How Australia's immigration detention regime crushed Fazel Chegeni

For a man who was stateless, who lived his life belonging to nowhere, the foothills of Kabir Kuh, the great mountain of western Iran, are as close as anywhere Fazel Chegeni knew to home.

Now, he is, finally, home.

Flown from Australia last week, the body of the refugee who died in November onChristmas Island has been returned to his family in Ilam province in western Iran. Chegeni was buried on Saturday in the soil of the country where he grew up.

He was laid to rest just a valley or so away from Reza Barati, a man he never met, but another who died in Australian immigration detention. But whereas Barati died a sudden violent death, in the madness of one night of harrowing violence,Chegeni was killed slowly by the machinery of detention itself.

His death was the inexorable crushing of a man trapped in a bureaucracy that did not, and could not, care for him.