‘Our lives is in danger’: Manus Island and the end of asylum

Introduction

We declare our profound solidarity with, and support for, the millions of people in different parts of the world who, for reasons beyond their control, are forced to uproot themselves and their families from their homes. Refugees and migrants in large movements often face a desperate ordeal. Many take great risks, embarking on perilous journeys, which many may not survive …

We acknowledge a shared responsibility to manage large movements of refugees and migrants in a humane, sensitive, compassionate and people-centred manner. We will do so through international cooperation, while recognizing that there are varying capacities and resources to respond to these movements … We also recall our obligations to fully respect their human rights and fundamental freedoms, and we stress their need to live their lives in safety and dignity. We pledge our support to those affected today as well as to those who will be part of future large movements.

On 14 April 2017, local residents, including up to fifteen naval officers, opened fire on refugees and staff at the Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Alarmed refugees began immediately to alert the outside world. One posted on Facebook that ‘The Navy shot more than 100 times and some of the bullets hit rooms. The refugees and Australian officers are extremely scared and are in the centre now in the rooms and the tent.’ ³ At least three refugees and an unspecified number of Australian staff were reportedly injured ‘by stones thrown by local people’ and many staff vacated the centre for the next two days. As reports of the incident began percolating through the Australian media, Australia’s immigration minister, Peter Dutton, went on the offensive to accuse refugees of triggering the incident by enticing a 5-year-old boy into the centre. The implication, that the attack was in response to paedophile activity in the centre, was vehemently denied by the refugees and some centre staff, refuted by the regional police commander, and not supported by any published independent evidence. Nevertheless, Minister Dutton insisted he had ‘different information’, the sources of which he refused to disclose, and demanded an apology from the few media outlets prepared to challenge his account. ⁴

For Dutton, and much of the Australian media, this ill-tempered and dismissive rationalisation of criminal mistreatment will be logged simply as another passing moment in Australia’s prolonged campaign of border protection. However, for the refugees on Manus Island, it reflected the everyday, structural violence of Australia’s border policing operations. The Manus Island centre has been condemned extensively as a site of systemic abuse and violence. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the rates ‘for depressive or anxiety disorders and/or PTSD’ for those held at Manus Island ‘are amongst the highest rates of any surveyed population’. ⁵ Rates of self-harm are similarly high. Human Rights Watch (HRW) recorded in 2015 that its observers ‘met individuals who cut themselves, hit their head against a wall, refused to go outside, and refused to speak to others for months’. ⁶ In 2014, one refugee was murdered following a co-ordinated attack on the centre and two others have died amidst allegations of inadequate medical treatment. Overall, the situation is so dangerous that the UNHCR has advised both the Australian and PNG governments that ‘the integration of transferred refugees to Papua New Guinea is not possible’. ⁷

Along with the regional processing centre on Nauru, Manus Island represents the front line ⁸ of Australia’s border policing offensive against unauthorised refugees. This offensive began twenty-five years ago with the introduction of mandatory detention for those seeking entry without a visa. It has evolved to the point where, since July 2013, unauthorised arrivals are forcibly transferred to Nauru or Manus Island, where their protection claims are processed by the local authorities, and where they are left stranded pending resettlement or repatriation. The Australian government has said none will be resettled in Australia and has proposed legislation that will prevent them from ever entering the country. The government has even declined an offer from the New Zealand government to resettle up to 150 refugees per year on the grounds it risks opening ‘a back-door way to get into Australia’. ⁹ In effect, Australia’s off-shore detention regime has created a barrier every bit as impenetrable as Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border, and operates as a real-life example of the direction in which the US and some European Union states appear to be heading.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a ‘global refugee crisis’, manifested by a record 65 million people displaced globally and the mass migration of refugees across Europe on a scale not seen since the second world war. ¹⁰ In 2016, this crisis prompted a series of summits, including a High-Level Plenary convened by the UN General Assembly on 19 September and a Leaders’ Summit convened by President Obama the following day. ¹¹ Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and other world leaders attended both gatherings to declare their solidarity with refugees and make ‘concrete commitments’ to alleviate the crisis. The New York Declaration issued by the UN Summit also agreed to work towards the adoption of a global compact on refugees and a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration. The Declaration was greeted with considerable enthusiasm by UN agencies and NGOs. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for example, stated: ‘The New York Declaration marks a political commitment of unprecedented force and resonance. It fills what has been a perennial gap in the international protection system – that of truly sharing responsibility for refugees.’ ¹² Given the situation on the ground in states like Syria and within Australia’s Pacific gulag, the level of optimism arising from these summits bordered on surreal. The commitments made by states like Australia (discussed below) contributed virtually nothing to global resettlement efforts, were premised on maintaining ‘strong borders’, and left intact the abusive regimes on Manus Island and Nauru. Moreover, notwithstanding support for a new global compact by 2018, no commitments were made to guarantee free movement or protection to the millions of refugees immediately in need of both.

