Hazara Nation

TheAUS PAKISTANI people-smugglers recommend Australia as the second-best destination for seeking asylum after Canada, according to one of the 134 Asian and Middle Eastern asylum-seekers intercepted off the Australian coast since October.>

Sadiq Bahram, an ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan who has reached Australian waters twice from Indonesia since 1999, said known in Pakistan were former police officers who charged $US15,000 ($21,000) for passage to Canada, $US10,000 to Australia and $US9000 to Europe.

In the first interview with any member of the seven boatloads of asylum-seekers now living or being detained on Christmas Island, Mr Bahram said: "They tell me Canada is the best, second is Australia and third is Europe but I tell them I want Australia, I love Australia and its people ...

it (is) the best paradise in the world because it is peaceful and beautiful."

Mr Bahram and his 13-year-old daughter, Arzoo, were intercepted at Ashmore Reef with 12 others on a small boat - the second detected in Australian waters since the Rudd Government was elected in November 2007.

They were brought to Christmas Island on October 10.

Everyone aboard, except the crew, and everyone aboard the first boat to arrive last year have had their hopes boosted by the Rudd Government's decision last month to permit all 26 to apply for protection visas.

Mr Bahram said he had paid a Pakistani people-smuggler $12,000. He received a special discount on his daughter's fare after giving the smuggler all his savings.

He said they were issued with false passports and flew unaccompanied from Islamabad to Singapore. He said they then joined others in a 12-day boat trip from Malaysia to Kupang, in West Timor, where they got into another smaller boat for the trip to Australia.

The trip was scary, he said, because the boat was in terrible condition and Arzoo could not swim.

None of the three Indonesian crew, including a teenage boy, seemed to know where they were.

"I asked him, 'Are we in Australia?' and the captain said, 'Yes'. But when I asked him later, 'Are we in Indonesia?' he said 'Yes'," Mr Bahram said. "We were lost."

Mr Bahram first sought asylum here in 1999. He was working as a camera operator for the Wahdat party in Afghanistan and coming under increasing pressure for his involvement in a social and cultural group called Machid Art, in which he met friends on Friday nights to write plays, film dramas and play music.

Mr Bahram tells a harrowing story of being pursued by mullahs over a film he made with Machid about the plight of Hazaras in Afghanistan, Broken Night, and a drama he helped write urging better leadership in Afghanistan entitled Gamshuda.

Local young men were warned by mujaheddin not to associate with them, and soon a leaflet was being distributed describing their activities as "not Muslim", Mr Bahram said.

"It said this group is not Muslim because they are watching a movie, making a movie, showing a movie," hesaid.

He fled to Pakistan after receiving threatening letters from a local leader, who was in the Taliban.

There, he paid a Pakistani people-smuggler $6000 for a journey to Australia that included two days locked in a basement in Bali.

He spent a year at Woomera, which he said he prefers not to speak about, and was living on a temporary protection visa when he learned that his friend from Machid Art, Qais, had been murdered.

He said the death of his brother and sister in a bomb blast from US troops put him under pressure to return, and he accepted $1800 from the International Organisation for Migration to help get home. "I thought things might be different with the new leaders but it was not," Mr Bahram said.

He knew he would be killed when he saw a "night notice" on a mosque wall referring to him and his former activities. "It said I had ins