Welcome To Manus, The Island That Has Been Changed Forever by Australian Asylum-Seeker Policy | THE GUARDIAN
By Jo Chandler
Photographs: Vlad Sokhin/Panos Pictures
The 60,000 people of Manus province, a remote island outpost of Papua New Guinea, had no say in the decision by Australian and local leaders to detain, process and at least temporarily resettle foreign asylum seekers on their shores.
“We heard about it on the radio,” says Nahau Rooney, a pioneering political leader, former PNG justice minister and Manus’ most famous daughter.
In the 14 months since Australia’s “PNG solution” was brokered, sending asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by boat to Manus for processing and eventual resettlement in PNG, the operation has also sent a tsunami of change crashing through every dimension of island life.
It has delivered a booming economy, jobs and desperately needed services. It has also brought social and environmental damage, deaths, dislocation, disputes and deep anxiety about what will come next. What is certain is that life in Manus will never be the same.
Any day now the first 10 recognised refugees are expected to move out of detention and into the $137m village Australia has built for them in Lorengau, the provincial capital. More refugees are expected to follow each week. Here they will live freely, but many are deeply anxious about how they will be received and fear for their lives.
Manusians are famously welcoming, but some are resentful about the uninvited arrival of these new neighbours; some are nervous and have little information to quell their concerns; and many worry about the strain they will place on the island’s limited jobs and services.
This exclusive investigation for Guardian Australia explores from the ground the consequences, good and ill, of Australia’s asylum seeker policy on the land, sea and people of Manus.
Touchdown at Momote airport
Two years ago there were only a couple of flights a week to faraway Manus province. Today aircraft sweep in every day over the Bismarck Sea, crossing 370km of open water from the Papua New Guinea mainland to bump down on a strip carved into the jungle by Japanese soldiers 72 years ago.
It’s here, since November 2012, that more than 1,650 asylum seekers who once tried to sail to a new life in Australia have instead found themselves unloaded on to PNG soil.
Most of the first wave, about 300, did fly back to Australia for processing when the regional resettlement arrangement with PNG was signed in August 2013. But under its terms all who have arrived since have been assured that even if they are ultimately recognised as refugees, they will never live in Australia. PNG will be their home.
None of these asylum seekers have yet been released, though this is said to be close. Two have died. More than 240 have flown away again, “voluntary returns” to their homelands. At last count 1,056 remain in detention, 20 minutes from where they landed.
They are held in a compound at a place called Lombrum. Though it long predates them, the name in local language refers to the bottom of a canoe where captives are kept.
Momote airport has also seen the coming and going of the legions of guards, tradespeople, medics, interpreters and officials required to wrangle, secure, house, assess and care for the asylum seekers.
Today a cargo plane touches down, engines never stopping as great crates are hauled out of its belly, fodder for the still-growing, voracious beast that is Australia’s Manus Island regional processing centre.
In the stifling departure shack an assortment of fly-in-fly-outs wait for the overdue morning Air Niugini flight. They grip their boarding passes — their tickets out of the noise and the heat. For their discomfort they will be well remunerated. Skilled trades can earn $200,000 in PNG. Some specialists at the centre are on $1,200 a day.
The Fokker 100 arrives. The latest arrivals might be consultants, construction workers or entrepreneurs cashing in on the bonanza the detention enterprise has ignited.
Many will never set foot inside the wire pens that are the business end of the detention centre, images of which now define Manus to the world. It’s hard to reconcile it with the cultural wonderland made famous by the fieldwork of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Some days the passengers transiting at Momote will include a young man, frail-looking, perhaps nursing wounds, escorted by guards. An asylum seeker returning from medical treatment in Port Moresby or Australia. There have been at least 48 medical evacuations, according to leaked records. He will be herded into a separate wire pen.
It’s all about him, this turnstile of people and cargo. Yet here he’s a bit player.
History lessons
Manus and neighbouring Los Negros Island haven’t seen this much action since 1944, when their deep, sheltered anchorages became home to a million US troops.
There’s a fractured concrete memorial in the jungle just beyond the tarmac where General Douglas MacArthur came ashore on 29 February, claiming “the base from which he would launch his great amphibious operation for the liberation of the Philippines”. Nearby is another memorial for the defeated Japanese. Occasionally descendants still find their way here.