Using the example of Australia and focusing on the situation on Manus Island, ¹³ this article examines the disconnect between the formal declarations of support for refugees emanating from UN forums and the reality of state-based border policing practices. It argues that while there is certainly a brazen hypocrisy on the part of leaders such as the Australian prime minister, the fundamental problem is an approach to refugees that constructs them as a problem to be managed on terms determined by receiving states. This enables a small minority of refugees to be resettled but leaves most languishing in camps or trapped in black sites like Manus Island.

Responding to the global refugee crisis

The increased levels of forced migration in 2015 marked a spike in a long-term trend, driven primarily by the escalating conflict in Syria, rather than a startling new phenomenon. Arguably, had it not been for the attempted entry into Europe of large numbers of refugees via a complex range of routes, and the graphic images of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, the political normalisation of a global refugee ‘crisis’ would not have occurred. ¹⁴ The sudden visibility of refugee movement in the West belied the fact that most refugees remained stranded in or near the conflicts from which they were fleeing. Of the 65.3 million people displaced in 2015, 38 million were internally displaced, 10 million were stateless and 21.3 million were categorised as refugees. Over 85 per cent of refugees were residing in low- and middle-income countries and only 107,000 refugees (accounting for just 0.66 per cent of the 16.1 million under the UNHCR’s mandate ¹⁵ ) were resettled. ¹⁶

Overwhelmingly, the increased levels of forced migration have been constructed as a crisis of border policing to be resolved by placing further restrictions on free movement and entry. In the European Union, this included the EU-Turkey Statement in March 2016 enabling the forced transfer of refugees from Greece to Turkey, ¹⁷ the Hungarian government’s decision to construct a fence along the Hungary-Serbia border in July 2015 and proposal to detain all asylum seekers in camps in March 2017, ¹⁸ and the dismantling and forced dispersal of the residents of the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp by the French authorities in October 2016. ¹⁹ What these and other practices such as forced returns and push-backs ‘have in common’, writes Frances Webber, ‘is an utter ruthlessness in pursuit of the aim of stopping migration to Europe, combined with wilful blindness to the realities of repression and refusal to contemplate the human rights violations to which the agreements will inevitably and necessarily give rise’. ²⁰

Such responses by EU states reflect the longer-term operation of western exclusion zones around Europe, the United States and Australia. In the US and Australia, which were not as directly affected by the changed forced migration patterns as the European states, the ‘crisis’ was absorbed into the political lexicon justifying the intensification of pre-existing exclusionary policies. For example, while President Trump signed executive orders in January 2017 banning entry into the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and banning the US Refugee Admissions Program, ²¹ the Trump administration’s plans to construct a wall along the US-Mexico border are part of a much longer pattern pursued also by the Obama administration of establishing ‘concentric rings’ of border policing measures designed to create a ‘giant dome’ over North America. ²² In Australia, the externalisation of border controls has been central to the border policing systems put in place since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992. ²³ This has included naval interdiction and push-backs, off-shore processing on Nauru and Manus Island between 2001 and 2007 and again since August 2012, the funding of detention centres in Indonesia, and attempted swap deals such as the 2011 Australia-Malaysia Agreement which provided a model for the later EU-Turkey deal. ²⁴ Moreover, the sense of ‘crisis’ generated around 2015 has been used by the Australian government to justify its criminogenic detention policies as the basis for a ‘humanitarian’ refugee policy and ‘one of the most generous and compassionate resettlement programs in the world’. ²⁵

In his speech to the UN refugee summit, Prime Minister Turnbull urged other world leaders to follow Australia’s example and claimed that: ‘Addressing irregular migration through secure borders has been essential in creating the confidence that the government can manage migration in a way that mitigates risk and focuses humanitarian assistance on those who need it most.’ ²⁶ However, Australia’s record of assisting refugees is poor. As the Refugee Council of Australia points out: ‘Of the 2.45 million refugees who had their status recognised or were resettled in 2015, just 0.48% were assisted by Australia … [and] in the 10 years to 31 December 2015, the 139,398 refugees recognised or resettled by Australia accounted for 0.99% of the global total.’ And despite the Australian government’s claim that it operates ‘the world’s third largest resettlement program’, of the 107,000 resettlement places offered globally in 2015, Australia offered only 9,399 places. ²⁷

