Surya McEwen

There's people like the ILF with like their guns are like walking around the platform, like yelling at us and shooting rubber bullets at people.

They were throwing lots of flashbangs, like these little grenades.

the first time we were taken they were throwing them it seemed like more to to scare us whereas like a psychological tactic but this time they were actually throwing throwing them like at people like trying to hurt people and um they have uh two different water cannons that are like aimed into the yard

When they used them, they were using like skunk water, like chemical, stinky kind of chemical water and constantly flushing the yard.

So it was like it was very hard not to be wet and stay wet and cold.

And I was quite like it was quite cold where we were.

So they've taken all your clothes.

Usually you're kind of soaking wet when you arrive there, because when you're in the ribs, you're like bouncing up in the waves quite a lot.

And so it was really hard for people to get warm, like to the extent it was possible to try to sleep at night.

Everyone's kind of like huddled in the containers and taking shifts because no one can fit in there.

And they're constantly blaring things on the loudspeakers or shooting or creating noise with the flashbangs.

um to stop people from sleeping and flushing the yard and you know there's not enough toilet paper in the toilets there's no sanitary like there's no tampons or pads for women who are on their period so we're like keeping a bunch of the toilet paper and trying to negotiate like just very basic like humanitarian standards that they they were trying to um keep from us and it's a really dirty space as well there's not enough food

on that particular prison ship most of us were on hunger strike but for the the food that people were given was like grotesque like old um old bread and um

Yeah, it was full on, like the amount of people on the, like between the two, the two ships, the amount of people that were tasered and tasered multiple times, like some people were tasered like four or five times, had like multiple broken ribs, multiple had broken, like so, so many when we, when we were eventually deported and we were all taken to hospital or the ones who were injured were taken to hospital.

It was mind-blowing to see how many breaks there were, how many rapes and sexual assaults there'd been.

It was just on a different level.

That time we were on the prison ship for over three days.

I think it was about two and a half days.

And the first time we were at sea for a while.

We were at sea for like three days.