War left behind piles of rusting debris and broken wharves. It also changed life in Manus entirely, reverberating through culture, imagination, infrastructure and economy.
It sparked so-called cargo cults and a powerful grassroots cultural revolution that endures today, underwriting the aspirations and education of the ranks of Manusians who are political, corporate and bureaucratic leaders in Port Moresby and beyond.
The tiny province has long punched above its weight in influence, its human resource becoming its most sustaining export in the half century since the market for copra — dried coconut flesh — collapsed, though there are signs the latest generation of students, distracted and in broken-down schools, are losing ground.
Now another surprise foreign incursion, Australia’s, is transforming Manus reality.
It has brought the asylum seekers, until now locked up tight in Lombrum, but soon the first refugees will be living and mingling freely with the population in Lorengau, according to the overdue timetable.
Diaspora from the world’s most damaged communities will be living in one of the world’s most disadvantaged countries. How long they will stay in Manus no one, it seems, can say, a source of tension for refugees and Manusians alike.
It has brought a thousand local jobs and crews of expat and national contractors delivering millions of dollars worth of desperately needed infrastructure, including in health and education.
It has brought squads of PNG’s notorious mobile squad police to guard the enterprise. Their actions have buried two local sons, one a schoolboy. They’ve menaced villagers objecting to aspects of the detention centre activities.
It has brought waves of Australian diplomats and functionaries implementing strategies to douse local disgruntlement at the profound social, cultural, environmental and economic impacts their operation has brought.
Right now many Manus people are preoccupied with wringing the most they can from this rare moment. Others try to contain the worst of the mess.
Many are angry they were not consulted when their land was co-opted as a “Pacific gulag”, in the words of Powes Parkop, a Manus son, human rights lawyer and governor of Port Moresby and the National Capital District. It offends both PNG law and local culture, he says.
Many welcome the flow of investment and jobs but are distressed at the dislocation caused by rapid change. Their voices are muted. “They can’t speak their mind, these people,” Parkop says. “If they talk, they will be sacked. This is not a peaceful regime.”
Some hope that ultimately the benefits will outweigh the costs. Manus has no gold, oil or gas to lure investors. What other endeavor might deliver critical health and education improvements in Manus, asks Alexander Rheeney, another high-stepping local who edits the national Post Courier newspaper.
But there is universal cynicism about whether either Australian or PNG leaders will do what is required to realise that hope.
One woman recalls a cautionary story passed down by her grandfather, from nearby Baluan Island, about the perils of misplaced faith in such an unforgiving landscape.
It was soon after the war, when islanders were preoccupied with how they might acquire the kind of wealth and health enjoyed by the US soldiers. A man on Baluan declared himself a prophet and urged his fellow villagers to cut off his head, destroy their crops and canoes, wait three days and he would rise and deliver them all into a paradise of plenty.
They duly obliged but after three days “he just began to rot and smell” and most of the village had to begin again. Her grandfather, she says, was wise enough to have hidden his canoe.
A Sunday walk
The cook at my guesthouse has invited me to mass at St Michael’s. Susan Kalai is a soft-spoken but fervent crusader for the Legion of Mary. More than half the province’s population are Catholic, the remainder Seventh-Day Adventists and assorted evangelicals.
Two degrees south of the equator, the heat is merciless even at 8am. We share the thin shade of an umbrella for the hike into Lorengau along the main road, following the sweep of Seeadler Bay. It’s a postcard anchorage that’s seen plenty of uninvited action: christened by Germans, occupied by Japanese, liberated by Americans, administered by Australians.
The trek into town is quiet. On the Sabbath the fleet of earthmovers that ordinarily grind the route to Lombrum — ferrying gravel to the detention centre building site where a crew of 300 labor to finish new staff accommodation — are resting in their compound.
Indeed the most dangerous thing about walking the sociable streets of Manus is the mayhem of too-fast, too-heavy vehicles, most on some mission emanating from the detention enterprise. They have worn craters and deep ruts the length of the road. Pedestrians — the vast majority of the traffic — take their chances.
