Exclusive: Documents show how the Australian government sought to drive refugees and asylum seekers from its detention centre in Papua New Guinea

For more than a year, camp managers and security staff have waged a campaign to make Australia’s detention centre for refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island as inhospitable as possible, leaked documents reveal.

A plan drafted in early 2016 outlines moves to coerce those recognised as refugees into leaving the detention centre and accepting resettlement in Papua New Guinea, while pushing asylum seekers to abandon their protection claims and return home.

Documents obtained by the Guardian acknowledge that many felt unsafe in the Manus community, would face violence and danger if forced out and had been “institutionalised” during their detention.

The detention centre on the PNG island is one of Australia’s two offshore holding centres – along with the other on the Pacific island of Nauru – for asylum seekers and refugees.

Australian Border Force and PNG immigration officials announced this week the demolition of the Manus detention centre would begin this month, and every detainee within would be removed – forcibly if necessary – by 31 October.

Under the confidential plan to coerce people to leave, refugees were to be separated from “transferees” – those who had not been formally recognised as refugees.

The documents, from camp manager Broadspectrum and security contractor Wilson, reveal efforts to push those recognised as refugees to accept relocation to the East Lorengau transit centre, and ultimately resettlement in PNG, while persuading those without refugee status to abandon their claim to protection and go home.

The document says: “Conditions for refugees at East Lorengau refugee transit centre should be more attractive than for refugees at Lombrum RPC. Conditions for refugees at the RPC should be more attractive than conditions for transferees.”

Transferees, who cannot be resettled in PNG, would be moved to a compound at the western end of the detention centre because “it does not have air conditioning”. Camp managers also mooted imposing a smoking ban to encourage refugees to accept resettlement in the community.



The documents from inside the Manus Island detention centre reveal that the Australian government understood there were serious risks to opening up the centre, risks highlighted by a shooting rampage at the camp on Good Friday by “drunken soldiers” after a dispute about the use of a soccer pitch.

One plan mooted was to forcibly remove refugees and asylum seekers from the detention centre into the transit centre in a single day.



Planning documents that proposed “moving residents into accommodation with less amenity than they currently have” forecast the forced removal raised an “extreme” risk of violence and protests, and warned of the potentially “catastrophic consequences” of using the PNG police, whom Australian authorities describe as “not trained” for the relevant tasks.



The documents raise the possibility of “extreme” outcomes, including that the commander of the naval base – where the detention centre is housed – “does not support the concept of an open centre given it is in the middle of the Navy base”; and that Manusians, already affronted by the imposition of 1,000 men with whom they have been forced to share their small, resource-poor island, are wary of, if not outright hostile towards, the new arrivals.

“The community considers the refugees as a threat,” planning documents say. “The community targets asylum seekers to either harm them or steal from them.”

For both cases – the navy commander’s possible response and the community reaction – the officials say there is a 50% likelihood of the scenarios occurring.

The Australian government-contracted managers running the detention centre have been aware from the outset that the move to push people out – without a plan for their ultimate resettlement – would be distressing for those detained.



“Many cohort members have forged friendships under very difficult circumstances thus creating support networks,” one document says. “Some groups even have gardens but in the main they have created a space to call their own.

“It is not ‘home’ but it is the next best thing, it is what they have become used to and moving these individuals around at any time will elevate the tension across the MRPC.”

Despite this, Broadspectrum’s planning suggests force would be used to move people into the new camps.

“If they [detainees] fail to comply, the police will remove them either to their new compound (peaceful), to the MAA (resist), police station (violent).”

After the PNG supreme court ruled on 26 April 2016 that the detention centre was “illegal and unconstitutional”, the detention centre was partially opened.

All of those detained remain behind the three-metre steel fences of the detention centre, and are not free to leave of their own volition, but refugees are allowed to take scheduled buses into Lorengau township. They are not permitted to leave Manus.

A subsequent ruling by the court found that the detention centre “legally” no longer exists, despite 861 men still being held there. Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection stills regards the centre as operational.

Only 36 men have agreed to being resettled in PNG over the four years of the detention centre’s operation.

Since the supreme court ruling a year ago, attempts have been made to further reduce numbers in the camps, which continue to operate under Australian control and Australian laws.

Pressure is being increased upon asylum seekers to abandon their claims for protection – they are offered inducements of up to $30,000 if they agree to return home; while forced deportations of those found not to meet protection obligations are occurring with increasing frequency, with successive national groups – Nepalese, Lebanese, Vietnamese – targeted.



Australia also brokered a controversial deal with the US for it to take an unspecified number of refugees from Manus and Nauru. Officials from the US departments of state and homeland security have been on the island assessing which and how many refugees it will accept for resettlement.

But there is no guarantee of how many – if any – refugees the US will accept from Australia’s offshore camps. The figure could be as low as zero, or a handful judged to have passed America’s “extreme vetting”. The Australian government has conceded that the US deal will not clear the camp – it expects a “balance” of refugees to be left on the island.

Inside the detention centre, despite the reforms to “open” the centre and the looming deadlines for its closure, the refugees held there say life is becoming, day-by-day, more repressive and inhospitable.

Unlike the centre on the Pacific island of Nauru, which holds families, women, and children, all the detainees on Manus are men.

As certain national groups are targeted for deportation, those without the “protection” of refugee status grow increasingly fearful they will be next.

Several refugees have been assaulted in Lorengau, including two men who were attacked by a gang wielding an iron bar.

On Good Friday, after a dispute about the use of a naval base soccer pitch near the detention centre, a mob of PNG naval personnel ran riot, trying to storm the detention centre, and shooting at refugees and staff hiding inside accommodation blocks. There were reports that a PNG navy vehicle tried to ram the gates of the centre.

The clashes, refugees said, were reminiscent of the attacks of the February 2014 riots, when police and local men overran the detention centre – murdering Reza Barati by dropping a rock on his head, shooting one man and slitting the throat of another. More than 70 refugees and asylum seekers were seriously injured during three days of violence.



“They tried to kill us, like they tried to kill us before,” one refugee told the Guardian after the Good Friday attack.



Many refugees, despite being granted the restricted freedom of a bus ride to the town of Lorengau, refuse to the leave the detention centre because they do not feel safe.



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“We are scared about the locals as well because we don’t know when the locals will be attacking. They are always threaten, ‘We will attack, my people will attack.’ This is another fear which is inside of us.”



Another said: “Manus is just a bigger prison.”





One man inside the detention centre, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retribution, said despite being formally judged to have a “well-founded fear of persecution” in his home country he felt under constant pressure to accept resettlement in PNG or abandon his protection claim and return home.

“PNG management, all the camp managers, they are all trying to pressurise us to go back to our countries, even when they are trying to resettle us in PNG. They not want to resettle us in PNG.



“They are trying to traumatise us and torture, to send us back to our home countries, and torturing us by their way, slowly, slowly they are killing us from minds and physically torturing us inside, the mark isn’t showing on our bodies, but we are dying. Our health is growing very worse, mentally sickness is going high level, everything is bad but they still put pressure on us.”