‘I never felt alone’: refugee Mostafa Azimitabar on justice, Jimmy Barnes and freedom after eight years

On his second day of freedom in this country, at the start of the Australia Day weekend, Mostafa Azimitabar went to a Jimmy Barnes concert: “the most Aussie experience I could ever imagine”.

A member of Iran’s Kurdish minority who fled racist repression in his homeland to seek sanctuary in a safe country, Azimitabar spent 2,737 days detained by Australia.

He counted each and every one, shipped capriciously between Christmas Island and Manus Island detention centres, a life in limbo in Port Moresby and, for his final 13 months, the sterility of a Melbourne hotel floor he could never leave.

From his “luxury torture cell” – in his words – he told the Guardian his only physical link with the outside world was a roadside window he could wind open a bare few centimetres.

Related: Peter Dutton says refugees released from Melbourne hotel detention to save money

He would stand by it, for hours some days, to let the air and the noise of the outside world rush in, and to look out at those outside: protesters who came to campaign for his freedom, people walking past oblivious, the slow crawl of cars on now-unhurried streets.

Now, suddenly, he is part of that world.

He is free, with a visa to live in Australia.

The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, said asylum seekers and refugees returned to Australia for urgent medical care under the medevac legislation had been released, some after more than seven years in detention and a year in a hotel room, because “it’s cheaper for people to be in the community than it is to be at a hotel or for us to be paying for them to be in detention”.

Azimitabar – known across the country as Moz Azimi - described his release on Thursday as “the most beautiful moment of my life”.

Detention in Melbourne’s Mantra Hotel was dispiriting.

Throughout his detention Azimitabar wrote. The endless thoughts and ideas that looped constantly through his head in the solitude of his confinement found their outlet in prose and poetry and song.

He became a friend – albeit one forcibly distanced – to dozens in Australia’s music world.

Sitting by his window inside the hotel, he wrote his song Love, on a guitar given to him by Jimmy Barnes, that was then mixed and produced by Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie.

The piece, he said, was written to thank all of those who had supported him, who wrote letters campaigning for his release, who stood on the street outside his window to wave and protest and bear witness.

Azimitabar’s musical journey came full circle on Saturday night, when he, along with artist and fellow refugee Farhad Bandesh, were special guests of the Barnes family at their Yarra Valley concert.

Pictures showed them arm-in-arm with Jimmy Barnes and his wife Jane Mahoney, and video from the concert revealed them dancing in the dark, beaming smiles further lit by the lights of the stage.

“I was so excited, and they were so kind and welcoming. It was like being released from detention all over again,” Azimitabar said.

Facing steadily ratcheting persecution in Iran, Azimitabar fled his country in 2013, arriving at Christmas Island by boat in July of that year. He immediately made a claim for protection.

The process was tortuous, but he was ultimately found to have a well-founded fear of persecution in Iran, meaning Australia was legally obliged to protect him. He could not be returned to his homeland. Azimitabar would be placed in the queue for resettlement in the US, a process that slowed with political inaction, and then stalled with the pandemic outbreak.

The Guardian met Azimitabar at a number of points on his seven-year odyssey through Australia’s immigration detention regime.

In Port Moresby in 2019, where Azimitabar lived a half-life in the PNG capital, unable to progress the US resettlement pathway he had begun, and caught by a bureaucratic intransigence.

And on Manus Island in 2017, in the dying days of the Lombrum detention centre, when the men held there staged a desperate and doomed stand-off, refusing to leave for fear they would not be safe outside.

In the middle of the night, we were was smuggled into the centre by sea, and shown around the decrepit, decaying site. Electricity had been cut off, pipes cut and water tanks deliberately spoiled in an attempt to force the men out. Supplies of food and medicines were dwindling.

In the Kurdish quarter, a quiet alcove near a crumbling accommodation block, Azimitabar sat peacefully. He offered a cup of tea, and apologies for the lack of sugar.

The detention centre, Azimitabar said then, was brutal: a place of privation, of systemic debasement, of great and terrifying violence.

Near where we sat, Azimitabar pointed out the staircase where his friend Reza Barati was murdered by detention centre employees who were supposed to protect him. Up to 15 people attacked him, beating his head with a wooden post spiked with nails and dropping a rock on to his head: two were convicted of his murder.

“They killed our friend Reza Barati,” Azimitabar told the Guardian. “He was innocent like us and they killed him. Then, I felt that it’s going to get worse day by day, but I never thought that it would take five, six, seven years.”

Related: Fazel Chegeni wanted 'nothing but peace'. Instead he died alone in Australia's island prison

The end of that 24-day stand-off would end violently for Azimitabar, beaten with a metal pole across his back by police: the trauma remaining long beyond the physical injury.

Now Azimitabar is adjusting to a life of liberty.

Those who have gone before him have found freedom exhilarating but the transition, at times, challenging. For all who have been held within Australia’s detention regime, there is a long way to go.

Azimitabar has thanked those who had supported him but said there were others still caught in the byzantine mandatory immigration detention system, many facing indefinite incarceration despite not being accused of doing anything wrong.

“They don’t have a voice. They need your help. The reason that I’ve been able to stay strong for eight years is because I never felt that I was alone. I always felt that there were people in Australia who cared about me. People who didn’t support with this cruel policy of torture.

“I believe the power of the people can crumble the walls of oppression and my freedom … is proof. I’ve seen the pain of my brothers in detention, I’ve listened to their sad stories. If they weren’t in danger in their homeland, they wouldn’t have fled and left everything behind.”

Azimitabar said those still in detention were in Australia, part of this country’s community, “but still waiting for their freedom”.

“If I am able to obtain my freedom, there should be the opportunity for the others seeking asylum to have their freedom as well. Until all of us are free, none of us are truly free.”