Last night I watched the excellent ABC Four Corners program recalling the orgy of violent rioting against Manus Island detention centre inmates on 16–17 February, climaxing in the deliberate beating and kicking to death of a young Iranian man, Reza Barati, apparently by a gang of PNG nationals working at the camp as security or maintenance staff. To this point, no charges have been laid.
Though few of the facts presented were new — most were canvassed in more or less detail by Australian media reporting in the weeks following the events — the impact of watching live accounts by present or former G4S expatriate staff members (mostly anonymous, one declared) was profoundly unsettling. I am not going to attempt to summarise the program — I urge readers to watch it online — but here are some follow-on thoughts.
In the final weeks of the G4S management contract for the detention centre, inmates mounted three weeks of sustained peaceful demonstrations which finally goaded PNG camp staff and police into invading the camp, firing guns and wielding machetes and nail-embedded clubs, and beating any inmates they could lay their hands on.
Barati was killed through his head being beaten and stomped into a metal grating on a stairway landing. As several G4S staff commented in the program, it is a wonder and a mercy that this was the only death.
The program only hints at the high degree of Australian official complicity and culpability in this terrifying story. I want to develop those threads further.
Those Australian politicians and officials who chose to set up and administer the Manus detention centre on PNG sovereign territory, subject to PNG law and police 'discipline', had deliberately and in full knowledge put three groups of people — young distressed male detained boat people, locally employed PNG nationals, and a small contingent of expatriate Australian G4S supervisory staff living on a boat moored at a nearby pier — into a situation where such a disastrous confrontation was only a matter of time.
It was predictable that detainees would demonstrate their rising frustration and anger with no progress in processing their refugee claims, and that their desperation would provoke violent retaliation on the part of resentful surrounding PNG nationals. This was a controlled experiment in the provocation of violence and terror.
It could also be correctly anticipated that expatriate G4S staff could not protect detainees from violence by angered PNG nationals when things