Fed: Ellis meets Baktiari boys in Woomera detention centre

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Fed: Ellis meets Baktiari boys in Woomera detention centre

CANBERRA, Aug 2 AAP - Controversial author and political speechwriter Bob Ellis gainedaccess to the Woomera Detention Centre this week by accompanying a group of lawyers.

He said he spoke to Alamdar, 13, and Montazar Baktiari, 12, who escaped from Woomeraand unsuccessfully sought asylum at the British Consulate-General in Melbourne last month.

"I got into Woomera and saw the Baktiari boys and tape recorded an hour-long conversationwith them and their mother pretty easily," Mr Ellis wrote in a feature in The CanberraTimes.

"What the Baktiari boys said in their wonderful gusty (gusty) Biblical English waspossibly enough to secure their release ... and can't be printed here."

Montazar told him: "If you take a fly and put him in a bottle and close the lid tightly,then you just watch ... He will struggle. We are just like that fly in here."

Montazar said the guards did things like giving them rations of sugar just so theycould take it away again.

Mr Ellis said he showed up at Woomera with some lawyers, using his own name and Sydneyaddress, and with a tape recorder which could have been a bomb in his pocket.

"(If) a known enemy of the Howard government can enter its most secure facility witha potential weapon in his pocket then the billion spent on our war of terrorism is wastedand our border security is pretty useless," he said.

Mr Ellis describes a desolate scene, devoid of grass and trees, but said the detaineeswere uncomplaining, telling him the food was good and they could watch pay televisionalthough only in English.

But Arab girls and women must go to a male official to ask for sanitary pads and, ifon the pill, go to the same man each day to get it.

"No good reason either for what happened to three male 20-ish Palestinians from Gaza.

Their city is being bombed and they can watch this on Sky news, yet they are not refugees,"

Mr Ellis wrote.

"They are not refugees yet they cannot go back because Israel ... won't let them goback, so they stay here indefinitely in Woomera.

"'It is a life sentence', one says."

The feature was accompanied by a partial transcript of the boys' conversation and Montezar'sstatement about their life in Afghanistan and their escape.

AAP fh/ldj

KEYWORD: WOOMERA ELLIS LEAD