It was on this road on 19 June this year that Kisawen Pokas, 17, a bright student and the son of two village teachers, was walking home from school when he was struck by a PNG police mobile squad Land Cruiser that swerved on to the wrong side of the road. He was killed instantly.
Not long before the accident, witness said, the driver had been riding around with local women and another taskforce officer, drinking and “not fully clothed”, as Guardian Australia reported on Monday.
Rotations of the notorious police mobile squad come to Manus from the mainland — on the orders of the PNG government but bankrolled by Australia — to help secure the Australian government’s operations. The Australian Senate investigation into February’s fatal unrest at the detention centre blamed the squad’s heavy-booted intervention for inflaming the violence that killed an Iranian asylum seeker, Reza Barati.
Schoolboy Kisawen is not the squad’s only local casualty. Susan and I pass the Lorengau market where, in June 2013, Raymond Sipaun, 21, was savagely beaten by the mobile squad police in public view. Witnesses said he had been drunk and had mouthed off at the police. His father later found him unconscious in a police cell. He could not be revived.
We come to a building site. A sign with the mothballed emblem of “Australian Aid” proudly declares support of the new market complex. It is almost finished, boasting lighting, running water, toilets, seating — unprecedented luxuries for stallholders.
There’s no day of rest for the contractors working flat out to have the market trading. As one of the most potent signs of the benefits to Manus of hosting Australia’s unwanted arrivals, it’s an Australian priority — and keenly anticipated by locals.
Nearby, up a steep hill, is the clapped-out Lorengau hospital, fairly typical of PNG’s sadly resourced, overburdened health system. Thanks to an injection of Australian money it has a laboratory fitted with new equipment. Blood tests can be analysed in minutes rather than days, immeasurably improving patients’ prospects, explains its chief executive, Dr Otto Numan.
Australia is also financing new staff housing and plans for a whole new hospital, which Numan is hopeful it will pay for.
There are commitments to a range of projects, including schoolroom kits at 20 sites across the far-flung province, a new police station and the reconstruction of the Lombrum-Lorengau road. Australia is providing aid to Manus province valued at $37m.
Though it’s a windfall for the neglected province, it’s only a modest slice of the payoff to PNG for processing and resettling asylum seekers, a source of grievance in Manus. Australia has committed $420m in additional aid to PNG, most to be spent on projects elsewhere in the country, including $207m on the Lae Angau hospital, the nation’s second biggest and in disrepair for decades.
Finally arriving at St Michael’s, we join the crowd filing into the cavernous church. At least 500 people are in the pews and dozens more outside, peering through the open louvres.
Father Justin Aminio, dean of Manus province, delivers a marathon Tok Pisin pulpit-thumping performance. He eventually dismisses his flock with a caution: lock up your daughters. “Protect your girls,” he says.
He’s seeing them on the streets, riding in trucks with police and others. As always when lucrative projects spawn populations of mobile men with money, prostitution rises.
“Those people who don’t have any chances of getting a job [at the detention centre] or even selling something, they sell themselves,” Father Justin says after mass. “A lot of girls who are still in school, that is how they get their money.”
A changing culture
Australia’s detention centre has generated 1,000 jobs for Manusians, a 70% rise in the number previously in formal employment, according to an independent evaluation for the Australian government of the impact of the detention centre on the Manus economy.
The spoils churn through an island economy that was almost inert two years ago, save for the hefty remittances sent home by the island’s famously high-achieving diaspora.
Now money generated by the detention centre pours down main street into guesthouses, hotels, hardware stores, car rental companies and grocery stores.
With so much at stake, local politics becomes rough, raw and dirty. Sometimes the loudest voices against aspects of the detention centre will be, on closer inspection, individuals upset that they have missed out on a contract.
Meanwhile, ordinary folk from all over the province — from far-flung sinking atolls to the mountain interior — flood into Lorengau, squeezing in with relatives and swelling the settlements, hoping for crumbs from the table. Old people in two coastal villages I visit say they are happy their young people have left and found jobs in town, but worry that they are abandoning longer-term educational ambitions. What if it doesn’t last?
His Sunday rites over, Father Justin sits down to reflect on the impacts of the detention centre on the community he has served for 14 years.
