Chinese Government and saying the Government is corrupt. Execution is too good for you," was one of the comments he remembered interrogating police making to him.

The Age first met Zhang about three months after his arrival back in China. He had fled his home city after the police suddenly released him, warning him to behave or face further punishment. He fled because he was afraid and did not want his few relatives and friends harassed.

At that time, he was tearful and suicidal, and was being supported by refugee advocates in Australia, including Balmain for Refugees, part of the Balmain Uniting Church in Sydney, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and a few friends and contacts.

It was decided that it was too dangerous to publish details about Zhang's plight until he could find passage to a safe country to seek asylum. Later, his story was lost amid the flood of pre-election coverage. After Labor won government, Balmain for Refugees and others continued to press Senator Chris Evans, who replaced the Liberals' Kevin Andrews as immigration minister, to allow Zhang to return.

In China, Zhang lived as a fugitive. His Chinese identity card had long expired and he dared not apply to his home city for a new one. His injuries meant that at first he could not work, and later he had difficulty getting work because of his lack of papers and the fact he was a non-local. He lived on his savings from Australia.

Both Zhang's parents died while he was in Australia. He and his wife divorced after 1989 because of the dangers of associating with him. He had not seen his now adult son, who would be 21, since he was a baby, although he kept tabs on his progress through friends and family. He had lost touch with his younger sister since 1989.

"Losing my family was a tragedy I cannot describe in words," he said last year. "But one's faith can never be exchanged for material things."

He said he could have had an "easy life in Tianjin" if he compromised with the police and renounced what he believed in. "But I am not such a person who just wants to earn a living. I have ideals," he said. "Life without freedom of speech is meaningless, and if I was just seeking food and money, I would not have done anything during the June 4 incident."

He had heard from friends that Australia was a "country of freedom and liberty that respected human dignity, and he felt if he went there he would have a good future".

Ms Wang (not her real name) met Zhang four years ago via an internet dating service in Australia. She was with him on the day he died.

They had begun corresponding and when Zhang was deported back to China, they finally met and became close friends, though his life as a fugitive made things difficult.

He was living in a small village out in the country but would come to visit her in the city when he could afford to. Last Saturday they had lunch together and he seemed "normal", Wang said.

"I had noticed from our previous conversation, though, that he was depressed because there had been no progress with his application to return to Australia. He felt very disappointed," she said.

About 2pm he said he was going for a walk, and she went off to do some chores. She returned home about 5pm, and when she could not raise him on his mobile, she went outside to see if he was in the grounds. She came across a crowd of people surrounding something. It was Zhang's body. Police later told her he had jumped from the sixth or seventh floor of another building in the estate.

Wang used her guanxi (connections) to obtain a death certificate in a false name, because she thought it could be dangerous to herself and anyone who knew him if she used his real name. She told the police that Zhang had recently returned from overseas.

Wang has delayed cremating her friend because refugee advocates in Australia were trying to get the Australian Government to send someone from the Guangzhou consulate to identify the body and confirm that it was Zhang. A first assistant secretary of immigration told Frances Milne of Balmain for Refugees on Wednesday that someone would go to the regional city where his body was to identify him and help with any formalities on Thursday. They did not show up. The consulate was due to send someone yesterday, but The Age returned to the town to identify the body so that there would be no issue about who it was. Mr Zhang's body was due to be cremated yesterday.

Senator Evans responded: "I am saddened to hear reports of Mr Zhang's death in China. I have asked the department to make inquiries into the circumstances."

Zhang was removed from Australia last year after an exhaustive process, including six appeals to the minister, which found him not to be a refugee, Senator Evans said.

Frances Milne wonders whether she should have told Zhang a week ago that she had given up hope that the Australian Government would save him and that he needed to try to make some other arrangements.

With his savings exhausted and in poor health — he needed a stomach operation that would cost up to 10,000 yuan (about $A1530) as well as mental health problems — Zhang didn't have many options.

He had repeatedly asked her, if they should fail to get him back to Australia and he was picked up and killed by the Chinese police or he killed himself, to use his death to publicise flaws with the refugee system so that others might not suffer needlessly.

The whereabouts or condition of two other Chinese nationals deported at the same time as Zhang remains unknown.

From Tiananmen Square to Sydney

IN 1988 and 1989 Chinese society was grappling with the onslaught of Western and other foreign influences — ideas, fashions, trends — after Deng Xiaoping had 10 years earlier declared that China and the Communist Party had to embrace market reforms.

Bill Zhang, a driving instructor for a technical institute in a big east coast city, became involved with a group of outspoken, free-thinking students. Like millions of other Chinese, freed from the strictures of communism by Deng's exhortations to get the economy moving, Zhang was moonlighting from his state-ordained job, driving an unofficial taxi.

He ended up driving the students from his home city to join their colleagues in Beijing in Tiananmen Square because he felt that society in 1989 was "inhumane". "We lacked freedom of speech, there was corruption everywhere, and a big gap between the rich and the poor. So I felt I must do something," Zhang said.

After the student protests in and around Tiananmen Square were crushed, Zhang was one of thousands detained. He was relatively lucky. He was beaten up in detention and after his release he was sacked from his technical college job. He became a full-time taxi driver. A few years later, in 1994, in response to unfair taxes and corruption, he helped organised a citywide taxi strike that he says involved thousands of cars.

As a strike leader he was jailed for six months and repeatedly bashed. Undeterred, after his release he joined a small underground group, the "(Name of city withheld) Democratic Workers Association" and organised a sit-in in front of the local Communist Party headquarters.

Warned by friends that the authorities had had enough, in late 1996 he left China, a relatively easy thing to do then if you had money. He paid 80,000 yuan to bribe officials and get a passport and tourist visa for Australia. He arrived in Australia in January 1997 and applied for a protection visa two months later.

This was refused and the refusal was confirmed on appeal. The Refugee Review Tribunal found him "not a credible witness". "He was evasive in answering a number of questions and he appeared to exaggerate his claims, particularly in relation to his own importance in events such as the taxi strike," the tribunal found on August 5, 1998 in affirming the decision not to grant Zhang a protection visa.

Zhang spent the next eight years in Sydney working near Sydney airport, convinced that it was only a matter of time before the Australian government gave him permission to stay. Lawyers made various appeals on his behalf.

"I wasn't scared because I was confident that one day Australia would accept me, and because of my experiences in China and contribution to Australia I was never worried about being forced to leave," he told The Age last year.

He was apprehended while visiting the Star City casino in December 2005. His name was called over the PA system after police issued an alert for him. He responded because he thought he might have won a prize. He did not consider being on a lapsed tourist visa as something that would get him into trouble.

His naivety landed him in Villawood detention centre, where he participated in several human rights events that were covered in local English and Chinese-language media and that would later bring him to the attention of the Chinese authorities, including a 10-day hunger strike in support of human rights activists jailed in China.

His case was taken up by Balmain for Refugees, a Sydney church support group. Requests for ministerial intervention, first made to then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone in 2006 and then to her successor Kevin Andrews in early 2007, were both refused on the grounds that he had been unable to provide evidence he faced a real risk of persecution in China for his pro-democracy activities.
 
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