‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’
Reverend Martin Luther King
Men scattered like a pack of cards. People ran for cover, threw themselves into the shower and toilet blocks, piled into washrooms or scrambled for the sanctuary of our stacked metal boxes – any shelter we could find.
Perhaps others had witnessed gunfire before in their violent homelands. For me, it was an appalling novelty. To borrow a Burmese expression, my blood cycled in reverse.
Outside the cell, the corridor was dimly lit by the pale red glow of an emergency exit sign. In the darkness below, Mike compound was a cacophony of screams, breaking glass, metallic clanging and more gunshots. I barricaded myself and Haroon inside. With no lock on our outward-opening door, I wrapped one end of a towel around the handle and tied the other to the frame of a bunk bed.
Footsteps thundered up the metal staircase and when I peered into the corridor a Manus local, a G4S cleaner still dressed in his uniform, appeared on the landing. He was followed by a posse of civilians from the local community. They were carrying rocks.
The men lunged for our door and pulled on it hard enough to drag the heavy metal bed frame across the floor. Somehow the barricade held. When they realised they couldn’t get through the door, the cleaner moved to the window.
Our eyes met and, under the dim light of the exit sign, his eyes were as red as burning coal. He started hurling rocks at us. Thankfully he couldn’t generate much damage through the small pane of glass, but a few rocks crashed into the cell and one connected with Haroon’s mouth, knocking out two of his teeth. Partially thwarted, the posse left.
Although we’d avoided being stoned, a man across the corridor hadn’t been so lucky. His eyeball had been dislodged from its socket and dangled on his cheek. He’d been struck in the face by a slingshot fired from beyond the fence.
As the cleaner and his posse turned their attention to other cells in MA2, a hailstorm of rocks and missiles fired from slingshots rattled the outside of the shipping container. Since our cell was closest to the perimeter fence, it was exposed if the shooting were to resume. I told Haroon that we’d be safer if we moved to a cell on the other side of the corridor. When I looked into the hall it appeared to be empty.
‘Let me see if it’s safe,’ I whispered to the old man. ‘If it’s okay, then follow me.’
The poor fellow was rigid with fear. He was older, and less able to defend himself. When the rocks smashed into the cell and the locals kicked and pulled at our door, he surrendered to the onslaught. He didn’t react at all, but sat on his bed and prayed.
Other Burmese and Rohingya men lived in a cell further up the corridor. ‘If I can get them to open the door, then you should follow,’ I told Haroon. ‘It’ll be safer if we’re together.’
I took a few cautious steps into the darkened corridor. A mistake. Two more Papu G4S workers were waiting on the other side of the block. They spotted me as I ran into the nearest cell. It was empty. I shut the door behind me, but with no way to lock it I was trapped. They yanked the door ajar and in the unearthly red glow I saw one of them swing a metal rod. His accomplice was unarmed and used his fists instead.
The man with the metal pipe swung at me in a rage, but the real damage came from the bare knuckles of his friend. He smashed his fist into my mouth over and over. The sharp latticework of my braces ripped into my lips and cut the inside of my cheeks to ribbons. When I tried to cover my mouth, he pulled my hands away and his blows flew harder.
A moment later, the metal rod, swung by his accomplice, struck the back of my head, opening a gash in my skull. My vision grew black. As I fell to the floor, I heard an Australian accent say, ‘Okay, that’s enough.’
Before they left, my assailants pulled two metal lockers down on top of my battered body.
Darkness.
When I thought about it later, it was the ferocity of the attack by the Papus that most baffled me. We’d been staging peaceful protests for about two weeks and although they’d grown more intense as our pleas were ignored, we posed no threat at all to the locals.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned of the fire that had been stoked in advance of our arrival – that the locals had been told we were hardened criminals, sent into local detention because we were too dangerous to be controlled inside Australia.
Evidence of this disinformation effort was easy to spot; if hard, at first, to understand. You just had to look outside the fence to see a Papu signalling, with a swipe of fingers against the throat, what would happen if we were to try to escape. It made sense. They were afraid of an incursion of fugitives taking over their tight-knit community. And we were even more terrified of them.
The campaign of deception had taken in the members of the PNG police force, who were the ones to fire their guns. The shooting was indiscriminate. One bullet tore through a detainee’s backside while other rounds were sprayed into the compound, randomly striking their victims.
When the shooting started, mobs of local G4S staff, accompanied by hastily-armed civilians from surrounding villages, pushed over the perimeter fence and stormed the compound. They’d been lying in wait. The mobs rampaged through the prison in droves, hunting us down and beating anyone they could find.
Mike was transformed into a blood-spattered arena of violence. Detainees were picked up and thrown off first-floor landings, hurled out of windows and slammed in the head with rocks and clubs. Men were kicked, punched, stomped on and flung against the hard edges of beds. Some fled through the downed perimeter fence and into the night, to be tracked down later.
In a way, I was lucky to be knocked out so early in the melee, since it put me out of reach of the later, more vicious offences. When I woke up, I was surrounded by three Burmese friends, who had found me in the empty cell and carried me to another cell in MA2. But the rampage continued.
Using towels to jam the door shut, we waited. One of the guys tried to peek through the outer window to see what was going on beyond the perimeter, and a single gunshot rang out. The bullet grazed his shoulder and struck the metal locker I was sitting against. If I’d been standing, it would have put a hole in my chest.
