Taste of life in refugee's shoes

Given the ferocity of the 'Pacific Solution' debate in Australia, Hamid Sultani is surprised how little people know about asylum seekers.

The Dandenong refugee from Afghanistan is one face in the second instalment of the SBS social-experiment series Go Back to Where You Came From, which starts screening tomorrow (Tuesday) night.

The show puts six well-known Australians with polarised views into the shoes of asylum seekers. As part of the journey, rock singer Angry Anderson, writer Catherine Deveny and former defence minister Peter Reith stayed with Sultani for two nights at his home.

During that time, Sultani and his three refugee housemates tell their stories.

He was shocked by some of their views. Deveny was sympathetic, Anderson steadfast in his resolve that boats should be turned back, and Reith - regarded as one of the architects of the Howard government's Pacific Solution - proud that "we stopped the boats".

"They didn't have information about asylum seekers and had not communicated with asylum seekers in Australia," Sultani said.

He hoped to have influenced his guests' ideas by sharing his experience, as well as taking them to speak with fellow refugees who run an Afghan bazaar, and a halal butcher in Dandenong. He welcomed the chance to break bread with his guests and tell his own astounding story on how and why he fled to Australia.

Like half of asylum seekers coming to these shores, Sultani is an ethnic Hazara - a minority that is persecuted by the Taliban insurgents in his homeland.

He said it was simply not safe to live there. The Taliban are against education, technology and modern hospitals. Those who wanted to go to school or university were targeted and labelled as 'infidels'. Those who ran businesses were heavily scrutinised.

"When you step out of your house, you are not safe. A lot of people are losing their life to trrorists."

He first fled to Pakistan as a 15 year old in 1999 when the Taliban took over, closed schools and killed people "not for doing something wrong but for doing something right", Sultani said.