He worries about the toll on communities. For those people who have scored employment for the first time the centre delivers a windfall, but also a rude shock to the cultural system.
In Melanesian tradition, labor is determined by need, season and ritual rather than rostered shifts. Today some villages near the detention centre are almost deserted when the contractor Transfield’s staff shuttle buses pull out.
“The kids are not being fed, because there’s no one to cook,” says Father Justin. Many marriages are fracturing under the stresses and jealousies of seismic change. “The respect that the family had in the village system, it is becoming loose, it is no longer strong.”
He holds forth on these problems for a half-hour then, just as I’m folding up my notebook, he declares that despite it all, the detention centre “is a blessing for Manus”. At least could be.
“The Australian government has given the opportunities … in health, schools, building roads.” Now it is up to “our leaders, mandated by the people to act for them” to manage the social fallout and to sustain the wealth when the centre closes.
“We are one tiny island surrounded by a huge sea. The resources are there but they are in the sea, not on the land. Our timber is slowly going. Our agriculture is nothing.
“And if it comes to a sudden stop? People will want to kill themselves, they will be confused. They haven’t seen money before … Now they’ve seen it.”
Lombrum and Los Negros Island
The Manus Island regional processing centre is not actually on Manus Island but across a bridge and a narrow channel on Los Negros.
The area where the asylum seekers are held hugs a 600 metre-wide strip along the north coast, bounded on the south by a road and bushland. Some of the “client accommodation” sits right on the road behind tall mesh, asylum seekers sitting in the shade of open awnings.
To the east along the road is Australia’s new staff precinct, a steel village sprawled across a freshly denuded landscape, with all the charm of a military or mining site. Gravel avenues are lined with ubiquitous dongas, some piled one on the other. They’re dug in deep. This is not a temporary construction.
The detention centre sits within another, looser compound that is the PNG Lombrum naval base. It was an Australian base — HMAS Tarangau — until independence in 1975. There is rumbling discontent that so much of the base is again, to all appearances, Australian territory.
Michael Kuweh lives on the base with his family. A former PNG major who trained at the Australian army’s officer cadet school in Portsea, Kuweh understands secrecy. “I’m a patriot,” he says. “I’m coming from a military-minded, security-minded position.”
“[But] why is this under a veil of secrecy? Like guarding the holy grail?” he asks of the operation on his doorstep. Would an Australian military site would be similarly surrendered? Personnel at the base are “refugees on their own land”, he says.
The detention centre “did not start like any other project”, says Kuweh. Ordinarily in PNG “you have to come, consult, appraise, do the nitty-gritty to allow the project to come. Allow timelines. So people are fully aware of the consequences.”
Anxieties about the detention centre are fuelled by wider concerns, he says. With 80% of Manus people living on the coast, the eroding shoreline and climate change are big issues. “Food security, health security, environmental security … nobody has any data in place to tell us where we are heading,” says Kuweh.
If the detention centre had been a mining project — the only other kind of venture likely to deliver equivalent people, investment, infrastructure and dislocation into remote PNG — the project developer would be required under law to conduct social mapping to determine which customary owners should be consulted and who should have a say and a stake in the distribution of royalties and benefits.
Such a process is critical in PNG, the most ethnically diverse country in the world, with some 800 cultures. It provides a mechanism to learn about communities, their character, rivalries; it can plot potential landmines. Manus province alone has 29 languages.
When Wilson Security took over security at the detention centre from G4S in the wake of the February riots, it commissioned social mapping from the PNG remote project specialist Firewall Logistics. The report, dated 14 April, was compiled by the veteran PNG cultural expert Philip Fitzpatrick and widely distributed on Los Negros. It noted the atmosphere was “politically charged and dynamic”.
“Manusians come from a traditional society that was highly structured, ordered and moral, many elements of which persist to this day. As such they find the concept of a regional processing centre somewhat confronting,” the Firewall report advises.
“The people in the villages of Los Negros seem to be puzzled, confused and, in some cases, fearful of the developments at Lombrum … It is a shame that this has happened because it could easily have been avoided.”
The report blames in part the culture gap between local people and the predominantly military, police and security types working at the centre, whose behaviour was noticeably condescending and whose physical appearance villagers found intimidating.
