Trapped in camp of broken promises
THE men packing the boat with rice, cigarettes and medicine had fled war and persecution in their home countries.
Now, at 1am, off the coast of a remote island in Papua New Guinea, they were speeding back to the detention camp they hated.
Why, I asked, would they return to the prisonlike “refugee processing center” where they had been trapped for nearly five years?
“We have brothers to feed,” said Behnam Satah, 31, a Kurdish asylum-seeker, as we cruised over moon-silvered waves on a hot November night. “We have brothers who need help.”
More than 1,300 asylumseekers have been dumped on Manus Island since the end of 2012 as part of Australia’s contentious policy to keep migrants from reaching its shores. They were all but forgotten until last month when Australia’s attempt to shut down the centre and move the men to facilities near the island’s main town of Lorengau hit resistance. Hundreds of the men refused to leave.
Many said they were afraid to move closer to town, where some had been attacked and robbed by local residents. But it was more than that. With the attention of the world finally on them, the camp’s detainees had turned their prison into a protest, braving a lack of water, electricity and food to try to jog loose a little compassion from the world.
They had already suffered and understood danger. Fleeing more than a dozen countries, they had risked their lives with human traffickers on ramshackle boats leaving Indonesia. And ever since the compound started filling up in 2013, it has been plagued by illness, suicide and complaints of mistreatment. But now, by staying there and sneaking in and out by boat, they were risking arrest in a desperate search for selfdetermination, and to intensify scrutiny of Australia’s migration policy and methods.
And that scrutiny has come. Veteran UN officials said this month they had never seen a wealthy democracy go to such extremes to punish asylumseekers and push them away.
Papua New Guinea officials and local leaders, enraged at how the camp’s closure was handled, have demanded to know why Australia is not doing more to help the men.
Instead, Australia is cutting services – reducing caseworkers and no longer providing medication, officials said, even though approximately 8 in 10 of the men suffer from anxiety disorders, depression and other issues largely caused by detention, according to a 2016 independent study.
“It’s a very drastic reduction,” said Catherine Stubberfield, a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency, who recently visited Manus.
Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection did not answer questions about the service cuts. In a statement, it said general health care was still available and “alternative accommodation sites” were “operational” and “suitable.”
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has also doubled down on Australia’s hard-line approach, arguing that offshore detention has been a successful deterrent against illegal trafficking.
But in Papua New Guinea, deterrence increasingly looks like an incentive for cruelty. Officials, Manus residents and outside experts all argue that Australia has a responsibility to those it placed here, to international law, and to its closest neighbour.
“They’ve put the burden on a former colony which does not have the resources for many of the things its own people want, like health care and a social safety net,” said Paige West, a Columbia University anthropologist who has done extensive fieldwork on Manus. “This is a problem created by Australia’s failure to comply with its human rights obligations.”
‘I’m tortured four years here’
The detention centre, a warren of barracks and tents, sprawls across a naval base built by US troops in 1944 during World War II. The Papua New Guinea Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the camp was illegal, calling it a violation of “personal liberty.” The governments of Australia and Papua New Guinea agreed in April to close the site by October 31.
But finding alternatives has been a struggle.
Some of the men at the camp – all of whom were caught at sea trying to reach Australia – have been granted refugee status and are hoping for relocation to the United States, under a deal brokered by President Barack Obama and initially opposed by President Donald Trump.
But nearly 200 of the 843 men still stuck on Manus (women and children were sent to the island of Nauru) have not had their asylum claims fully processed, or their claims have been rejected, leaving them effectively stuck on the island.
For now, all of the detainees are expected to move to three smaller facilities, near Lorengau, a few kilometres from the camp.
Part of the problem is that the governments of Australia and Papua New Guinea are at odds over who is responsible for the men. Australia says Papua New Guinea is in charge of providing for them. Papua New Guinea says it is willing to house the refugees, but it is Australia’s responsibility to pay for them and pursue ways for them to leave.
“We’ve been urging that the Australians keep up their responsibility,” said Duncan Joseph, a community leader and the island’s Red Cross representative. “The fact that they’ve withdrawn and drastically scaled back services doesn’t change that for us, morally and legally, they are responsible for these men.”
Many of the detainees who have moved to the new sites reported crowded dormitories and delays with getting food. Some did not receive the weekly stipend of $30 for medicine and incidentals they were promised upon arrival.
Mohyadin Omar, 27, a lawyer with a soft demeanor who fled Somalia in 2013, said the move to the transit centre had made him consider returning to Mogadishu. He is a certified refugee who lost his entire family to war. He fears he will be killed back home, but he may go anyway.
“I’m tortured four years here,” he said. “I’m done.”
‘Only freedom’
Back inside the main detention camp, conditions deteriorated quickly after the Australians officially left on October 31, cutting off the electricity and water before departing.
In the equatorial heat, the men who were sick got sicker. Asthmatics needed inhalers. Diabetics needed insulin.
Some of the men who stayed at the camp appeared mentally stronger than those who had relocated.
They made clear they want to be resettled in a third country, neither Australia nor Papua New Guinea. In the meantime, they were surviving. They were defying authorities. Thanks in part to money from supportive Australians and local boat pilots risking arrest, they had cigarettes, a stash of booze, and a measure of what they have most craved: agency and autonomy.
“There are many things that brought us to the point where we’ve said we will never go,” Satah said when he was still in Lorengau gathering supplies. “But remember, we didn’t come here by choice.”
Behrouz Boochani, another Iranian Kurd who has become well-known for writing from the camp, put it more simply in a resistance manifesto: “All the conversations are driven by one thing, and one thing only, and that is freedom,” he wrote. “Only freedom.”
Why then have more of the men not tried to pursue a future in Papua New Guinea? After I spent time in Lorengau, it became clear: Even for those who have made a life in Manus, there are real challenges.
Mustafizah Rahman, 25, an asylum-seeker from Bangladesh, married a local woman and opened a shop in a red shipping container near the main Lorengau market. There, he said, he is pursuing his dream “to become a multimillionaire”.
The island’s residents consider him a model of integration. But Rahman, whose wife is eight months pregnant, remains stateless, he said, without formal residency in Papua New Guinea.
Lorengau has become increasingly crowded with climate change refugees who have moved there from more remote islands, and Rahman said he was barely getting by after paying for rising rent and food costs.
“Not everyone can do this,” Rahman said, between customers. “We’re really not accepted in this country. If they bring everyone to town, many people will die.”