🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea: Strangers in Paradise | 101 East

“It’s like a prison, like Guantanamo Bay, the one America built in Cuba,” says Faisal. As he sits in a refugee detention centre on an island in the middle of the Pacific, his dream of starting a new life in Australia is fading.

Many refugees fleeing war and persecution dream of starting new lives in Australia, but recently any who try to travel there by boat instead end up on shores far away in Papua New Guinea.

More than 3,500km away from Faisal, his sister Samar waits by the phone in her Sydney home. When he calls, he tells her he has no news of when he will be released.

This is the life of more than 1,000 men detained behind the barbwire fences of Australia’s refugee processing centre on PNG’s remote Manus Island. Most of them are fleeing countries like Iran, Iraq, and Sri Lanka. They are detained for months or years while their claims are being processed, after which they are either sent home or to a third country.

It is difficult to gain access to the detention facility – where refugees live behind high fences and appear to be housed in shipping containers. Tensions are high. Detainees are frustrated over long waiting and processing periods.

Earlier this year, frustration at the camp exploded into violence. Riots broke out over two days and were brutally put down by PNG police. At the height of the violence, Reza Berati, a 23-year-old Iranian asylum seeker, was killed.

The Australian government insists sending asylum seekers to Pacific Islands for processing deters refugees from risking their lives on dangerous sea journeys. For the more than 60,000 Manus islanders, hosting the refugee processing centre
promises job opportunities and increased Australian aid.

But at a nearby village, angry locals are calling for the detention centre to be shut down. According to Ruth Mandrakamu, the mayor of the provincial capital, Lorengau, the centre is breeding resentment and animosity.

“We are not benefitting in the way we should be,” she says. “I just want to make sure the governments of Australia and Papua New Guinea bring something permanent here for the local people.”

The Australian government recently announced that their resettlement policy in PNG will be revised. But it provides little information of its plans for the Manus Island detention centre or the refugees held inside. What is clear is that many locals staunchly oppose accepting refugees into an already impoverished nation.

101 East travels to the remote Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to investigate Australia’s controversial detention policy and the lives it continues to affect.

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