Refugees cast despairing shadow
As visiting leaders talk, unwanted boat people stay in limbo
Shaped like a peanut and smaller than some big-city airports, this tropical Pacific island has an unusual history. Thanks to rich deposits of a fertiliser ingredient, Nauru’s 11,000 citizens were once among the wealthiest people on earth. But after much of the phosphate was plundered, Nauru squandered its wealth on bad investments, such as a 1993 musical about Leonardo da Vinci.
That left the island searching for new sources of income, and in recent years it found an answer by becoming a holding station for hundreds of refugees who tried to reach Australia by boat. Australia designed a policy of keeping boat refugees and asylum seekers far from its shores to deter more of them from trying to make the voyage, but many critics say the policy violates human rights.
The fate of those refugees, including a growing number of children who advocates say are suffering from life-threatening medical conditions, is casting a shadow over the Pacific Islands Forum conference that started in Nauru last night. The forum brings together 18 members including Australia and New Zealand to discuss regional issues.
On the agenda are plans for an enhanced regional security agreement and discussions on the threat that climate change poses for lowlying islands. China’s growing role in the Pacific will likely be a point of tension, with some forum members favouring diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Nauru has preferred to limit discussion on refugees. For years, it has effectively prevented most journalists from reporting first-hand by charging A$8000 ($5750) for a media visa. It waived the fee for the forum, but let in only a few and put restrictions on them.
Many of the more than 600 refugees on the island describe the hopelessness they feel after being stuck in limbo for up to five years. They say they’re not accepted by the locals and many children don’t attend island schools because they are bullied or made to feel unwelcome.
While the United States has taken some of the refugees from Nauru under a deal struck by Barack Obama and reluctantly accepted by Donald Trump, many refugees fleeing places such as Iran and Somalia say they have no realistic hope of being allowed into the US, which has sharpened their sense of despair.
A series of Australian court cases has described how some of the 120 or so refugee children on Nauru have been evacuated because they are suffering from resignation syndrome, a medical condition in which they withdraw socially and stop eating and drinking.
Ahead of the forum, Nauru hit back at the findings on Twitter, saying some refugee children were being manipulated into self-harm by their families, supported by activists “in a disgusting & tragic political game”.
But Louise Newman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, said she had seen four cases of refugee children aged between about 10 and 14 with resignation syndrome.
“To all intents and purposes, they become comatose,” she said. “It’s like they go into hibernation from the overwhelming stress. They don’t respond to pain. Their knee-jerk reflex is absent.
“Australia should not be condoning what amounts to a form of state-sponsored child abuse,” she said.
Many of the leaders in Nauru this week have little appetite for intervening.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said in Nauru: “We’ve got 50,000 people who are homeless back home, we have to help fix their lives up as well before we start taking on new obligations of the level that some people would like.”