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Warning: This story contains graphic content.
A man who spent two decades in jail for killing his wife before putting her body into a wheelie bin filled with acid has gone on hunger strike at a detention centre in Nauru, sewing his lips together in protest after being deported from Western Australia last month.
Tony Kellisar, 64, is on day six of his hunger strike, claiming he has been unable to leave his room in what he describes is a “hellhole prison camp” after being transferred there from WA’s Yongah Hill Detention Centre.
Iranian-born Kellisar was transferred to immigration detention in 2019 after serving 20 years for the murder of Svetlana Podgoyetsky, who he strangled in Melbourne in 1997 before driving her body to Sydney.
However, Kellisar was one of 150 detainees released in November 2023 after the High Court ruled that indefinite detainment was illegal.
For 15 months, the former soldier, who fled to Australia as a political refugee in 1990, lived and worked in WA, renting an East Perth apartment where he worked and received a certificate III in civil construction, his HR licence, mining dump truck licence, white card, and loader, excavator and bobcat licence.
Kellisar worked casually but said wearing an ankle bracelet and being bound by a 10pm to 6am curfew made mining and night shift work difficult, leading to him picking up warehouse and maintenance work where he could.
However, the decision to release Kellisar was overturned late last year, and he was returned to detention, where he launched a number of High Court appeals – to no avail.
A $2.5 billion deal between Australia and Nauru late last year then saw Kellisar transferred to the island on May 6, where he said conditions were “hell on earth”.
The deal would see the Pacific island nation take in hundreds of foreign-born criminals over the next 30 years, a decision which has garnered criticism from the opposition and human rights activists.
“I live in a terrible physical and mental state in the camp,” Kellisar told this masthead this week.
“I have a severe asthma and diagnosed in Australia with complex PTSD because I was traumatised during the Iran-Iraq war as a combat soldier.
“My desperation turns into depression. I am a prisoner in my room due to the horrible climate in Nauru. Others are the same.”
Kellisar has collapsed twice since he got to the island, both times needing to be hospitalised. He said the facility is “filthy” and “in a terrible state”.
“The rooms are full of flies because the doors are open and most of [the] windows have a broken glass,” he said.
“It is sweaty hot inside due to lack of proper air conditioning.”
Kellisar claimed food on the island was so expensive he could only afford to eat once a day.
“Fruit is a luxury item for detainees and no one can afford it. Our family and friends cannot send us any money because the Nauruan government does not allow detainees to open a bank account on the island,” he said.
Kellisar said a Libyan man who is wheelchair bound was sent to the island on May 27, despite there being no disabled facilities.
The man cannot leave his room without the assistance of other detainees, cannot cook for himself, and has difficulty accessing the toilet.
Kellisar said he would continue to protest and remain on hunger strike until he passed out, and wants to be returned to detention in Australia, or “to another country with a different climate”.
Suicide prevention researcher and custody advocate Gerry Georgatos said the Nauru prison camp was an “outpost gulag”.
“At 64 years of age, the practical reality [for Kellisar] is that this may amount to a life sentence of exclusion,” he said.
“The conditions in detention are abominable. Stir-crazy existence in a small squalid hovel, a grotesque corral of human misery.
“The Nauru ‘prison’ is Australian-made, Australia-funded, and it is in fact an outpost gulag.
“No sentencing judge imposed that outcome. No criminal court ordered that outcome. Yet it has become the reality.”
Georgatos said arguing Kellisar’s case was not about “excusing the crime”.
“The crime [Kellisar] committed was reprehensible,” he said.
“The courts dealt with that crime. The sentence was imposed.
“The sentence was served. The debt to society, as determined by the judiciary, was paid in full.
“The question is what happens next.”
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