For all the unwelcome intrusion into her private life, for all the angry public debate, for all the wasted expense and the time spent just waiting: nothing, for Abyan, has changed.



She is still on Nauru, still scarred by the trauma of an alleged rape, and still bearing a pregnancy she doesn’t want.

This month, the 23-year-old Somali refugee was flown to Australia for a termination she had begged for weeks for, only to be secretly spirited back on a private charter flight without the operation when she asked for more time, for counselling, and for an explanation of the procedure.

Her private circumstance has become the stuff of newspaper headlines, her image the front page picture of some newspapers, her distress the political fodder of parliament.

She is unwell, deeply traumatised, and desperately concerned for her future.

But Abyan’s tortuous case has come to represent more than her own unhappy circumstance.

While the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, was only too eager to bang the drum for the Australian government’s hardline stand in his Margaret Thatcher lecture on Wednesday, Abyan’s story betrays unease in Canberra and elsewhere on the mainland. Questions have been asked in parliament. Campaigners have demonstrated on her behalf. The United Nations in Geneva urged Nauru and Australia to find “a decent option” for the “deeply traumatised” woman.

On Wednesday afternoon, Peter Dutton, the Australian immigration minister, announced that Abyan would return to Australia for medical treatment.

Abyan’s situation has become emblematic of Australia’s serious questioning of a policy of sending asylum seekers to its tiny, impoverished client state in the middle of the Pacific. She has become the symbol of the calculated cruelty, of the contradictions and of the unsustainability of Australia’s $3bn offshore detention regime.

Abyan (not her real name) fled her home in Somalia in 2007. She was 15, and her country was caught in a brutal civil conflict between the government the Islamist terrorist network al-Shabaab. She survived the rocket attack which struck her home and killed her family. She fled.

Her journey was ad hoc and inchoate. Eventually she found a people-smuggling network that could get her to south-east Asia and, from there, a place on board a boat to Australia.

She arrived in Australia, on Christmas Island, on 21 October 2013. She was taken to Nauru two days later.

A little more than a year later, in November 2014, Nauruan authorities determined she was officially a refugee: that is, she has a well-founded fear of persecution in her home country and could not be returned there.

She was moved into accommodation “in the community”, outside the detention centre on Nauru. But life in the community, while better than detention, is hard. Abyan is alone. She is poor, food is expensive and the market a long way from where she lives. And she is fearful.

On 18 July this year, Abyan says she was raped by an unknown man.

Abyan does not want a baby born of her assault and is growing increasingly anxious

She told caseworkers and fellow refugees what happened to her. But she has not filed a report with police over the assault, saying she fears retribution from her assailant or others.

Now doctors say she is approaching 15 weeks’ pregnant. She does not want a baby born of her assault and she is growing increasingly anxious about having the termination she first requested nearly two months ago.

Nauru is a deeply conservative, Christian country. Restrictive abortion laws there mean she cannot have a termination in that country.

Nor can she have it in Papua New Guinea, the other Pacific country where Australia runs an “offshore detention centre”.

There is nowhere in Australia’s “offshore detention” network that can provide Abyan the medical service she has asked for. Only Australia remains.

Abyan first asked for a termination on 1 September. But it was more than five weeks before she was brought to Australia on a scheduled commercial flight on 11 October.

What happened to Abyan in Australia is fiercely contested.

Abyan, the minister and the reporter

Peter Dutton, the Australian immigration minister, has said Abyan was afforded extensive medical care while in Australia but that after extensive consultation she decided she did not want to terminate her pregnancy.



“We’re talking about four or five days of medical consultations and all through that period we had interpreters present, mental health nurses, GPs, doctors ... At the end of it the advice to us was that she had decided against the abortion,” Dutton said.

Abyan says that is untrue.



“I was raped on Nauru,” she said in a written statement given to the Guardian. “I have been very sick. I have never said that I did not want a termination. I never saw a doctor. I saw a nurse at the clinic but there was no counselling.

“I saw a nurse at Villawood but there was no interpreter.”