Australia’s pledges at the two summits did little to redress this. The only significant development was an agreement to participate in a US-led multilateral programme to resettle refugees from Central America currently held in camps in Costa Rica. ²⁸ This arrangement was not designed to increase Australia’s annual intake but it was tied to a further ‘one-off’ deal announced in November 2016 enabling the resettlement in the United States of up to 1,250 refugees currently stranded on Nauru and Manus Island. ²⁹ The future of that deal, signed in the last days of the Obama administration, remains uncertain. Even if it does proceed, it cannot accommodate the over 1,600 refugees on Nauru and Manus Island eligible for resettlement. ³⁰ Those not covered by the deal have been left with the option of resettlement in PNG or long-term temporary settlement in Nauru, both of which have been declared unsuitable arrangements by the UNHCR. Refugees processed on Nauru also have the option of resettlement in Cambodia but despite considerable pressure from the Australian authorities, few have yielded. Of the six refugees who have been resettled in Cambodia since June 2015, four have returned subsequently to their states of origin. ³¹

The Australian government’s denial of resettlement to those held on Nauru and Manus Island illustrates the way in which resettlement policy is integrated into the matrix of Australia’s deterrence policies towards refugees. By refusing to allow refugees entry to claim asylum, the Australian government is effectively bypassing the limited obligations arising from the 1951 Refugee Convention. If all states adopted Australia’s policies, the fragile edifice of legal protection for refugees would collapse. The problem is not just that Australia takes an especially cynical approach to international human rights law or that it owes a responsibility to those it has forcibly detained. Nor is it that Australia resettles only a tiny proportion of the world’s refugees and that its ‘humanitarian assistance’ largely consists of funding to contain refugees in the developing world. At the core of Australia’s policy rests a conceptual approach to refugees that deprives them of agency and vests legitimacy only in those willing to comply with border controls. Within this paradigm, the legitimate refugee waits in a notional queue with minimal prospects for resettlement, while the threatening, destabilising, dangerous refugee attempts to seek protection on their own terms. The meaning of refugee as someone forced to flee across borders to seek security and safety is reconfigured into a suspect outsider. This renders to a fallacy the notion that refugees have enforceable universal rights to protection and an entitlement not to be punished because of their status. And, taken to its logical conclusion, it allows for the systemic criminalisation and abuse inherent to Australia’s policies. The crisis for refugees that is unfolding on Manus Island provides a dismal illustration of this.

Incarceration and structural violence

The Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (RPC) is located on the Lombrum naval base, originally established during the second world war. In 2015, a Refugee Transit Centre (RTC) was also established by the PNG government in the nearby township of East Lorengau to house refugees eligible for resettlement. In October 2016, the PNG government further announced it would be building another detention centre in Port Moresby to hold detainees facing removal. ³² Formally, the RPC is hosted by the PNG government in accordance with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the Australian and PNG governments in August 2013. Under the terms of the MOU, the Australian government is responsible for the operational costs, including processing and resettlement. The centre is administered by a PNG government appointee but private ‘service providers’ contracted by the Australian government undertake the bulk of the daily operational tasks, including welfare, healthcare and internal security.

The RPC was re-opened in November 2012 following the decision of the Labor government in August 2012 to return to the system of ‘offshore processing’ on Nauru and Manus Island (the ‘Pacific Solution’) implemented by the Liberal-National Party Coalition government between 2001 and 2007. The background to the 2012 decision is analysed in detail elsewhere, ³³ suffice it to say that the official rationale for the move – that it was necessary to prevent asylum seekers losing their lives at sea – was a flimsy attempt to rationalise a policy that was designed politically to reinforce Labor’s credentials domestically as being ‘tough on borders’.