“Unprovoked, Manus people are a friendly and gracious community,” Fitzpatrick counsels. But he echoes Michael Kuweh’s concerns about the stresses they now confront.
“They are facing an unprecedented period of pressures relating to overpopulation, diminishing natural resources, cultural decline and social fracture. The [detention centre] is an issue that they could well do without at this time. That fact should be appreciated by all concerned.”
Mokoreng village, Los Negros
Fishing sustains the people of Los Negros but overfishing, overpopulation and climate change are taking their toll on the precious resource.
George Lokowah — a chief and local councillor — points a finger across the water to two cargo ships sitting in the harbour. “When the shipments come in it disturbs the fish,” he says.
George Lokowah, a chief and local councillor at Mokoreng village, says cargo ships are disturbing the fish
There’s talk about villagers blockading the ships with their outriggers. “You want to turn back the Australian boats?” The irony is lost, but — yes.
Until two weeks ago the Bibby Progress, a floating hotel housing hundreds of detention centre staff at phenomenal cost to Australian taxpayers, sat near here for 13 months. Because villagers had worked to develop marine plans to preserve their fishing, they were “well aware of the adverse effects of stationary installations like the Bibby,” the Firewall report notes.
In November last year, having failed to get a response to their concerns from the detention centre managers, they tried to cast off the Bibby Progress’s mooring lines, provoking a security alert, a heavy-handed response by PNG police, arrests, injuries and a legacy of simmering tensions. “Unfortunately the incident was not handled very well,” Firewall noted.
Lokowah is also concerned about damage to local roads and the social changes in the village, with so many people working shifts at the centre. People are neglecting their family duties, he says.
Three times a day Transfield shuttles come in and out of Mokoreng, moving shifts of guards, cleaners and caterers. Young guards tell me they are happy to have the work. They mix closely with the asylum seekers. They feel sorry for them.
They are paid four kina an hour ($1.84), they say, though figures in the economic analysis put the hourly average at about seven kina. Local pay rates are “commensurate with other locally available jobs”, according to the Australian government’s literature on “the economic and development benefits to PNG of the regional resettlement arrangement”.
It’s cash they’ve never known the likes of. But the disparity between their wages and conditions and those of the expat guards working alongside them is causing deep resentment. Several guards say they have gone on strike or formally complained, only to be left off the roster as punishment.
Michael Kuweh is concerned about their conditions of employment and about how long the work will last. “These are menial jobs. When this project leaves, tomorrow, there is no job.”
The Australian government says PNG staff are being assisted to build capacity for future employment. That’s not nearly enough, according to Nahau Rooney and Powes Parkop, two of Manus’ most politically world-wise exports. They share deep misgivings about the prospects of Manus benefiting in the long run from Australia’s incursion.
If the cultural and collateral damage is to be mitigated, they say, there must be close local engagement and a vision beyond the detention centre: a maritime college, or a tourism industry, or a road around the island, or a ground-up rebuilding of the education system which for so long sustained Manus and so powerfully contributed to PNG.
For those Manusians who had long dreamed of capitalising on their military, environmental and cultural treasures to build a tourism market, their island’s portrayal in the Australian deterrence campaign as a “hellhole” has been galling.
It has embarrassed and distressed Papua New Guineans more widely. A “comment in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph that ‘PNG is a shithole … and now it’s our shithole’ … had our readers’ keyboards melting in indignation”, observed the popular PNG/Australian blogsite PNG Attitude.
“It is to the advantage of the Australian government to portray that message — that negative image of Manus and the people of Manus,” Parkop says. “It’s going to take a lot of effort to turn that around.”
If tourism is beyond salvation, there’s a substantial war relic hidden in the bush at Mokoreng which Parkop suggests might be dusted off to provide a future for Manus. It’s another second world war airfield, bigger than Momote, blasted and built by the Americans to receive and launch their bombers in the Admiralty Islands campaign.
It could soon be restored, Parkop says. PNG is still a strategically critical player in evolving geopolitics in the Pacific. If neither the Australians or Americans want it, he wonders — provocatively — if the Chinese might be interested.
Refugee camp, Lorengau
Well back from the road at the eastern fringe of Lorengau, behind a ramshackle primary school and below dense forest, is the shiny new $137m demountable acropolis built by the Australian government to house refugees when they are finally freed.