When I had first heard the gunshots splitting the air, I’d assumed they were warning shots or rubber bullets. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would be firing live ammunition – let alone from automatic rifles.
As relative quiet descended, we could hear people all over the compound shouting for help. It was the only word we heard for hours – until news spread that someone might have been killed.
Reza Barati was a young man, full of promise. He had studied architecture in Iran but was unable to finish his degree. As a member of the persecuted Kurdish minority, he found life had grown too dangerous for him. He fled in 2013 and arrived on Christmas Island soon after me.
He’d hoped to resume studying architecture in Australia. Instead, he ended up on Manus Island in the prison block that stood next to ours. He was a tall man, physically robust, with an easy-going nature that made him a popular figure.
Reza was among a group who, instead of sheltering in the shipping containers, ran to the phone room, maybe to seek shelter or call for help. When the barrage occurred, Reza had tried to return to his cell to seek safety. Seeing this large man running past, one of the Papus hit him hard. He collapsed in the darkness of the upper corridor of MA6, and the marauders kept striking him, each passerby taking his turn at hastening the end of this amiable young man.
A coroner’s report later clarified that he was killed on the spot when the back of his head was crushed by a rock. He was just twenty-three years old.
As the night wore on, new troops appeared on the scene. Belonging to a squad called the Incident Response Team (IRT), they came to retake control of the prison. I’d first heard about the IRT a week earlier from a Burmese man who worked for the Salvation Army. As a heads-up to his countrymen, he’d let slip that a special force was being trained within G4S ranks, to deal with any uprising in the detention centre. Recognisable by their all-black uniforms and riot gear, including oversized transparent shields, they now fanned out and searched the prison, moving cell by cell.
They were not a calming presence. Far from being our rescuers, the IRT punched and kicked us, as they herded us into the main yard of Mike. By then the electricity had been restored. I was alarmed to see how much blood I’d lost: my white t-shirt had been dyed a dark and sticky red. The IRT stormtroopers were undeterred by the bleeding, and kicked me in the back a few times to keep me moving. My pain receptors were so overloaded I was numb to their blows.
The IRT then encircled us. There was no attempt to give us medical attention. If you begged for some water, the reply was a fist or a boot. If you asked for a napkin or toilet paper to stem your bleeding, you were struck with a baton or a shield.
More than sixty detainees sprawled in the dirt, reeling from injuries that ranged from cuts, bruises and broken teeth to multiple fractures, head trauma and major lacerations. One man’s throat was an open wound. Some of these men took years to recover, if they ever did.
We were forced to cower on the ground until dawn. At first light, we were marched under guard to a nearby football field on the navy base and again told to sit. Terrifyingly we were left under the watch of local G4S guards – the very Papu men who had bashed us senseless and murdered Reza Barati hours earlier. When we were rounded up and ordered to the ground, it seemed reasonable that we might be next.
The fear hung over us as the sun rose and the heat kicked in. We tried to sleep in shifts in the 40 degree swelter in case the guards launched another attack.
As the adrenaline subsided and the astonishment wore off, the pain set in. Hundreds of the injured lay on the ground and moaned in agony. My swollen face throbbed with every heartbeat, and all I could smell and taste was my own blood. The blow to the back of my skull had triggered a headache that was bottomless. Each time I moved I was reminded of the man with the steel bar. There was not a nurse or a medic in sight.
That evening, the guards ordered us to stand and march back to our compounds, but we weren’t allowed into our cells. The accommodation in Mike was now a crime scene, strung with ribbons of black and yellow police tape. We were corralled into a cement-tiled square that had a metal roof but no walls. As it was night again, we were expected to sleep. There was just enough room for most of us to crouch, and wait for the morning.
The locals had looted the detention facility over the course of the night, taking food, cigarettes, mattresses, pretty much everything that was not nailed down. Infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed, including the mess area. As a result, we were served our usual slop on pieces of paper, and forced to eat it on the ground using our hands, with no water to wash ourselves.
We lived like this for weeks. Mosquitos preyed on us, day and night, in the open air. Other flies came to feast on the wounds of the injured, and on the decaying food that filled the cracks between the concrete tiles where we ate and slept.
The roof wasn’t wide enough to cover us, so the rain would soak us while we slept. With all of us huddled together, lashed by the wind and by our fear of dying, it was like being back on the hard deck of the boat on the dangerous swells of the Banda Sea, the most unforgiving of water bodies. It was not just me that felt this way. We had all made that boat journey, and talked about it often. Mostly when it rained, or at night, when there was nothing else to do. It was a distraction from the pain and unease.
We slept in shifts, and even then we were packed tight, each of us getting kicked in the head or doing the same to the next guy.
As I fell asleep, I felt the gentle return of the rolling waves. It was a perverse form of nostalgia, this yearning to return to our ocean journey. While that trip had been full of its own mortal dangers, it also carried in it a spark of optimism that lit up those moments of deprivation. There was a feeling of movement toward something better, and that hope had been extinguished.
Some nights I even yearned to be back on Christmas Island. Back there, we had been stigmatised, terrorised and robbed of our dignity.
Here we were just animals.