Decay, despair, defiance: inside Manus refugee camp
PEOPLE AT AUSTRALIAN DETENTION CENTRE SURVIVED ON SMUGGLED RATIONS, SCANT LIGHT
y the glow of his phone, Benham Satah leads the way into the Manus Island “regional processing centre”, abandoned by both the Australian and Papua New Guinean governments, and left to ruin and the resourcefulness of those left within.
The massive steel fences that surrounded the place for years have been, in large part, pulled down, but in haste, and much of the perimeter lies half-dismantled, twisted and torn. Inside is decay and despair, but also defiance.
Two weeks since the camp was shuttered and essential services withdrawn, the 400 men who remained inside were resolute in their determination to stay.
They said they spent nearly five years living with uncertainty of indefinite detention, and they were adamant there was no possible future — no safety — for them on Manus Island.
But they survived on increasingly meagre resources.
There was a fraught underground supply chain of food and medicine coming into the camp from Manusians outside anxious to help. But it was ad hoc and vulnerable.
Phones, lifelines to the outside world, were kept charged via batteries dragged from one of the abandoned administrative blocks. Those were kept replenished by solar panels brought from another building.
Scavenging for basics
The camp was rotting in the muggy tropical heat. Refugees had been pulling apart the abandoned buildings, using the timber frames as firewood so that they could cook on earth stoves.
The generators that powered the centre have been removed and water lines cut. Other items of value and utility — fans, fridges, furniture — were stolen by people from the surrounding military base or further outside.
The water in the jury-rigged wells the men have been dug was deliberately spoiled. Rubbish and oil had been poured into them by PNG immigration officers sent in to encourage the men to leave.
PNG wants to reclaim the land where until recently it allowed the men — refugees and asylum seekers — to be held on behalf of Australia, which is refusing to resettle them. PNG police have brought officers from across the country to Manus to oversee the final shutdown.
Shelters have been torn down, and pumps and pipes sabotaged so they can’t be repaired.
In response, the men who remained in the camp coalesced into an anarchic collective, cooperating to Papua New Guinea (PNG) police wielding metal rods cleared the final 320 holdouts from a shuttered Australian refugee camp yesterday, ending a 24-day standoff that put a global spotlight on Canberra’s tough policy on asylum seekers.
Videos and photos posted by the detainees showed police moving through the camp on Manus Island, swinging long metal batons and pushing men towards buses bound for PNGrun centres elsewhere on the island.
Pictures showed men with some scrapes and cuts they said came from being hit and dragged by police.
Several hours later, PNG and Australian officials confirmed the camp on a former PNG naval base had been emptied as ordered by the PNG Supreme Court, which said last year that the Canberra-run detention centre violated the country’s constitution.
“It’s empty. The military have taken back their base,” PNG police spokesman Dominic Kakas told AFP.
Australia’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton welcomed the news, and accused refugees and their advocates of making “inaccurate and exaggerated claims of violence and injuries” during the operation.
Dutton told reporters in Brisbane he was aware of three people with minor injuries, but the United Nations (UN) refugee agency, UNHCR, said its staff had received reports that several men were “seriously injured”.
Canberra set up the Manus camp and a similar complex on the Pacific island nation of Nauru under a policy of “offshore detention”. share the tasks of running the “camp”.
United by division
They say the abandonment had inspired a unity among them. It was a resilience born of new agency: after fourand-a-half years at the whim of a capricious detention system, the men of Manus finally felt in charge of their lives again. “All our brothers here are contributing in whatever way they can to make life a little bit easier,” Satah said. “This situation has made us more closer, and more determined. Many of us have experienced war, and this is like a war. We are all together.”
The refugees had established a roster of men “on watch”, guarding the perimeter of the camp, for any incursions, and people were assigned jobs based on their skills.
Most of the refugees have abandoned any ideal of Australia as a country that might one day welcome them.
“I don’t care about Australia, I don’t care where they send me, I just need to be somewhere safe,” a Kurdish refugee, who declines to give his name, says.
“Safety is all I want, and we are not safe here.”
Many Manusians were trying to assist the refugees stranded inside the detention centre.
Ezatullah Kakar still has the kickboxer’s physique that made him a champion in Pakistan, but he says his mind has been weakened by years of indefinite detention, and the capricious, shape-shifting regime which has held him.