They will live temporarily at this open facility while they are taught Tok Pisin and other cultural and practical skills to settle into a new life in PNG.
The first 10 occupants will be from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Burma, among them an accountant, an engineer, a watchmaker. They will be joined by others flowing through at a rate of about 40 a month, according to statements by the Australian immigration minister, Scott Morrison, and his PNG counterpart a month ago. By last week, none had yet arrived.
According to local talk, this may be because of unrest about whether locals will get the security contracts. Or because of the murmurings of some with traditional links to the site that they weren’t properly compensated when the land went to the state 20 years ago. Or because of the anxieties of the refugees about their safety.
Manusians are highly literate by PNG standards, hospitable, laidback, curious. It is ingrained in the culture to share everything with kin. But in a land where resources are scarce, outsiders are competition.
Many say they are sympathetic to the refugees and will welcome them, but others are more reticent — they know nothing of their cultural, religious and political backgrounds. There’s little understanding and some trepidation about the arrival of Muslims. Their concerns about asylum seekers echo the more moderate voices on Australian talkback.
Just across the road from the new facility, down by the shore, is a cluster of broken-down timber shacks built in 1969 to house an earlier wave of asylum seekers delivered to Manus on the instructions of Australian authorities.
The camp was for refugees who had fled into Australian New Guinea from West Irian (today West Papua), some 400 of them arriving on Manus by May that year. Their children and grandchildren still live in these shacks, held together with salvaged tin and timber.
Manfred Meho, born here in 1970, says his parents and the other refugees were forgotten by Australia and ignored by PNG. They relied on the generosity of Manusians and, eventually, intermarriage to get access to gardens and fisheries to sustain themselves and their families.
There are more than 9,000 West Papuan refugees living in PNG, unable to get citizenship or work legally, many in remote camps where thousands have little or no access to basic services. Many born in Meho’s circumstances are stateless.
PNG is finally promising action for West Papuans, but the notion that under Australia’s deal a new intake of foreigners will get better treatment than their long-suffering Melanesian brothers and sisters offends many Papua New Guineans.
The Lorengau man who shows me the old camp does so to make a point. Either the new refugees get access to housing, services and assistance beyond the reach of local people. Or they are left to fend for themselves, as the West Papuans were. The first scenario will fuel jealousy, the second resentment.
This goes to the heart of why the PNG prime minister, Peter O’Neill, surprised his Australian counterpart, Tony Abbott, in October with advice that the existing resettlement agreement would have to be revised because PNG had to “work through the issues” owing to lack of public support.
Carol Umbo, a journalist with the PNG National Broadcasting Corporation’s Manus service, says the feeling among the population is clear. Hosting the processing centre is one matter, accommodating a refugee community is another. They don’t have capacity, she says. “It is not that the people of Manus are unkind.”
“It was a surprise for us, when Australia put them here,” says Nahau Rooney. “All of a sudden everything is dropped on the island. Some things are good, some bad, but we still have no say. That is the saddest thing about it. Our leaders and our citizens opinions are not even taken into account.”
Rooney is one of only seven women elected to the national parliament and was justice minister in the first government elected post-independence. These days she continues in various leadership roles and runs a Lorengau guesthouse just a few minutes’ walk from where the refugees will soon live.
Rooney grew up in a village reshaped by the cultural fallout of war, the last great wave of change to sweep the island. “For many of us who have gone through the process of development to get to where we are today — it has been a long journey.
“Development is a process, a process that can only be effectively guided by the community and the leaders who want to see development,” she says. “But in these circumstances the development taking place in Manus is an imposition.”
Rooney adds: “Let me make it clear that Manus has been very significant. We have contributed immensely to issues not only effecting Manus and PNG, but internationally. Yet our airport is still as it was during the war. They built all the wharves around here, but they are gone. My challenge to them is — don’t they feel guilty to bring this other thing to us?
“These asylum seekers … it’s another issue, it is just like a war they are bringing back to Manus.”
Reporting on this story was made possible with an independently awarded grant from GetUp’s Shipping News project
Originally published at www.theguardian.com on December 16, 2014.
