Fears for sanity of lone refugee

SYDNEY - He is the last man standing, and possibly the loneliest refugee in the world. Mohammed Sagar has spent the past five years living in a detention camp on Nauru, a sun-baked rock in the middle of the South Pacific.

He was one of 1500 refugees from the Middle East and Afghanistan sent to the near-bankrupt republic under Australia's so-called "Pacific Solution".

They were intercepted by the Navy trying to reach Australia in rickety fishing boats in 2001 and 2002 and sent to Nauru, which lies just south of the Equator and consists of just eight square miles of land.

The vast majority of the asylum seekers have either been granted refugee status and settled in other countries or sent back to their homelands.

Last month there were two remaining: Sagar, 30, a Shiite Muslim from Najaf in Iraq, and another Iraqi refugee named Mohammad Faisal, 26. Faisal became suicidal and had to be evacuated to a hospital in Brisbane.

Alone and deeply depressed on Nauru, a former British colony devastated by decades of phosphate strip mining, there are fears that Sagar is also beginning to lose his mind.

He has set up a website to document his incarceration, Refugees Left on Nauru, which includes pictures of the deserted refugee camp he inhabits.

"Can you imagine how horrible this nightmare is," he writes. "Just imagine that you are alone in a place where you can't even find anybody to talk to. Detention means that you do not own your life any more, or in other words, you can't feel alive any more."

Sagar is stuck in legal limbo - although judged to be a genuine refugee by Australian immigration authorities, the country's intelligence agencies have ruled that he is "a risk to national security".

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has given no reason for its negative assessment and declined to answer questions on the case.

Not only will Australia not accept Sagar as a refugee, the ruling acts as a deterrent to any other nation throwing open its doors.

This week the opposition Labor Party called for the refugee camp on Nauru, which costs $A20 million ($22.5 million) a year to maintain, to be closed. Australia's third party, the Democrats, also condemned the treatment of the two refugees.

"This is literally like something out of a Franz Kafka novel," deputy leader Andrew Bartlett said last month.

"They can't go back to Iraq, they can't go to any other country, they can't appeal the security assessment, and they can't even find out what it's about. I think that would drive anybody crazy. "

Even Nauru, which relies on the Australian-run detention centre as its main source of income, is frustrated with the situation and wants to see Sagar released.

"We feel it's most unfair that his resettlement status continues to be left up in the air," said Nauru's Foreign Minister, David Adeang. "It does not reflect on us very well as a Government, as a country and as a people to be held responsible for somebody who, on our soil, turns out to be mistreated to the point he becomes suicidal."

Sagar lives in a small cabin outside the gates of the refugee camp. He is free to wander the island and has even worked part-time as a computer technician at a local college. Many Nauruans feel sorry for him.

"It's very surreal because he's walking among all these Australian officials and security guards and there's no feeling that he's a threat," said Susan Metcalfe, an Australian refugee advocate who will travel to Nauru next week for the fifth time.

"He even works in a Nauru Government office and they are quite happy to sit down and have a cup of tea with him."

Sagar was studying microbiology in Iraq but says he fled in 1997 because of persecution by Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime.

"He swears black and blue that he has no idea why he was deemed to be a security threat. He can't even answer the charges against him because they haven't been disclosed. He's coming to the end of his ability to cope with the situation," Metcalfe said.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has tried for two years to find a third country willing to accept Sagar, so far without success.