‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’
George Orwell
In the wake of the attack, G4S staff were forbidden from entering the prison. Even with that threat removed, the mood upon returning to our own compound and storage container homes was one of apprehension and dismay. The memories were too fresh, and we were as trapped as ever.
The physical hardship continued, unaddressed. The injured were not offered a single painkiller. Those who had been launched off balconies had suffered multiple fractures. One had two broken legs, another had a large shard of glass embedded in his side. He was advised not to remove it for fear of major blood loss. An old Iraqi man lost his eye to an untreated blood clot.
Medics flew in a few days later and set up a makeshift clinic out in a football field, which was soon blanketed in injured men lying in military cots and attached to IV drips. The open-air clinic was barely able to handle a simple sprained wrist, let alone dozens of cases of major trauma. Some of the most critical – including the shooting victim and my neighbour, who, like the older Iraqi man, had also lost his eye – were medevaced to Port Moresby.
Since mine were mostly soft tissue injuries, especially inside my mouth, I was left to heal on my own. Each time I tried to eat my food, my mouth filled with blood, a condition that lasted for weeks. Yet at least I had my life. And there were others, still living, who had suffered much worse.
During the long wait for care, I had time to reflect on the events of the past few days. When my mind cleared of the worst images, it was the incidental details that took the stage. The Papu cleaner, clearing the rocks. The delayed dinner. The extra guards, with their metal rods. The shutdown of the generator. Any one of these things would not be peculiar in itself, but taken together – in the context of the violence – they suggested that a more deliberate pattern was possibly at play.
The giveaway to me was the appearance of the IRT troops. As I had learned from the Salvation Army worker who had first discussed them with us, they consisted of G4S guards who had received special training to overcome an emergency situation by force. That training, as well as their special outfits and riot gear, would require a great deal of advance planning.
Every action taken by the prison authorities that night required a decision, carried up the chain of command, and, in the case of the IRT troops, a special budget to cover it. While the recent violence would later be described as a riot, it was no such thing. A riot implied chaos, and that we were the cause of it. This was the opposite. It was an attack on us, from without and within, and in my view a deliberate one.
The attack triggered a series of changes at the detention centre. We were told that local officials, and even a judge from Australia, would investigate the events of the night. Eventually, anyway. And of course, the comfort we drew from this news was offset by the track record of both countries and their legal systems when it came to protecting vulnerable people like ourselves.
Reza, who was killed in the attack, would have to wait for justice. One of the key witnesses, a roommate who was with him during the attack, identified the assailants in court. The attackers included both Manus residents and expat G4S guards.
Yet only two names remained on the list when it came time to press charges, and they both belonged to Papus: a G4S and Salvation Army employee. The Australians were nowhere to be found on the island. And while there were calls from local PNG civilians and officials for the accused Aussies to be brought back for their day in court, their demands fell on deaf ears.
The guards’ convenient departure might seem an effect of the normal revolving door of staffing on Manus, until placed in the context of later incidents. Fast forward to August 2015, a year and a half after the attack on the detention centre, when three prison guards would be hurriedly flown out of the country after being accused of sexual assault by a Papu co-worker. A regular critic of the island’s detention system, Manus Island MP Ronny Knight, described the disappearance of the guards as just another example of Australians escaping the PNG justice system.
The pattern of evasion and secrecy continued in January 2016, when an Australian guard left the island while being investigated for an attempted robbery. This time, Knight was scathing in his response: ‘The locals don’t matter, and the expats get off, they can do what they like.’
In a similar manner, the attack on the prison also fell under a legal and legislative process that went nowhere. An inquiry into ‘alleged human rights violations’, led by a PNG judge, came to a premature but predictable end in March 2014, when it was shut down under accusations of judicial bias. Lawyers for PNG’s chief immigration officer filed for the judge to be disqualified in part due to his role in a previous legal challenge to the centre.
In December 2014, the Australian Senate launched its own investigation into the attack, and found it to be ‘eminently foreseeable’. In the same manner, perhaps, that applying a lit match to a pile of wood, which someone has taken the time to pile together and then soak in kerosene, might have a foreseeable result.
