He refused a decree by Saddam Hussein to amputate the ears of Iraqi draft evaders, and wound up on a rickety boat to Australia. Now Dr Munjed Al Muderis is a pioneering surgeon giving amputees the ability to walk. By GREG CALLAGHAN.
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The junior surgeon is sitting on a toilet in the women's locker room, hunched forward, his eyes fixed firmly on the brown tiled floor. He's desperately trying to stop panic from overwhelming him. If they find him here, he'll almost certainly be taken away and shot.
It's been the longest five hours of his life, huddled here alone, the deathly silence punctuated only by the odd moment of sheer terror when two or more nurses enter from the adjoining operating theatre to wash up, their panicky, hushed tones betraying what they've been forced to do to the young men lying on their operating tables.
"What makes me do this, is that I came from a war-torn region where people regularly lost limbs."
Mercifully, no-one notices the toilet cubicle in the corner of the change room, its indicator permanently switched to red. Not so much as a whimper can be heard from the soundproof operating theatre only metres away, but the young doctor can picture what it must look like by now. A cauldron of blood.
For Dr Munjed Al Muderis, this hazy day in late October 1999 had begun in as routine a way as they come, with the 27-year-old doing his usual 6.30am round of the wards of Baghdad's Saddam Hussein Medical Centre before the daily meeting of surgeons and registrars to discuss new admissions. While this sprawling hospital on the banks of the Tigris River was suffering terribly as a result of the draconian UN trade embargo imposed on Saddam, which meant a chronic shortage of basic medicines and equipment, the staff still managed to tend to the sick and dying.
Suddenly, about 8.30am, a swarm of soldiers had stormed into the hospital, led by a powerfully built man bristling with aggression - a senior army officer - who demanded that elective surgery for the day be cancelled in all 10 operating theatres. Three bus loads of army deserters and draft dodgers had arrived and each was to have one of his ears partly amputated, by order of Saddam himself, he declared.
A wretched, ragtag bunch, some still in their pyjamas, others already bloody and beaten in dirty sandals, were then frogmarched into the admissions area and ordered to lie down on the trolleys, ready to be wheeled into the theatres. Muderis was astonished that most of the men appeared calm, perhaps from sheer relief the amputation would at least be performed under anaesthetic, rather than with the cold blade of an army knife.
After the head of surgery had loudly objected to disfiguring these men, citing the Hippocratic oath, he was promptly dragged outside by a group of soldiers. Minutes later, the sound of a single gunshot pierced the air. "If anyone else shares his view, step forward," the captain said. Muderis's eyes darted about, scanning the faces of the anaesthetists, doctors and surgical staff around him, all frozen in terror. Muderis knew he couldn't go through with this - doctors are trained to heal, not maim or kill - but there was no way to get past the soldiers. And so, while everyone was distracted, he had slipped into the women's locker room through an entrance behind him, shut the cubicle door, sat down on the toilet - and desperately tried to figure out what to do next.
Sitting here now, hours later, what's running through his head is the day Saddam's henchmen came for his next-door neighbour, a draft evader. He remembers the screams of the young man's mother as he was hauled out of their house in his white underpants; the loudspeaker on top of the ruling Ba'ath Party truck imploring locals to come and witness his execution by firing squad; his father being forced to pay for the bullets that killed him. Muderis's mind then flashes back to his elite high school in Baghdad, where his fellow students had included Saddam's sons Qusay and Uday, teenage thugs who would speed about the grounds in their souped-up cars, before later graduating to rape, torture and murder on an epic scale. Then there was Saddam's nephew Omar, who would sit next to him in class, an arrogant, ignorant little prick.
It's now 2pm, the daily closing time for surgery, and a group of women enter the change room for a final wash-up, their ghastly handiwork now complete. Muderis waits another 15 minutes after the last one leaves before nudging open the cubicle door, crossing to the male locker room and shedding his surgical gown for civvies. The hospital's corridors, crawling with soldiers only hours before, are now quiet; to avoid suspicion, Muderis resists the temptation to run to the nearest exit. He steps outside into the pale autumn sunlight and strides directly to the taxi rank.
It's too risky to take his car, which can be easily followed, and he can't go home, because military intelligence may already be there, asking his mother about his whereabouts, so he gives the taxi driver an address on the edge of town, the home of a trusted family friend. Muderis is now a fugitive, and not even his aristocratic pedigree - he is the only child of one of Iraq's most noble families, with a lineage dating back to the prophet Muhammad - will protect him from the Ba'ath Party's wrath. From the back of the taxi, he takes one last look back at the hospital.
This much is certain: he has to leave Iraq. But beyond that, he has no idea of the ordeals to come. He doesn't know that within weeks he'll be the only doctor aboard a rickety boat jammed with 150 asylum seekers sailing towards Christmas Island, tending to three women in the late stages of pregnancy, while other passengers vomit and piss over one another from seasickness.
