Asylum surgeon cuts through with his take on refugees

He came in a boat, with nothing but a dog-eared anatomy textbook and the clothes on his back.

Refugee orthopaedic surgeon Munjed Al Muderis. Picture: John Feder

He came in a boat, with nothing but a dog-eared anatomy textbook and the clothes on his back.

Two decades later, Sydney ­orthopaedic surgeon Munjed Al Muderis is at the forefront of a surgical revolution, fitting amputees with robotic limbs and transforming lives.

Dr Muderis’s refugee story is just one of many, but he’d like it to serve as a beacon.

“Every human being deserves a fair go and people who are ­vetted from the medical, criminal and terrorism side of things have a right to be processed for settlement,” he says.

“It’s not a crime to cross borders if you are in fear for your life.”

An aristocratic young doctor born into a wealthy and influential Baghdad family, Dr Muderis, 47, was forced to flee Iraq in 1999 when he refused a brutal edict from president Saddam Hussein to cut off the ears of deserting ­soldiers.

After landing on Christmas ­Island, he was transferred to Western Australia’s Curtin Immigration Detention Centre where he spent 10 “dehumanising” months before being granted ­asylum.

Dr Muderis worked his way up from the bottom, cleaning toilets while awaiting registration here as a doctor.

Now he is one of the world’s leading experts on osseointegration, a radical procedure in which a titanium rod is implanted ­directly into bone and connected to a state-of-the-art prosthesis.

Dr Muderis is not a ­politician. He doesn’t have an answer to the vexed question of asylum-seeker policy. But he has some thoughts.

“Incarcerating a person indefinitely is the worst thing you can ever do to a human being,” he says.

“No one should have open borders, but Australia should have a cost-effective, humane and long-lasting policy that would allow us to keep face in front of the rest of the world.

“I think the vast majority of the Australian public are genuinely good people and would not like to see asylum-seekers treated inhumanely.”