In 1987, seven-year-old South Sudanese Juma Piri Piri began a journey harder than any seven-year-old should. 

Travelling at night to avoid detection and relying on the goodwill of strangers to provide water, Mr Piri Piri walked on tired legs in the hope of reaching Uganda, and safety. 

“I remember walking at night along the Congo border. I can remember probably a month of the journey, it’s really a survival walk from one point to another,” he said.

Last Sunday Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull added fuel to the fire of the asylum seeker debate, announcing asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island will be permanently banned from entering Australia.

If it passes, the new legislation will apply to those who have arrived by boat from July 2013 onwards.  

Mr Piri Piri has a unique insight into what causes someone to flee their country seeking asylum. 

“We’ve lost everything and there's nothing to hope for and that’s why people make this decision that it’s better to be in a refugee camp and be alive, rather than living in that situation. Because that situation means anytime you can die,” he said. 

Mr Piri Piri said even now people are dying in South Sudan – slaughtered by a government asserting its authority to quell opposition. 

Just a month ago, Mr Piri Piri’s uncle become another number on the growing list of dead.  

“As I speak right now people are being killed on a daily basis and now they are using ethnic tribal groups to justify the killing,” he said. 

“I lost three family members and one of them is actually my immediate uncle. [He] was brutally murdered. He wasn't shot, he was basically chopped into pieces like a lamb, you know, that you see in the butcher.”

It is little wonder, when he had the chance to make a bid for a new life, seven-year-old Juma took it. 

“It wasn’t a situation where you can organise, like, your family together,” he said. 

“A lot of people didn't have time to prepare. It’s basically what you can get at that particular time.

“You don’t even have time to go and see where the rest of the family members are, so it’s a very, very difficult situation. 

“That’s why you see a lot of families who are scattered, some lost their family members and some don’t know [what happened to them].”

Mr Piri Piri’s family are killed, scattered, missing or uncontactable. 

Much like the Middle East, but less widely covered, South Sudan has been in conflict for decades. As with all wars, the greatest casualties are often the civilians. 

The ongoing conflict in the country has seen thousands killed and over a million displaced. 

At the time Mr Piri Piri fled along the Congo border, the Congolese government were in sympathy with the South Sudanese government. Stumbling across Congolese authority was akin to a death sentence. 

“A lot of people very unfortunately they got returned back to Sudan and they never made it, because as soon as you go back there that will be it,” Mr Piri Piri said. 

“We were lucky that we managed to escape that part and eventually we exited the Congo border with Uganda.”

He credits the reason he, and others like him, are here to tell their stories is because they were fortunate enough to reach a refugee camp and were resettled under the humanitarian program.  

It was then a future opened up to him. 

But the nightmare continues for those who haven’t made it out. 

Mr Piri Piri said people mostly sleep in the bush and avoid cooking during the day to avoid detection. 

Government-approved forces move into towns by night and eliminate entire tribal groups, having forewarned others to leave. 

“About 12 midnight to 2.30am, that would be their time approximately for operation. They will go door by door,” he said. 

Mr Piri Piri said those accused of being rebel forces are simply ordinary people doing what they can to assure the survival of those they love. They are protecting the civilians.

“If you see women, your own sister, your own mother, your own wife being raped in front of you, what you do? I think you would do the best thing that you are able to do to protect them next time,” he said.

Now he is viewing the situation from the other side, as successive Australian governments grapple with whether, where and how to accept asylum seekers. 

Mr Piri Piri said it is a complex issue, and each story is unique. 

“I think that any government of the day will do their best to do what is in the national interest,” he said.

“They probably know more than I do.”

He said he thought a case by case approach might be better than a generalisation. 

But perhaps for someone with no hope, even a glimmer of promise might still be a lure worth trying. 

“People have not really anything that would hold them back, because they have lost everything in life,” Mr Piri Piri said. 

“We cannot be part of society where there is no equality, no justice, there is no basic human right. All those fundamental things that everyone would assume anyone in the world would have access to are being denied deliberately and people can’t handle it anymore.”