While these developments lay some way off in the future, those of us in detention saw some immediate changes. In another example of bait and switch (and dodging responsibility), a new corporation took over from G4S in running the centre. The Australian company, Transfield, had already won the $1.2 billion contract: the handover was merely expedited after the riot. When the Salvation Army’s $74-million contract ended in early 2014, Transfield took on responsibility for prisoner welfare too. Capitalism, like playing poker, is all about turning risk into opportunity, and when it came to the assault on the offshore detainees, there was plenty of money to be made by those who knew how to play the cards well.
The prison’s security services, meanwhile, were contracted to another Australian company, Wilson Security. As a result, the prison was now staffed and run entirely by Australians. Many of those employed by the new regime were Aussie G4S guards who’d taken part in the riot, just in different uniforms. They had been gone long enough to change their clothes, like snakes that had shed their skins. Within a few months, the Papus were back too.
Like their British predecessors, the new Australian firms favoured staffers with a military background. Many were ex-soldiers who had served in Muslim-majority countries. So it might be expected that some of them had developed a habit of stepping on the necks of people, much like the prisoners for whom they were now responsible.
Because I spoke English I sometimes talked to the guards out of boredom. They usually spoke of their time in military service, with explanations of how they were just following orders, and sticking to their lawful duties. They had a part to play and were not there to ask the big questions.
When they were relaxed enough to open up, however, their take on the big questions was put on display. It was an alarming Pandora’s box of rumours and speculation about the Illuminati and the meddling of the Rothschilds and other prominent families (read: Jews) who secretly controlled the world economy.
I also heard and understood their spiteful banter when they mocked the detainees. They’d learn curse words in people’s native languages and seemed to think that using these slurs to abuse and humiliate made them appear worldly.
Their disdain was as casual as it could be lethal. One day we were subjected to a loud conversation between two Wilson guards watching us on the concrete. Having seen us eating and sleeping on the ground like dogs for weeks, one decided it was a good time to regale his colleague with a story of how he’d bought his son a hoverboard for his birthday. The guard was at pains to emphasise how he’d spent the best part of two weeks’ pay on it.
In normal circumstances, there’d be nothing wrong with such a chat. Who would begrudge a man spoiling his kid on his birthday? But there is a time and a place, and this was not a quiet aside to his co-worker: it was a loud brag for everyone to hear. It was a case study in the banality of evil, in which the excitement of buying a crappy toy could blind a person to the suffering bodies lying at his feet.
In some ways, the callousness and emotional disconnect on display were predictable. The guards, like pretty much all Aussies who worked on Manus, did not actually stay on the island. Rather they lodged at a 300-room floating hotel named, strangely enough, ‘Bibby’. Owned by a British company and retrofitted in Singapore, this ‘coastel’ was outfitted with a large bar, restaurant, gym and roof terrace, when tanning was popular. The cost to Australian taxpayers: $73,400 a night.
The staff attracted to a working vacation on Bibby, we had heard, were drawn from the castoffs of the Australian workforce, whose need for a fun sunshine excursion verged on desperate, given the nature of the work they had agreed to take on. I understood all that. Still, this man’s gross insensitivity made me see red. I walked over and confronted him.
‘Did you tell your son how you earned the money for his toy?’ I asked bluntly.
‘What about it?’
‘I’m just wondering. Did you mention the money has our blood on it? Does your son know you have our blood on your hands?’
The Australian flushed with either embarrassment or anger. ‘Here’s a question for you,’ he said. ‘Do you have a preference for which solitary confinement you want to go to?’
‘If you promise to tell your son you paid for his hoverboard with blood money, then I’m happy to go to a solitary of your choosing, not mine.’
‘Listen,’ he shot back angrily, ‘you’re now stopping me from executing my duties.’
‘I thought your duty was to watch out for the security and welfare of these people,’ I said, gesturing to the damaged men sprawled on the cement. ‘I didn’t know it was your job to brag about what’s happening at your home.’
I expected the guard to grab me but he radioed for back-up, not what I expected. The guy was a lot bigger than me, and he had the training and the authority to crush my slight frame under his army boots. Yet he felt threatened enough – by my studious young self, just out of my teens, dangerously malnourished and exhausted – to call for assistance.
