New 10-part podcast tells the story in his own words of Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a refugee waiting for his future to begin

Aziz wakes early and takes a white plastic chair.

Surrounding him are the steel fences of the Manus Island regional processing centre, the offshore detention camp that has been his unwanted home for nearly 1,200 days now.

There are few guards at this hour and the others, the men he is detained with, sleep late in this place for myriad reasons – heat, boredom, fear of the night-time – the horrors that haunt the rest of many in these compounds.

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But, in the early morning, Aziz says, it is quiet. For the first few hours he is as alone as he ever can be in this place. There is time now to think.

In his hands Aziz holds a cheap and battered mobile phone – once an item of contraband, now permitted and a precious lifeline to the outside world.



He hits a button and begins to speak quietly into it, to dictate another message.

Aziz is the Messenger.

Abdul Aziz Muhamat is one of the 800-odd men still detained on Manus, beginning his fourth year of an indeterminate incarceration without charge.

A Zaghawa man from the Darfur region of Sudan, Aziz is 24. Or 25. The Australian government lists his date of birth, improbably, as 1 January 1992. He says it is 17 February, and has told authorities so, but still the anomaly remains. He is resigned about it – in detention, there is energy for only so many battles.

Listen to the first episode of The Messenger here

In 2013, fleeing the violence of his homeland – a country for decades, and still, benighted by brutal civil conflict, famine and drought – Aziz flew to Indonesia, where he put himself on a boat bound for Australia.

After six days at sea, he made it. But, from Christmas Island, the only place in Australia he has ever seen, Aziz was cast into the byzantine world of Australia’s offshore processing, sent to an island he had never heard of.

On Manus, Aziz has been “processed” as the dehumanising nomenclature of detention puts it.

Authorities determined him to be a refugee – having a “well-founded fear of persecution” in his homeland – nearly two years ago, in early 2015.

But still, in 2017, he waits for the protection he is legally owed, by the governments, Australian and Papua New Guinean, that hold him.

In his time on the island, Aziz has coped better than most, though he acknowledges more than seldom moments of darkness. He has emerged as a leader of his community in detention, a magistrate of sorts for the internecine conflicts of the compounds and, armed with good English, a conduit to the outside world.

Aziz has learned, in his time on the island, to inure himself to the vicissitudes of the news and rumours that regularly sweep through the centre, enlivened and distorted as they travel, and traded, almost like a currency, in an environment where men live on wisps of hope and palace intrigue.

He has learned to trust little of what he hears.

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The PNG supreme court judgment in April 2016 that ruled the detention centre was “illegal and unconstitutional”; the announcement in November that a deal had been struck for resettlement in the US. These have come and gone and little, if anything, on the island changes.

Still Aziz waits.

This podcast series – entitled, from Aziz’s own words, The Messenger – exists to explore one man’s experience inside Australia’s policy of offshore processing: the reality of that policy as it impacts upon one person.

The Messenger also examines the growing friendship between Aziz and the journalist Michael Green – the enlightenment that occurs on both sides of the divide about life in immigration detention and about the country that insists such a regime is necessary, even laudable.

Over the course of more than 3,500 brief WhatsApp messages sent from detention – an autobiography in instalments – Aziz reveals his continuing story: his flight from a war-riven homeland, the perils of his journey by boat, the deterioration and deaths of friends on Manus, the confusion and frustration at a maddening detention whose arc seems to bend always, but never quite, towards freedom.

Australia’s offshore detention policy is regularly posited around the world as a “solution” to the “problem” of forced migration, as though it has brought resolution to Aziz and his fellows, and as if people being forced to flee is somehow a novel occurrence.

But The Messenger seeks to examine offshore processing not as a matter of domestic policy or regional realpolitik but through its impact upon a person captive to it.

Because, so rarely, is Australia’s discussion of asylum seekers ever about the people.

In all of the fierce rhetoric – “stopping the boats” , “securing Australia’s borders” – the individual is lost. People are no longer asylum seekers but “illegals”, a curious sophistry that defines people by their (in actuality legal) method of arrival.

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Once in detention, they are known not by their names but by dehumanising “boat IDs”, three letters and three numbers, a call sign that metamorphoses into their identity.

My parents, they sacrificed for me to have my name. Not to have this boat number.

And, in the public arena in Australia, the discussion is not of migrants arriving on these shores but of them emerging in uncontrollable metaphors of water – in floods and waves and surges.

The discussion so often occurs in the abstract, that the people about whom we are talking are reduced to an amorphous, unknowable mass.

In a global order built upon nationality and bounded territoriality, one of the first things those displaced from their homeland feel themselves losing is themselves.

There are 65 million displaced people in the world, a bare 2,000 of whom are held on Australia’s offshore detention islands, but in all of the debate about numbers, push-pull factors and policy levers, the humanity at the heart of this issue is too often forgotten.

The Messenger is about people, about one person, just one of those 65 million displaced.

The Messenger is the story of Aziz.

• The Messenger is a 10-part podcast series co-produced by Behind the Wire and the Wheeler Centre. It is produced by Michael Green, André Dao, Hannah Reich, Bec Fary, with Jon Tjhia and Sophie Black at the Wheeler Centre, and additional fact-checking by the Guardian’s Ben Doherty. To find out more about The Messenger and to subscribe, visit wheelercentre.com/themessenger