As Behrouz Boochani reports from Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, a number of the over 900 refugee men who have been detained there by Australia will soon fly to the United States where, under the fraught deal struck between the US and Australian governments in 2016, they will be allowed to settle.
The Australian government is shutting down the detention centre on Manus while many of the refugees who have been detained there over the past four years are demanding, as they have from the beginning, that they be afforded the human right of being permitted to settle in Australia — a country where they are likely to be safe from war, poverty, and persecution.
They have suffered beatings, deaths, and endemic mental illness in detention on Manus, and the alternatives being suggested by the Australian Government — settlement in PNG or return to the country from which they are seeking asylum — are no better for them. That the men are even in PNG is due to another deal, struck in 2013 between the Australian and Papua New Guinean prime ministers, known as the Regional Resettlement Agreement.
What is the impact of this ostensible regional partnership on relations between Australia and PNG? The agreement, such as it was, is now arguably in tatters. The suffering of the refugees in detention, the abuse of their human rights, has been monumental. Manusians and Papua New Guineans more broadly have had this suffering in their faces, often finding themselves blamed for it, such as when refugees have been attacked by locals outside of detention on the island.
Plans to resettle the refugees in the US have been the subject of international scandal, stopping and starting several times before the current assurance that some 50 will be flown there soon. Many of the jobs promised by Australia for the remittance-dependent Manus Island have not materialised, and Manusians (e.g. local Member of Parliament Ronny Knight) have repeatedly expressed concern about the volatility of a situation where so many men are held in poor conditions with no realistic exit point in sight.
Australia has shown no intention of intervening to improve the situation for the refugees, nor for PNG. In this, we have probably brought relations between the prosperous island nation and its former dependent territory to its lowest ebb in decades.
Many Papua New Guineans feel that Australia has ducked its responsibility to resettle refugees and treated PNG like a