When the lightly framed Sawari arrived at the transit accommodation in April, there were only 12 other residents. Now there are more than 50 others in the same situation: recognised as refugees, but denied almost all the basic rights that are supposed to come with refugee status.
They cannot earn a living, learn, move freely, buy property or be reunited with family members. For the Rohingyas among them, it is a reminder of what they left behind in Myanmar, except that the threat of extreme physical violence is much reduced. Others come from the Sudan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They are the forgotten exceptions to the generosity of one of the last decisions of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership: the commitment to resettle 12,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria and northern Iraq.
They are also the cruel, lingering footnote to one of Abbott’s proudest achievements: stopping the boats. Their continued misery, and that of those in limbo on Nauru (at a cost to taxpayers of $900 million a year), is considered essential to deter others from trying to come by boat.
Australia’s new and popular Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, says one of the most important qualities for a leader is to possess “emotional intelligence and the empathy and the imagination that enables you to walk in somebody else’s shoes”.
But, after insisting that he shared the concerns of all Australians about those in limbo on Manus and Nauru, Turnbull declared there would be no backward step. “People who come via the people-smuggling route will never settle in Australia,” he said.
Sawari’s sole plea to Turnbull is to muster enough empathy and imagination to walk in his shoes, and those of the others on Manus and Nauru. “Kyaw”, for example, is a Rohingya who is too fearful to have his real name published. Like many in the transit centre, he spends most of his time in his room: afraid, damaged and vulnerable. If he was born in another country, he might be at university now, on his way to a PhD.
When the young Rohingya men of his village were targeted for assassination, his family urged him to flee to Bangladesh but that border was closed. So he took four dangerous boats trips before arriving at Christmas Island just four days after Kevin Rudd announced that future arrivals would be resettled in PNG, a country he had no idea existed.
Along the way, he was jailed in Malaysia, robbed by a people smuggler in Indonesia and saw three passengers die on the trip from Indonesia to Christmas Island. When he ran out of money, his mother sold her only remaining jewellery to secure his freedom.
Like many of the others, Kyaw remains traumatised by what he saw in the country he calls Burma, what he endured while fleeing and what he witnessed the night Reza Barati was killed at the detention centre in February last year, when locals joined PNG security and others in breaking into the centre and attacking detainees.
One young man in his early 20s is still so frightened he wedges a table across his bedroom door each night. “I am scared, day and night,” he says.
He points to the burn on his arm suffered while cooking his dinner the previous night. “When I try to cook I forget so many things,” he says.
Kyaw’s roommate was seriously wounded in last year’s riot because he looked Iranian and Iranians like Barati were those targeted by the mob. Kyaw pleaded that he had nothing to do with protests at the centre and was picked up like a rag doll by one security guard and carried to safety. “How I can forget that riot and also the Burma violence?” he asks. “I never ever forget what I saw with my own eyes.”
Kyaw says he would rather be back in the detention centre that for all intents and purposes is a prison, where the refugees can line up each night, show their blue “mental help” card and receive their nightly sleeping tablet.
At the transit centre, support is limited and the refugees must pay for everything beyond the basics from the 100 kina ($50) allowance they receive each Monday, including their medications. “I have my eyes problem, double vision and headaches,” says Kyaw. “I got glasses after one year (in detention), but unfortunately they not working for me. We are mentally no good and physically no good. I can’t move forward and I can’t move back.”
Sawari hurt his arm recently when he says he was punched by a security guard after asking for an extra cake of soap. The doctor gave him a prescription to address the pain, but he could not afford to fill it and still buy enough credit to ring his mother, who believes he is living happily in Australia.
There is a push for some of the refugees to be offered jobs in the town, provided they are not paid and return to the centre by 6pm. The local mayor, Ruth Mandrakamu, says she is keen to involve the refugees in local activities and looking at offering two positions.
But the refugees are deeply suspicious and believe the PNG government is simply trying to demonstrate that something is happening.
Even without the 6pm curfew that is not strictly enforced, the refugees fear going out at night, when they are easy targets for those locals who turn nasty when they have had too much to drink.
It isn’t that Manus is a normally violent place. These are a friendly and peace-loving people. It’s just that, since the detention centre re-opened, it has become one. “When the asylum-seeker project was brought in, a lot of youths and a lot of people get employment and when they have money in their pockets, they use it unwisely,” says provincial police commander Alex N’Drasal.
“Most of that money is used on alcohol, whether legal or home brew, or used on drugs and that is when they get involved in all kinds of social issues that speed up the rate of crimes in the province so high.”
So concerned is the island’s governor, Charlie Benjamin, about the rising crime rate that he recently rang the country’s prime minister, Peter O’Neill, and asked for members of the country’s riot squad to be sent to help to restore order.
“We now have more social problems and I think the social problems, hopefully, does not outweigh the tangible developments that are happening,” he tells me. “So many drunks, people are getting drunk, boy-girl issue and adultery issues and these are now happening which in the past were not as common.”
Benjamin is a supporter of the detention centre, on the grounds that it will deliver important infrastructure and employment to Manus, but he remains disappointed with what has so far been delivered and is opposed to the refugees being settled on the island.
“We only happy to process them in here, but we’re not happy to resettle them in Manus,” he says.
The island’s member of the PNG Parliament, Ronny Knight, agrees. “How are we going to resettle them?” he asks.
“Ninety-nine per cent of our people live by subsistence farming and by fishing. Whose seas are they going to go fishing in? Where are they going to go farming? The only option that is going to happen is they are going to marry the young girls and become an extended family and be a drain on our people. It’s just impossible - technically and sociologically.”