Abyan has maintained in interviews since that she wants to terminate her pregnancy. (Even those interviews have proven controversial: foreign journalists are, in effect, banned from Nauru. The only reporter allowed on the island in the past 18 months has been Chris Kenny, from the government-allied Australian newspaper, who flew to Nauru last week. He has been accused by some advocates of harassing Abyan, and arriving at her accommodation in the company of police. He denies this. He is the former chief-of-staff of the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and an avowed “strong supporter” of offshore detention, and acknowledged this support may have helped him get access.)

Inside Canberra’s byzantine bureaucracy, it was ruled Abyan had chosen not to have the termination.

Dutton had previously railed against refugees exercising their rights in courts, seeking injunctions against their removals to offshore detention: “The racket that’s been going on here is that people at the margins come to Australia from Nauru, the government’s then injuncted, we can’t send them back to Nauru,” Dutton said that week.

Anxious to avoid a court order that would keep Abyan in Australia, the government chartered a private jet, at a cost of more than $100,000, to secretly fly her back to Nauru via the Solomon Islands.

Beyond the cost, its circumstance was even more controversial. Abyan was moved, against her will, before she could tell refugee advocates or her lawyers what was happening.



A series of frantic phone calls bounced around Australia on Friday 16 October between advocates and lawyers and friends of Abyan. She was not in the Villawood detention centre any more, and she could not be contacted. The government would not say where she was being held.

The first Abyan’s lawyers knew of her location was when they appeared in the federal court that afternoon seeking an order that she not be removed from the country. They were told by lawyers for the government she had already left Australian soil.

Abyan was in the air, and out of the court’s jurisdiction. She landed in Nauru that night.

Since being back on the island, Abyan has fallen ill again, according to those in contact with her. She remains adamant that she wants to terminate her pregnancy, a pregnancy she never wanted, that was forced on her by violence.

Riches to poverty

Australia’s deal with Nauru is a caustic realpolitik, a reflection of Australia’s Melian attitude to its weaker Pacific neighbours, and the power of its regional economic strength.

Nauru is a once-wealthy country now poor, a riches-to-rags story of resource curse.

Nauru has about 1,000 people in Australia’s detention centres in a population of 10,000.

The island was rich once in guano, bird manure. For decades in the 20th century, massive deposits of the valuable phosphate were mined almost to exhaustion for huge profits.

In the years after Nauru gained its independence in 1968, the tiny island was one of the richest places on Earth. But the days of plenty are historical ones.

The phosphate is almost all gone, and the billions it brought in have been siphoned off by a succession of corrupt, wasteful governments.

A series of scandals, and almost-comically disastrous financial mismanagement (including funding a London musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci) bankrupted the country. Nauru’s central bank went broke, its real estate assets in other countries were taken and sold, its airlines’ planes seized.

Nauru spent years in desperate penury. The outpost nation became a haven for money-laundering – a billion dollars of Russian mafia money is estimated to have been washed through the country – and its officials reduced to selling passports.

Nauru even used its membership of the UN general assembly as a money-making exercise, accepting tens of millions of dollars in exchange for “recognising” countries, such as Russian-backed breakaway republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Its government was debased, but it was Nauru’s people who suffered.

Unemployment hit 90%, the school system collapsed almost entirely, cruelling the futures of a generation. Mining has left much of Nauru’s tiny landmass hollowed out and unusable, and its people have been left unwell – they suffer extreme levels of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Nauru’s economy has slowly improved. But no industry has emerged to replace mining.

The country remains almost wholly dependent on aid, and that, now, comes with strings attached, conditions that demonstrate the old problems are not entirely resolved.



On Nauru there are few places to run, and certainly nowhere to hide

Earlier this year, New Zealand suspended all aid to Nauru’s justice sector because of what it described as a “diminishing rule of law”, citing among other failures, the seizure of an opposition MP’s passport, and the sacking of the country’s judiciary.

The Nauru government almost “ran out of money” as recently as last year.



So Australia’s decision in 2012 to reopen its detention centre on Nauru – and the influx of jobs and money that that decision represented – was gratefully welcomed (the first iteration of Australia’s detention centre ran between 2001 and 2007, including at one stage housing just two refugees).

