The men packing the boat with rice, cigarettes and medicine had fled war and persecution in their home countries.
Now, at 1 a.m., 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.”
Secret supply runs maintain the camp’s solidarity.
Power, food and water were cut off weeks ago.
The asylum seekers have been trapped for years.
Some holdouts struggle with anxiety and depression.
More than 1,300 asylum seekers 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 center 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
self-determination, and to intensify scrutiny of Australia’s migration
policy and methods.
And that scrutiny has come.
Veteran United Nations officials said this
month they had never seen a wealthy democracy go to such extremes to
punish asylum seekers 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 United Nations 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 neighbor.
“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.”
The camp is a half-hour boat ride from town.
Relations with refugees have been uneasy.
Jobs on Manus are scarce. Rents are rising.
Just south of the equator, the heat is relentless.
The detention center, a warren of barracks and
tents, sprawls across a naval base used by American 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 Oct. 31.
But finding alternatives has been a struggle.
Some of the men at the camp — all of whom were
caught at trying to reach Australia by boat — have been granted refugee
status and are hoping for relocation to the United States, under a deal
brokered by President Obama and initially opposed by President 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 miles from the camp.
Lorengau is not a big place. It is a close-knit
rural town with a few thousand people, a single supermarket, a rusty
playground and electricity that comes and goes.
The new detention facilities are set apart from
main roads and are closely guarded — we were turned away when a
photographer and I tried to visit. But detainees can come and go. And
photos, taken by the men, show that none of the facilities were fully
operational more than a week after the move was supposed to happen.
At one of the new facilities, West Lorengau
Haus, the electricity and water had not been turned on when
representatives of the United Nations refugee agency visited days after
the main camp had officially closed.
“It’s still a construction site — you can’t just move refugees into that space,” said Ms. Stubberfield, the spokeswoman.
The two other sites also had problems: One had
intermittent running water, and the other, the East Lorengau Transit
Center, lacked caseworkers.
Kepo Pomat, who owns the land that facility
occupies, said he had issued the authorities an ultimatum: If his
company did not receive the caseworker employment contracts, he would
kick the refugees off his property.
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 center
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.”
Behrouz Boochani writes about the camp’s struggles.
But others suffer silently.
Morteza Arefifar recently tried to commit suicide.
Joinul Islam was attacked with a machete.
Back inside the main detention camp, conditions
deteriorated quickly after the Australians officially left on Oct. 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.
Mr. Satah, the leader of the supply operation,
seemed relieved when our boat pushed ashore. The navy guards and police
meant to keep everything out of the camp either did not see us or chose
not to intervene. Mr. Satah, a fast-talking former English teacher,
smiled he led a dozen men carrying food and medicine toward a container
inside the compound.
“O.K. Brothers, thank you very much — love you, love you,” he said, echoing their expressions of appreciation.
Though it was after 2 a.m., many of the men
were eager to guide me through the camp, where most had lived for more
than four years, in many cases without ever leaving.
They showed off the well they had dug for
water, and the protest signs they posted on Twitter using cracked
cellphones, cherished like fine crystal.
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 the 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Rahman said he was barely getting by after paying for rising
rent and food costs.
“Not everyone can do this,” Mr. Rahman said,
between customers. “We’re really not accepted in this country. If they
bring everyone to town, many people will die.”
Photos in camp point to the past.
Graffiti shows the pain of detention.
And the dead are memorialized.
Another challenge: missing family.
The fear of violence is shared by many of the
asylum seekers, who have been targets of attacks in Manus and in other
parts of Papua New Guinea, as they have been in other countries. A
recent Human Rights Watch report documented a series of cellphones thefts and attacks, some involving machetes.
Kakau Karani, Lorengau’s acting mayor, said
that the risks were exaggerated and that in fact, many residents had
provided the men with food, lodging and work.
Around 10 children have been born to asylum
seekers and local women, the mayor said, adding, “If we weren’t
friendly, we would not be making babies here.”
Other residents worry that the men are preying on local women.
Ultimately, both the asylum seekers and the local residents are a mix of potential and risks.
Some of the detainees are resilient and have
learned new languages. Others survive with sleeping pills or drink too
much — as do some local men.
Australia says offshore detention has reduced trafficking and deaths at sea. Mr. Turnbull has rejected an offer from New Zealand to take 150 of the refugees, arguing it would encourage traffickers.
But for Manus, the effects are evolving and
still being tallied. Six detainees have died here. A small number have
reached Australia for medical treatment. Hundreds have left, after
agreeing to deportation. And 54 refugees from Manus and Nauru have made
it to the United States.
When might more follow?
Yassir Hussein, one of the camp’s leaders, said
he often contemplated ideals like liberty and justice — and what they
mean for migration’s winners and losers.
“We are happy for the lucky ones,” he said. “But why are they lucky? Why are we not lucky?”
