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.

ABOVE Loghman and Mohsen make a trip into Lorengau.

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.

ABOVE Refugees return to the transit centre by the 6pm curfew.

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.”