The supervisor came, accompanied by another G4S, and Mr Hoverboard released me into their custody, his face still lit with anger. Maybe I was right about the blood money: the words had stung.
At any rate, by daring to ask a guard a question about ethics, I was on my way to my first stint in solitary confinement.
The chauka bird is only found on Manus and it plays a big role in local customs and folklore. So revered is this white breasted honey-eater, it appears on the flag of Manus. It’s best known as a kind of living timekeeper. Villagers interpret its piping calls as alarm bells that mark life’s daily intervals. Its song, and that of other native birds, was the only music we heard on the island.
Chauka also happened to be the name of a solitary confinement block. Separated from the main jail by several hundred metres, Chauka consisted of three 20-foot shipping containers arranged in a triangle. Each one was empty, save for a green military-style canvas cot and a blanket. No pillow. There were no windows either; just a vent that pushed the hot, stale air in circles, and a lightbulb in a cage, with no light switch to turn it on. When the guards shut me in, it was pitch black and silent, except for the birdsong.
Strangely, for an area dedicated to punishment, Chauka wasn’t as sweltering as the cells in the main prison. The containers had been placed beneath trees and I was spared the additional body heat of my usual companions. An average visitor might expect to be carried out of Chauka on a stretcher after a short stay, but after months of 40 degree heat, I found the 35 degrees of solitary a small reprieve.
Time slowed down in regular detention. In my shipping container cell in Mike, an hour felt like it might last a day. In Chauka, the passage of time went into freefall. Separated from day and night, circadian rhythms were scrambled. There was little to listen to, except the birds and the gloomy scraping of the tree branches against the metal sides of the container. Without the senses to grasp onto, my mind entered a sunless place of its own making, a jungle of shapeless forms and eerie impressions. Nightmares, memories, fears, despair, yearning for family, anger, resentment, frustration, sadness: each took its turn at the front of the pack, and then fell back to let the next tormentor take the lead.
Although I felt remote from humanity, the Wilson guards were never far away. When I wanted to use the toilet they’d let me out, which brought a new kind of pain. In the five metre walk to the filthy lavatory, the sunlight was incandescent and disorienting, requiring me to cover my eyes until I made it inside the stall. At night the walk to the lavatory was marked by the bright fluorescent flares that pricked the eyes and left me with an instant migraine.
Then it would be back to my cell and my lonely cot, hanging from an invisible chain above the void. I was told I spent three days and three nights in Chauka but the time seemed to stretch on too long to measure.
Just as my eyes grew painfully sensitive in my period of isolation, so did my perception change when I returned to my old life in the detention centre. It was with a new x-ray vision that I took in the high fences and the decaying prisoners they held in check. The guards, too, seemed to be peeled back and exposed, revealed as more fleshy automatons than human beings. They could walk and talk, but their brain function was at a minimum, as it would have to be, to keep them going through the paces of their grotesque duties.
Each of us, jailer or prisoner, was trapped in our own way in that abject place, with no purpose or direction, no past or future. Our living, changing and hopeful selves had been stripped. Where once vibrant personalities had brought energy and light to the world, now we were robots, reacting to remote-control inputs of the prison machine. The policy makers twiddled with their procedural buttons, thousands of kilometres away, and we complied.
When we could eat, when to sleep, where to stand and where to take a shit: these decisions were for others to make. We had to be careful not to shout out in unison for our own freedom, or question the ethics of our keepers, lest we cause offence. Any expression of free will was taken as a flaw in the source code, causing us to be extricated from the system and thrown into solitary, to limit the potential for the damage to spread.
The view gave me hope, since recent events had surely changed things. The prison had been overrun and looted: someone had been shot, someone else been killed, still two others had lost an eye; people had been hacked with machetes and beaten with clubs. If that wasn’t evidence the place was unsafe and the policy a disaster, then nothing was. It was hard to imagine that a rational decision maker would think it wise to return to business as usual. The system had failed, and was due for a massive reboot.
