Amir “Everyone needs a clear pathway and plan; some form of certainty. When you are stateless, you’ve always been uncertain about your life. You are looking for certainty.” My name is Amir. I am Kurdish, now Kurdish-Australian. Before becoming an Australian citizen, I would say I was Kurdish-Iranian. I was born in the Kurdistan region of Iran in 1988. Growing up in Iran, I had a simple life, as my parents lived in a village and were first-generation settlers. Previously, my family were nomads. They travelled from south to north or west to east, following the fertile land for their sheep and animals to eat better food and to find a better place to stay. From winter to summer, they kept changing places. In the village I grew up in a community where families built their own homes with their hands using stone from the mountains. My dad built our home which still stands today. Many people have since rebuilt their homes using bricks, but my family’s home remains original. In the village, they work from morning to night; they live day by day. Now the older people like my parents and others in the village are struggling. There is no retirement plan—no superannuation. These are foreign concepts for them. When they are old, who will take care of them? The government won’t support them. When I was growing up, we all spoke Kurdish in my village. Persian came later from the capital. People were brought to the village to teach us Persian, and they destroyed lots of things about Kurdish culture and our way of life. Many of us can speak Persian, but we’re more articulate in Kurdish. When I was a child the elders in my family would tell me about our Kurdish culture and history. Since World War I and II, when they were creating the borders in the Middle East, they put lines through the middle of the Kurdish region. They created Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye. So you have Kurdish people from Iran, Kurdish people from Türkiye, Kurdish people from Syria, and Kurdish people from northern Iraq. Kurdish people also live in other places. I’m told that there are about 40 million Kurdish people in the world. There was a time when all these people were all the same, living in the same area. And over the last 80 to 100 years, the host country influenced the language. The Iranian-Kurdish is closer to Persian. Syrian-Kurdish is closer to Arabic. Iraqi-Kurdish is closer to Arabic. Türkish-Kurdish is closer to Türkish. Growing up, I heard stories about how in Türkiye, the government tried to go one step further to eliminate the Kurdish people through mass murder. The terms ‘Kurd’ and ‘Kurdish’ were prohibited in Türkiye; instead, Kurdish people were referred to as ‘Mountain Turks’. Many Kurdish people from Türkiye now live in Melbourne. They don’t speak Kurdish because they were punished if they spoke Kurdish in Türkiye. So they have forgotten. When the older generation died out, the younger generation only spoke Türkish. But they still identify as Kurdish-Türkish. 94 Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness | Understanding Statelessness in Australia In Iran, there are many Kurds, and they have rights. The Iranian government says they have the same rights as other citizens. Some Kurdish people in Iran do well. But many people face discrimination. We face discrimination because of the way we look, how we talk, and how we live our lives. Kurdish people are highly educated. We prefer pens over guns; we don’t like violence. Kurdish people started learning languages such as English, Arabic, Japanese and so on. And they started to go further with their education. We rarely get far, but when we get far, we want to make a positive difference. I was studying in a blind school, and I was playing sports. And life was just passing by. But this changed as I was heading to university. By the time I arrived at university, I knew too much. There was a demonstration—if you know more, you get more involved. We were told in 1979-80 by the constitution that any government department with over 100 employees had to employ 3% of people with disability. Unfortunately, this was not followed. People with disability were being pushed around, and many people, including people with disabilities, thought that this was acceptable. The basic rights of people with disabilities had been eroded, and people were just accepting it. If you talk, the only good place for you is the jail. If you protest, sometimes you disappear, and no one can find you. I was protesting about these basic rights that would enable me to have a job and a simple life. Other things also happened that I prefer to not talk about. I left Iran because of this discrimination and intimidation. Around 2012, I flew to Indonesia and travelled by boat to Christmas Island. I was jailed for two years by the Australian government. This didn’t make sense to me because Australia has a reputation for supporting human rights. I don’t know what they achieved by keeping a blind person in detention for two years other than wasting over a million dollars. They moved us from Christmas Island to Darwin and then to Melbourne. In the detention centres, there were some nasty people; they were calling themselves ‘case workers’. There were also a few officers in the detention centre we got friendly with, and they smuggled some coffee in for us. So, they made me a coffee drinker. I’d never drank coffee before coming to Australia. I managed to convince one of the kind officers to let me make a phone call. He gave me a couple of precious minutes to talk to a friend in Tehran. And that friend called my family to say, “He is safe.” It was a dark time of my life. One of the darkest. Because I realised there is no such thing as human rights. And those who say there are human rights are just living a fantasy life. And still today, where are we? Looking at Ukraine, looking at Palestine, looking at Israel, looking at the Middle East and Syria, look at Iran—all this. A few years ago, the earthquake happened in Türkiye. So many Kurdish people disappeared under the rubble and died. No one cares. The few people who do care don’t have much power. That’s the life of the Kurdish people.