The three years since the centre was reopened (and substantially extended) has re-established Australia as Nauru’s principal and pre-eminent benefactor, and Nauru as Australia’s supine subordinate.



Today Australian direct aid makes up about 15% of the country’s domestic economy, and the Australian-run immigration detention centre is the second-largest employer on the island, after the Nauruan government.



Nauru is a client state in every sense, kept functioning, just, by its wealthy neighbour.

But its dependence on Australian largesse makes its government entirely beholden to its benefactor’s interests, even at the expense of its own people.



And Australia’s generosity does not come without quid pro quo.

The 1,000-odd asylum seekers and refugees imposed upon Nauru by Australia represent more than 10% of the entire country. Per capita, Nauru is now the third-highest refugee-hosting country in the world, because of Australia’s forced transfer.

It is an ill-disguised secret that significant sections of the Nauruan community resent the presence of refugees within its formerly monocultural Islander society.

auru is barely more than 20 sq km and has a population of fewer than 10,000. There are few places to run, and certainly nowhere to hide.

Young men, particularly the teenage boys who are on Nauru without parents, have been targeted for violence, especially if they are out at night.

Women, like Abyan, fear sexual predators outside and inside the camp. Between September 2012 and April 2015, 33 sexual assault incidents were logged by camp management, including nine judged critical or major. And that figure is believed to be significantly under-reported. (Abyan’s was not reported.)

But Abyan’s case – among others – has highlighted the systemic, calculated cruelties which benight Australia’s offshore detention regime, and given rise to new debate over the policies’ fairness, and morality.



Peter Dutton, the Australian immigration minister, said he was advised that Abyan had chosen not to have an abortion when she was brought to Australia. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The policy is posited by the Australian government as a deterrent, a disincentive for asylum seekers searching for a new country to pay people smugglers to board boats bound for Australia.

It is credited in large part with “stopping the boats” arriving in Australian waters, while they still continue in large numbers to be piloted around the waters of south-east Asia and Europe.

Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, concedes the policies are “harsh” and “cruel” but says they are justified in the circumstances because they deter others from trying to make similar journeys.

Critics of the policies – a noisy, sizeable, and growing minority – argue offshore processing ignores the human cost of a detention regime designed to be brutal in order to deter others.



Successive parliamentary inquiries and the government’s own investigations have found allegations of systemic sexual abuse of women and children, violence against men and boys, inadequate medical care and neglect on Nauru.

Instances of attempted suicide and self-harm are common. Caseworkers report children constantly banging their heads against walls in frustration. Dozens of people have sewn their lips together. Rape victims refuse food for days and weeks.

Nothing permanent

Australia’s other offshore detention centre, on PNG’s Manus Island, which now houses only men, is even more violent. One asylum seeker was killed when more than a dozen guards reportedly beat him to death during riots last year, while others have been shot, tied up and tortured. And one died from a lack of medical intervention after a minor leg wound turned septic.



But there is massive financial imposition to Australia’s policies, too.

The government’s auditor says it costs more than $400,000 a year to house a single person in offshore detention, nearly double the figure for detention within Australia, and 10 times the cost to taxpayer of an asylum seeker or refugee living in the Australian community on a bridging visa.



The total cost of Australia’s offshore detention regime is upwards of $3bn a year. It is more than five times the budget for all of the UNHCR’s operations across south-east Asia, but handles just 2,000 people.

Australia has also paid Cambodia more than $55m so far under a “regional resettlement program” that seeks to relocate refugees to a third country permanently. So far that country has taken five people.

But even beyond the human costs and the financial imposition, Nauru, by the concession of its own and the Australian government, can never be a solution.



The development of international refugee law has, for decades, identified as a priority the establishment of “durable solutions” for those displaced from their homelands: a long-term settlement plan that won’t enforce on them another move.

Nauru will not offer permanent resettlement to refugees. At this point, none will be allowed to stay in the country any longer than 10 years.

Then they will again be looking for a new country in which to restart already-interrupted lives.

For Abyan, finding a new home again in a decade, after nearly a decade of displacement already, is beyond contemplation.

She is unwell again and troubled too greatly by her immediate future.