Those transferred to Manus Island and Nauru under the revived policy were subjected to the ‘no advantage’ principle, which meant they would have to wait for up to five years for a determination on their protection claims. In July 2013, before any of these claims were processed, the principle was abandoned in favour of the current policy of enforced third-country resettlement in PNG, Nauru or any other state deemed suitable by the Australian authorities. Those detained offshore prior to 19 July 2013 (approximately 350 on Manus Island including family groups) were removed to detention in Australia before mostly being released into the community on bridging visas pending the outcome of their applications. Since then, only adult males have been detained on Manus Island. By February 2014, over 1,300 men were detained. As of 28 February 2017, the numbers had declined to 837, with the remainder either returned to their states of origin, living in the East Lorengau transit centre, living in the community in Port Moresby, or held in Australia for medical treatment. ³⁴

During that time, the Manus Island complex has operated as a hybrid total institution ³⁵ and gulag within which Australian state agencies, through an opaque and complex chain of command, wield control over detainees’ basic means of survival, their daily routines, and the key decisions affecting their lives. The status of the RPC was thrown into question by the decision of the PNG Supreme Court in April 2016 that the detention regime breached PNG’s constitutional guarantee of liberty to all persons. ³⁶ The following day, the PNG Prime Minister ordered the centre to be closed but the Australian government responded by enabling some liberty, for example, allowing detainees access to a football pitch adjacent to the centre and to take daily return bus trips off the naval base. However, those detained in the RPC are not permitted to stay overnight at the RTC, even if they have refugee status. The legal fiction promoted by the Australian government that the centre was no longer detaining people in closed conditions was taken further by the Chief Justice of the PNG Supreme Court in March 2017, when he reportedly held that those detained at the centre were ‘now accommodated at the naval base the centre was built on’ and that the centre had been ‘closed down’. ³⁷ In April 2017, the Australian government announced that the centre would in fact be shut down by 31 October 2017; but in May PNG immigration officials announced that demolition and forced clearance of the centre would begin by the end of the month. ³⁸ As will be discussed below, this leaves unresolved the fates of the hundreds of refugees stranded there.

Despite these developments, the RPC is a prison in all but name. A 2013 report by Amnesty International described it as follows:

The facility is a closed detention centre, resembling a combination of a prison and military camp. Detainees are prevented from leaving by locked gates and security guards at the exits to each compound and the main entrance to the facility. Inside, the detention centre is a network of single-story buildings, staff facilities and ‘compounds’ that house asylum seekers, all divided by fences of about 2.4 metres in height and connected by uneven dirt tracks. The structures are a combination of World War II-era buildings with concrete walls and corrugated iron roofs, temporary structures such as marquees and ‘demountables’ (similar to converted shipping containers), and basic building used as offices by staff. Security staff … are visible at all times, positioned at all gates and patrolling all areas.

Within this environment, freedom of movement was seriously curtailed:

Asylum seekers are not free to leave the detention centre on their own, and the movement of asylum seekers within the facility is highly regulated and securitised. Asylum seekers and visitors must sign in and out when entering and leaving the compounds, including to attend medical visits, and must be accompanied by a G4S guard at all times. G4S guards also accompany female service providers or visitors who enter the compounds.

Although the facility has secure walkways that detainees can use between areas, they are often transported less than 100m in a G4S vehicle. ³⁹

In November 2016, the UNHCR submitted to the Australian Senate Committee Inquiry ⁴⁰ that it had ‘observed over successive visits [to the RPC] excessive levels of security … creating an institutionalised and punitive environment, wholly inappropriate for asylum seekers and refugees’. Furthermore, it had ‘observed overcrowding in Oscar and Delta compounds for recognized refugees during the April 2016 visit, with highly reduced personal space for privacy or solitary reflection’. The dwellings in the two compounds ‘provided approximately 1.68m² per person, which is half the minimum international standard for prisons’. ⁴¹

In general, the UNHCR noted that despite the reclassification of the centre to ‘open’, ‘asylum seekers and refugees living at the [RPC] have restricted freedom of movement’ and that this was ‘not only owing to security regulations related to the Lombrum Naval Base … but other factors including fear arising from security threats against asylum seekers and refugees outside the Lombrum Centre’. ⁴² The security threats, exemplified by the fatal attack on the RPC in February 2014 and the events of April 2017, ⁴³ have generated widespread anxiety amongst the detainees. As the UNHCR also noted, by April 2016, over 400 refugees had refused to transfer to the East Lorengau Transit Centre, with the vast majority of those spoken to at the RPC by the UNHCR citing ‘fears for their safety among the many reasons that prevented them from moving out’. ⁴⁴ Evidence of such fears was also provided to the Senate Committee Inquiry by HRW, which submitted that detainees ‘rarely leave the Centre despite now having the freedom to do so’ and ‘that these fears were contributing to an unwillingness to consider settling in PNG, with some refugees describing settling in PNG as “unthinkable” and “terrifying”’. Further, ‘several of the 25 refugees who had moved to mainland PNG to live, had returned to Manus because they felt unsafe, were the victims of crime, or faced problems in the workplace’. ⁴⁵ HRW also raised concerns about the targeting of gay refugees and the criminalisation of same-sex relationships between men in PNG, while a lawyer from the Human Rights Law Centre gave evidence that:

I witnessed the aftermath of a very violent attack by a group of locals against two refugees. The two refugees were surrounded, were beaten with an iron bar and were robbed. One of them collapsed unconscious, and I saw that. ⁴⁶

The tensions between sections of the local Manus Island community and the detainees are rooted in the socio-economic impacts of locating the centre in one of the poorer regions of PNG. Several submissions to the Australian Senate inquiry into the February 2014 ⁴⁷ attacks emphasised local resentment at the disproportionate resources seen to be devoted to the centre; the distorting effect it had on the local economy; the relative privileges perceived to be available to the detainees; the thriving black market in cigarettes and other goods available in the centre; and the environmental damage. In the days preceding the 2014 attacks, tensions were also stoked by the stationing of the PNG Mobile Squad (riot police) near the perimeter of the centre in response to escalating protests by the refugees. The attack, which was carried out by members of the Mobile Squad, local residents (many of whom were also employed at the centre), and some members of the centre’s Incident Response Team intersected with confrontations between the protesters and centre security staff. The assaults on the detainees were violent, chaotic and traumatic. At least sixty-nine people were injured and a Kurdish refugee from Iran, Reza Barati, was killed when his skull was fractured. Two men employed at the centre were subsequently convicted of murdering Barati. A witness who identified one of the men to an earlier inquiry testified to the levels of violence:

Yes, he’s the one who … hit him twice with a very long stick … When he fall down, more than 10 officer passed him and all of them, they kicked him in his head. I know these officers by their face … I can recognise all of them, it was including PNG locals, PNG guards and Australian expats … Then at the end, when he was down, all of those officers, they had the riot gear … and the locals from the outside, because whoever attacked us attacked us from the back wall … When he fall, all of the guards who were passing, they kick him in his head, and the last one, one of the PNG locals [name redacted], he put a very big stone at his head. ⁴⁸

The April 2017 attacks were less serious in their intensity but reflected enduring tensions. According to the eyewitness account of detained Kurdish Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani, ‘the incident started when drunk soldiers had a serious argument with refugees who had been using the soccer field’. ⁴⁹ Subsequently, access to the soccer ground and other facilities on the naval base was banned pending an investigation. Six days after the attack, Boochani wrote:

Also, we have just heard the Australian immigration minister say in an interview that the incident was sparked by asylum seekers taking a local boy into the processing centre. It’s a big lie and he wants to hide the truth. If the fight started because the refugees wanted to take the boy to the centre, why did the navy commander order that we cannot use the soccer ground? … His comment is very dangerous and makes this place more unsafe because he is going to make more conflict between refugees and local people … His lies are very dangerous. He must respect Manusian culture and try not to make people more angry. We refugees did not come to Manus by our will and I’m calling on both refugees and Manusian people to be smart and not allow a politician in Australia to make more trouble here. ⁵⁰

The violence associated with attacks from sections of the local community, and fuelled by inflammatory comments by politicians in Australia and PNG, ⁵¹ cannot be dissociated from the structural, systemic violence of the detention and offshore transfer process. This violence takes many forms and manifests itself through a range of harms inflicted upon the refugees but ultimately derives from the routine exercises of force by border policing agencies. The methods used extend the continuum of abuse experienced by many forced migrants during their hazardous journeys to Australia. From its interviews with the first cohort of refugees transferred to PNG in 2013, Amnesty International noted:

All were shocked to hear that the Australian government had decided to hand them over to a country that many had never heard of.