The hope lasted for a few weeks, which was precisely how long we were cut off from the internet after the attack and looting. When communications were restored, I was stunned at how the recent events on Manus were being characterised in the Australian media. I should have known better.
By this point, I also should have anticipated how the politicians would invert reality to keep themselves on top. In his initial public comments, Scott Morrison, the faux-pious immigration minister, stated that Reza Barati had been fatally injured outside the detention centre, as if he were part of a marauding group of jail breakers who had jumped the fence to fan out and terrorise the locals.
The truth – later ratified by official investigations – was that the attack had come from outside the fence, causing the detainees to flee for their lives. But by then it was too late, as the narrative of the rampaging prisoners had already taken hold. And the minister’s evasions took a more subtle and characteristic turn, with terms like ‘riot’, ‘escape’, ‘violent’ and ‘illegal’ joining in the effort to reverse the flow of blame.
‘I can guarantee their safety when they remain in the centre and act co-operatively with those who are trying to provide them with support and accommodation,’ Morrison stated to the media after the attack. A pronouncement that deftly omitted the fact that those who were caring for us were also the ones who were killing us.
Injustice had always galled me, but since my first taste of it back in Burma, it had seemed wiser to me to direct my anger at the system as a whole. Most of the time, from what I had witnessed, people and the way they behaved were products of the power structures in which they operated.
For the first time, it seemed that an individual shared a unique portion of the blame. Scott Morrison appeared to relish the task of delivering his harsh and punishing policies. You could hear it in his speech, read it in his words and see it in his body language. He delighted in playing the tough guy – the bureaucratic fist deployed to bash us as a warning to others. And, as it turned out, to grasp at his own political ambitions. In the nativist culture of Australia, where anti-immigrant sentiment was fairly mainstream, getting tough on refugees could put the highest levels of power within reach.
The gears continued to turn as the system moved to restore itself. While we were still sleeping outside, the detainment centre was regularly visited by officers from the Australian Federal Police. They busied themselves in documentation, taking photos of every bullet hole and broken lamp. They were too focused on the property damage to take notice of the nearby encampment of prone bodies, where people were begging for blankets and medical help.
With the damage fully annotated, we were briefly allowed back into our cabins. Soon after my arrival from confinement, the crime-scene tape was taken down and we went to our rooms to gather towels and clothing.
It was a return trip to a nightmare. We had to step around shattered glass and dried patches of blood, and pass cell doors smeared with crimson handprints where people had tried to barricade themselves. The place was littered with signs of mayhem: broken light fittings dangled from the ceiling, torn clothes and towels were scattered about, and shoes lay in the hallways where people had run for cover.
In my room, rocks were still scattered across the floor but I couldn’t find any trace of the teeth that had been knocked out of Haroon’s mouth. I hurriedly grabbed a change of clothes and a towel and returned to the concrete slab.
A few days later, after all the blood and glass had been cleaned up, we returned to our cells for good. While I still felt uneasy back at the scene of the crime, it was a relief to sleep on a bed again, after a month on the concrete tiles.
For the Australian government, the riots were taken as proof that, rather than needing a rethink, the system was due for reinforcement. The new double-down approach included the installation of higher, stronger double fences topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras. It was an imposing, robust new cage befitting a facility that was transforming from an ad hoc jungle camp to a high-security prison.
Once again the bulldozers were brought in and a new site adjacent to the old prison was levelled. Each pass of the bulldozer’s blade pushed me further and further down a dark tunnel, away from my eventual release.
‘For a very, very long time,’ said Scott Morrison’s voice, which had taken up residence in my head.
The jail was now referred to as the Detention Centre 1, while the new section was dubbed the Detention Centre 2. The first thing to be constructed on the site was a metal frame, which grew to become a cell phone or radio tower. This time there were no shipping containers: the new prison had proper buildings, erected on poured concrete foundations.
Each new wall boxed us in further. And because we still had not heard from the officials about the immigration process they had promised, we only had the noisy voice of the construction site to tell us the truth of our new condition. We were trapped, worse than ever.
Once the new fence was finished, the local guards who weeks earlier had attacked us in a frenzy of hatred were welcomed back to their old jobs.