From there he'll wind up at the Curtin Detention Centre in Western Australia's Kimberley, where he'll be stripped of his name and assigned a number - 982 - and where he'll act as an intermediary between protesting detainees and the guards, only to find it festering into a game of Russian roulette, with him being falsely accused of inciting a break-out.
Muderis's tortuous odyssey will end on the eve of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, outside the Curtin Detention Centre, waiting for a bus, squinting into the blazing sun. From this modest start he will go on to become one of the country's most respected orthopaedic surgeons, one who will give Australian and British soldiers who've lost legs to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan and Iraq the ability to walk again, pioneering a technology that enables other amputees, such as accident victims, to lead more mobile lives.
But all this is still ahead of him. For now, he's enduring a clattering bus ride across a beige, desolate landscape to the Jordanian border, having secured fake papers from his cousin, an army officer with contacts in the passport office. He has $22,000 in cash taped to his stomach, handed to him by his mother, who tearfully farewelled him in a final clandestine meeting. Doctors are forbidden from leaving Iraq, so Munjed Al Muderis, junior surgeon, is now Munjed, handyman.
"Get off me! Get down, Mozart!" Dr Munjed Al Muderis, a slim man with quick, intelligent eyes and a Harry Potter-like face behind rimless glasses, picks up the black miniature poodle springing about on the grey sofa and plants it firmly back on the floor. Sporting a crisp white shirt, charcoal trousers and shiny black shoes, he's sitting with his back to a dress circle view of the great steel arc of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. But his thoughts aren't here, in the chic apartment the 41-year-old shares with his wife and infant daughter. Instead they're back in a decaying six-storey hotel in a bay suburb north of Jakarta, back in November 1999, when he and about a thousand other asylum seekers were waiting for a boat to make the treacherous crossing to Christmas Island.
After 36 harrowing hours, they made it to the rocky shores of Christmas Island. There they were rescued by the Australian Federal Police, whom Muderis can't praise highly enough for their kindness during their five-day stay. Indeed, the detention facilities on Christmas Island were a tropical paradise compared to the hell hole of Curtin.
Within two months of being released in 2000, after sending out more than 100 resumes, Muderis was working as a medical practitioner at Mildura Base Hospital. A year later he was at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. "I received Centrelink payments for two months before becoming an Australian taxpayer," he says proudly. "There's this argument that I'm the exception, but that's completely false. Out of 1252 people who were with me in Curtin, 13 were doctors - and 12 of those are now practising as specialists in Australia."
In his biography, Walking Free, there is a picture of Muderis as a goofy teenager in the 1980s, clutching a ghetto blaster and skateboard. This is a time he prefers to remember: when Baghdad was a colourful, cosmopolitan city with vibrant cafes, bars and nightclubs.
Sadly, over 30 years, the colour has drained from a capital now clothed in black and white, driven by joyless social restrictions and sectarian conflict. "My two best friends in school were a Jew and a Christian; I didn't understand what religion they were at the time because nobody cared."
On the day of our chat at Muderis's apartment, disturbing reports come through that IS is slaughtering Christian men and abducting and raping their wives, sisters and daughters in the captured northern Iraqi city of Mosul. "One of my fellow orthopaedic surgeons is an Iraqi Christian and he was telling me his aunt was forced to leave her house. She was given an ultimatum: convert to Islam, pay a huge amount of money in tax, or leave."
At one point during our interview, Muderis's Russian-born wife Irina, a GP with a thriving practice on Sydney's lower north shore, walks in and introduces herself. The couple have a five-year-old daughter, Sophia, and have been together since 2006. Muderis has three other children: two sons, Adam, 12, and Dean, 10, by Doha, the Iraqi woman he met on the boat to Christmas Island and later married, and a grown-up son, now living in California, with a woman he was briefly married to in Baghdad when he was in his early 20s.
At Muderis's clinic at the Norwest Private Hospital in Bella Vista, in north-west Sydney, three amputees are sharing stories about life since their operations. One young woman, Miranda Cashin, who was born without a tibia in her right leg, is tearfully describing how the operation has radically changed her life. After years of struggling with a socket prosthesis, and needing crutches and a wheelchair to get about painlessly, she now goes on five-kilometre walks.
Thanks to Muderis's pioneering work on prosthetics, and patents on titanium devices he has designed, Australia is now at the forefront of osseointegration technology.
"What makes me do this," he says, "is that I came from a war-torn region where people regularly lost limbs."
Dr Al Muderis will speak at Villa D'Oro Function Centre, Flinders Street, Wollongong, at noon on Wednesday. Details here.
His book Walking Free was published last week by Allen and Unwin.
smh.com.au