If the upside of the detention centre was the promise of economic development, the downside has been that locals do not receive the same pay as fly-in, fly-out foreigners who do the same jobs; that local contractors have not shared in the work; that the promised “Manus package” has so far failed to materialise; and that food prices have increased.
“On the positive side, we have seen a lot of unemployed youth, not only in Lorengau but those who come from the rural areas, engaged in employment, especially on security side of things and in odd jobs at the centre,” says Mandrakamu, the mayor.
“On the negative side, there have been a lot of social problems, not created by service providers or asylum seekers and now the refugees, but created by those who come and look for employment in Lorengau and for the first time have a paid job.”
Although there have been no complaints to authorities so far, there is also deep apprehension about the prospects of integrating scores, and maybe even hundreds, of single men, many of them damaged by their experiences in their own countries and in detention, who come from a different culture and a different religion.
Benjamin says he has no issue if the young refugees form relationships with local women, so long as they are single, but the police commissioner has a different view, saying this is prohibited.
“They shouldn’t be going around with ladies or consuming alcohol or going around with youth and consuming drugs,” he says. “Of course it is illegal.”
Another frustration for local politicians and law officers is that they do not know what is happening inside the detention centre. “It’s more or less whatever they want to do, they just do and later on inform me,” says Benjamin.
“If I want to go there I would ask permission like everybody else. If they allowed me to go then I will go, but if they not allow me to go then I will not go. It’s like a country in a country, that’s how I see it.”
The relocation of refugees to the East Lorengau centre was supposed to be evidence that PNG was moving to resettle them, but it was revealed as a cruel hoax when Reza Mollagholipour applied for a job as a civil engineer in Port Moresby and was invited to meet his prospective employer to discuss his salary.
The passport he was given allowed for travel within PNG, but he received a letter late in March, just as he was due to fly out of Manus, from the country’s chief migration officer, Mataio Rabura, telling him he had no right to leave. “In essence, there is currently no government sanctioned arrangement in place for your integration and settlement into PNG,” the letter said.
“The idea of coming to Australia died in my mind when I was on Christmas Island and they told me you will never go there,” Mollagholipour explains. “That is why I planned to apply to every company and work in Port Moresby. “I was happy because I thought I could again start my life. What makes me really crazy is that they are calling this a process without doing anything.”
Mollagholipour now spends most of his time in his room, studying physics and improving his English. He says he is “fine” because he is older than most of the others and more resilient, having worked as fly-in fly-out civil engineer on big projects in Iran for a decade. “My feeling is very different from the others. The majority are young, they are thinking about their families, they cannot understand anything about their future. When I was young as Loghman, I could not have tolerated his situation, really. He is very strong.”
And he is. Sawari’s first taste of the heavy hand of those who run the detention centre came soon after he arrived, when he spent two months in isolation with three other teenagers. He believes two returned to their country and one is living in Adelaide.
At one point he threatened to hurt himself if he was not able to join his friends in one of the big compounds. He says he wasn’t serious, just depressed and lonely. Within 30 minutes, 10 security guards arrested him before he had time pull on his shoes. At the police station, they ordered him to strip naked to show he was not carrying a weapon before immigration officials delivered an ultimatum: “If you don’t promise to be a good boy, we will leave you here.”
When he returned to the compound, having promised to be a “good boy”, the door of Sawari’s room was replaced with a curtain so he could be monitored. “I was sitting in the rain, crying. The guards from G4S (since replaced by Wilson Security) were laughing at me.”
A year after the violence, Sawari was among 60 detainees who spent three weeks in the East Lorengau jail after protesting against their indefinite detention. As Sawari tells it, his crime was to be among those who chanted ‘Freedom!’
“The security guard say, ‘You want freedom?’ I tell him yes. He handcuff me and send me to the jail for 21 days.” What made the experience more traumatic was that two of Barati’s alleged killers were being held at the jail at the same time.
Immediately after Sawari’s suicide attempt, three months ago, one of the other refugees confronted the immigration officer who had upset him. “Why you provoke him to kill himself? He’s a young person. How do you answer to his family if he die?” Mohsen, a 28-year-old Iranian refugee who dreams of studying art, recalls saying.
The response, he says, was the stock answer to any complaint: “If you have a problem, go back to your country.”
Days later, Mohsen was physically attacked by the same officer and two others when he was drinking with locals at the Harbourside, one of two hotels on the island.
Police commissioner N’Drasal says the immigration officers, who have been charged over the assault but continue to work at the centre, had come to get Mohsen because he had failed to return to the centre by the curfew. He is convinced the attack was at least in part retribution for speaking up for Sawari.
One advantage Sawari and the others in the transit centre have over the 936 asylum seekers still in detention is that they have a voice. During my stay on Manus, I attempted to speak with a group of detainees who were allowed out on an “excursion” to a secluded harbour near the airport.
I approached once they were out of the mini-bus and shook the hands of an Iranian and a Sudanese before a stocky guard with the empathy of a robot delivered an ultimatum. “Talk to him and the excursion over,” he barked. “Your choice!” I retreated.
Some detainees, such as a young Rohingya who is a new arrival at the transit centre after 25 months in detention, are so utterly consumed by pessimism and despair that hope is beyond them. “Better, after my boat broken, that we die in the ocean,” he says. “Then finish. Better than this.”
Sawari still suffers depression but retains the capacity to hope for a happy ending. “Everyday I pray, ‘Please god, not only help me, help everyone’,” he says.