Even more shocking to them was the manner in which they were transferred to Manus Island – woken in the middle of the night, told they were being removed … made to wait for hours with little food, made to sign statements that they were undertaking the journey to Papua New Guinea voluntarily, and then escorted onto the plane by security guards, one on each side of each asylum seeker, holding him firmly by the arms. Once on the plane, asylum seekers were not allowed to leave their seats except to use the toilet; when they did so, they were accompanied by security guards and told to leave the door open as they relieved themselves. ⁵²

Systemic abuse and neglect

The criminalisation and dehumanisation of refugees through such practices flowed through to the detention environment. There is extensive evidence of abusive conduct towards detainees by RPC staff, through ‘bullying, intimidation and harassment’. In 2016, the Senate Committee Inquiry was told by a former RPC employee that:

[I]n her experience, any staff members who deviated from using language which dehumanised the detainees was ‘instantly suspect’ and would be questioned and monitored by others for not having ‘professional boundaries’. She stated that despite attempts by management to ensure that staff referred to detainees by their names, they would generally be referred to by their boat identification number. She also alleged that refugees and asylum seekers would be taunted, provoked and humiliated by Australian staff, pushed and subjected to verbal abuse including calling them ‘ragheads’ and ‘sand niggers’, and physically crowded by guards and sexually assaulted. ⁵³

There have also been allegations of physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by other detainees, and that distrust of the centre security staff and management operates as a barrier to these being reported. In April 2016, the UNHCR found that the measures put in place to respond to such allegations were ‘insufficient to address the protection needs and concerns of victims’ and that:

Senior staff members responded on at least one occasion that allegations of sexual assault, including rape, are unsubstantiated and asylum-seekers and refugees may simply be exaggerating such claims. Staff did not appear to appreciate or take into account the serious welfare concerns for survivors of sexual assault, despite acknowledgement of the lack of forensic capacity by local police to investigate. ⁵⁴

In February 2017, a detainee and award-winning cartoonist who draws using the name Eaten Fish, went on hunger strike for nineteen days in protest at the way in which a sexual abuse allegation made by him had been handled, and because he couldn’t ‘bear the suffering anymore’. ⁵⁵ His case underscored the crisis in mental health that is generated by mandatory detention. The burgeoning literature on the damaging impacts on mental health arising from immigration detention was largely ignored when offshore processing was revived. Indeed, the known and predictable consequences of detention for mental health are incorporated into the deterrent nature of the policy. As the former director of psychiatric services for the detention network, Dr Peter Young, commented in 2014:

We have here an environment that is inherently toxic … It has characteristics which over time reliably cause harm to people’s mental health. We have very clear evidence that that’s the case … If we take the definition of torture to be the deliberate harming of people in order to coerce them into a desired outcome, I think it does fulfil that definition. ⁵⁶

In April 2016, UNHCR conducted a survey of 181 asylum seekers and refugees on Manus Island, most of whom had ‘no pre-existing psychiatric disorder prior to their detention’, although ‘a considerable proportion had been exposed to trauma’. The survey found that:

88 percent were suffering from a depressive or anxiety disorder and/or post-traumatic stress disorder … Furthermore, a number of very severe psychiatric disorders were identified, including gross psychopathology consistent with psychosis as well as psychotic dissociation.

By comparison:

The rates of moderate or high psychological stress in newly settled refugees in Australia are 35 percent for men and 46 percent for women. The prevalence of depression or anxiety is estimated to be 10 percent in male prison populations, and 61 percent for asylum-seekers living in the community.

The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder is estimated to be nine percent in resettled refugee populations, 21–30 percent in male prisoner populations and 52 percent for asylum-seekers in the Australian community …

Furthermore, the medical experts observed that a significant number of asylum seekers and refugees reported experiences of bullying, intimidation and harassment by security staff, which has resulted in them being frightened, withdrawn and submissive in their interactions with Lobrum Regional Processing Centre staff. These conditions have precipitated and/or exacerbated major depressive disorders in vulnerable individuals.

The UNHCR further submitted to the Senate Committee Inquiry that:

[T]he type, extent and severity of these mental disorders is unprecedented within the [PNG] health system … [PNG] mental health services are structured to assess and treat low prevalence illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and substance related disorders. There is no current skills capacity [within PNG] public mental health services to address severe post-traumatic stress disorder and current resourcing will not be able to cope with the surge of cases with major depression. ⁵⁷

The systemic mental health crisis and isolation endured by refugees underpins widespread, routine self-harm. For example, on 3 May 2017, Behrouz Boochani posted on Facebook:

Last night one of the refugees hurt himself with a razor in Oscar bathroom. He hurt both of his wrists, but his left wrist was hurt seriously and the bathroom space became full of blood. He was in medical almost all day today and it shows that his situation is serious. This man was very sick mentally and physically for a long time but IHMS did not provide medical treatment for him and he was under pressure. He is a father and husband and this point is enough for anybody in this prison to break after four years suffering without any clear future.

On the basis of its April 2016 data, the UNHCR argued to the Senate Committee Inquiry that there was significant underreporting of self-harm and that the oral evidence gathered by doctors ‘of numerous first-hand accounts of self-inflicted lacerations, voluntary refusal of food and fluid, and deliberate overdosing of stockpiled medications … would have grossly exceeded the reported rate’. Moreover, the official data provided no insight into the desperation underpinning acts of self-harm and attempted suicide nor the Australian immigration department’s bland, bureaucratic responses. ⁵⁸ In November 2016, an Iranian refugee attempted to set himself alight for the second time in five weeks. He was stopped by a fellow detainee as he was about to throw himself into a fire but the official record of the incident noted a fire had been extinguished without any reference to a self-immolation attempt. Contrary to the norm in Australia, the refugee reportedly has received no counselling or mental health support. ⁵⁹

This is consistent with the evidence given by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to the Senate Committee Inquiry regarding the inadequacy of medical services within the RPC and more generally PNG. One of a series of case studies presented by the AMA was of ‘a man [who] allegedly sustained a head injury at the Manus RPC, and subsequently lost consciousness twice over the following 38 hours’. A neurosurgeon ‘advised that the patient required a brain scan and possibly an MRI’ but the department subsequently advised the AMA that the patient ‘is not prescribed any regular medications [and] no recent health issues have arisen’. ⁶⁰

The continuity and quality of healthcare available to detainees is complicated by the contractual arrangements for healthcare provision within the centre, and delays in referrals to either PNG or Australian hospitals. Two detainees have died in Australian hospitals after being transferred for emergency treatment amidst allegations of inadequate care and undue delays. ⁶¹ In August 2014, 24-year-old Hamid Kehazaei was admitted to the RPC medical centre suffering from a fever. There, doctors’ instructions ‘to provide [medication] were ignored two nights in a row … leaving him in increasing pain, vomiting and growing increasingly confused … As he grew increasingly sick and sepsis took hold, Kehazaei was heard, even from outside the medical centre, screaming unremittingly … Severely hypoxic … [he] was left unsheltered from the tropical sun at the airfield – febrile and septic, but unsedated – while he waited for the air ambulance to finally fly him off the island to a hospital in Port Moresby.’ ⁶² According to medical evidence given to the Coroner, he was then the victim of ‘a cascading litany of mistakes’, including not being admitted to an available intensive care unit. He was believed to be ‘neurologically dead’ by the time he was flown to Brisbane. A doctor working for International SOS, who organise the medical transfers from immigration detention, told the Coroner that the immigration department ‘routinely refuses doctors’ recommendations to move critically ill asylum seekers to Australian hospitals’. ⁶³ Another doctor who attended the inquest said:

The court heard that the request for medical movement – including that just from Manus Island to PNG mainland – needs to go through five separate Departmental personnel for approval, even after the transfer had been recommended by several doctors. In almost 30 years practicing as a doctor in Australia, I have never once seen this sort of bureaucratic sanctioning required anywhere. ⁶⁴

Similar concerns were raised regarding the death of 27-year-old Faysal Ishak Ahmed in December 2016. Ahmed collapsed at the RPC following a seizure and, according to the immigration department, died from subsequent injuries. However, Facebook posts from Behrouz Boochani claimed:

Faysal wrote about his heart problem and headaches. Many times Faysal collapsed and all of us here knew that he was seriously sick for more than 6 months. More than 60 people wrote a letter to IHMS [contracted health services provider] and explained to them how faisal is sick and has constant headache and heart problem but they did not care. Every day Faysal went to medical asking for help. They did not help him. A few days ago a nurse in IHMS told Faysal that he was fine and didn’t need medical treatment. ⁶⁵

Deterrence, abandonment and resettlement

The daily experiences of refugees on Manus Island are almost totally absent from Australia’s mainstream political discourse. While isolated individuals like Behrouz Boochani struggle to reach out by social media and a limited number of news outlets, there is a deliberate strategy of institutional obfuscation and silence. Thus, the Senate Committee inquiring into the abuse allegations on Nauru and Manus Island complained it had not received appropriate co-operation from the immigration department, while Greens Senator Nick McKim was refused entry to the RPC when he sought to investigate the April 2017 attacks. Moreover, in an out of court settlement in June 2017, the government agreed to pay $70m. damages to 1,905 Manus Island detainees rather than have evidence of their experiences ventilated in open court surroundings. ⁶⁶

Since 2013, the Coalition government has refused to comment on ‘operational matters’ such as boat turnbacks and the internal workings of the detention centres. This strategic commitment to secrecy, combined with measures introduced in July 2015 to criminalise whistleblowing ⁶⁷ reflect both an aggressive fixation with deterrence and a dismissal of the humanity of refugees. The pursuit of ‘secure borders’ has been elevated to such a primary criterion of political authority that the existential crises it creates for the thousands of refugees affected by it barely merit acknowledgment.

In this context, resettlement is reduced to an endgame cynically played out as an act of largesse. The deal signed with the US government to resettle refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru was an exercise in ‘burden sharing’ necessitated entirely by the Australian government’s refusal to allow unauthorised entry. The absence of any humanitarian principle underpinning the agreement means that those not covered by it – potentially a significant percentage given the Presidential ban on migrants from Muslim countries – can be marooned indefinitely with little prospect of resettlement offers from other states. Moreover, within PNG, where resettlement policies have focused almost exclusively on refugees from West Papua, ⁶⁸ the understandable absence of political will to take long-term responsibility for its much wealthier neighbour’s border policing policies means the Manus Island detainees face the choice of being stranded in a dangerous limbo or returning to their states of origin. The sense of abandonment created by this situation was summed up by a Rohingyan refugee in June 2016:

The irony is that we were rescued from the death sea and we now have been pushed to death on the land …

There are no tears left on our eyes to shed, our hearts are not beating any more. We have been tortured beyond our endurance. We wander around confused, tormented, distressed and with addled minds. We are dying one by one. We desperately need your help and support in order to end this political game. We are neglected, abandoned, tortured, humiliated, beaten to death and most notably accused of being criminals and terrorists without committing any crimes. ⁶⁹

The legal and social alienation of refugees that arises from their exclusion by the Australian state essentially condemns them to a form of civil death. Once detained and under the control of the Australian authorities, they are permitted no rights other than to return to their state of origin and cease ‘being’ refugees. As a collective of ‘boat people’, their main function for the Australian state is to remain a largely invisible mass that can simultaneously be constructed as a threat to be deterred and an example of Australia’s resolve only to acknowledge those refugees unable or unwilling to engage in unauthorised travel. This reduction of the refugee to an entity whose fundamental existence is determined entirely by an external state for its own purposes illustrates how the ‘humanitarianism’ of resettlement is divorced from any meaningful concept of universal rights.

Conclusion

The situation on Manus Island has reached a tipping point, and it seems the Australian authorities have engineered a situation calculated to put the maximum pressure possible on refugees to accept ‘voluntary’ return. Indeed, documents leaked to The Guardian in May 2017 revealed that ‘[f]or more than a year, camp managers and security staff have waged a campaign to make … [the Manus Island centre] as inhospitable as possible’. ⁷⁰ With the RPC due to close, there is the prospect of large-scale forced removals or dispersal into the PNG community, particularly if the US swap deal does not proceed. ⁷¹ Given the acknowledged fears refugees hold about living in PNG and the long-term impacts of their incarceration, it seems probable this will be a violent and convulsive process. In the longer term, offshore detention seems likely to continue in Nauru (where the patterns of abuse mirror Manus Island), although the escalation of boat turnbacks may mean the numbers of detainees will continue to decline. For the two main political parties in Australia, mandatory detention (either on or offshore) remains central to their border policing policies. The indisputable evidence of the abusive nature of detention continues to prompt official denials or, at best, concern. Thus, the Senate Committee Inquiry into allegations of abuse on Nauru and Manus Island, on which government senators were in a minority, provided a devastating catalogue of mistreatment but limited its recommendations to demanding further inquiries.

Nevertheless, there has been a vocal campaign in Australia to enable those brought to Australia to remain and to resettle those stranded on Nauru and Manus Island (#Let Them Stay – Bring Them Here). ⁷² This has more than domestic significance. With the Australian government arguing its approach provides a model for other western states, the need to establish a right to free movement as a foundation for any ‘solution’ to the refugee crisis becomes urgent. Even if some large-scale resettlement agreements emerge from the UN processes in 2018, it seems unlikely they will accommodate more than a small proportion of the world’s refugees. In that context, a right to free movement without the further risks associated with abusive practices such as detention and offshore processing, remains fundamental to an internationalist humanitarian response.