‘One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.’
Niccolò Machiavelli
Meanwhile, in the happy colonial centres that continued to make a wreck of our lives from afar, the Australian government appointed a new minister for immigration and border protection. Peter Dutton was an unsmiling ex-police detective with a predictable authoritarian stance on ‘illegal’ refugees. (On Manus, guys used to refer to him as Mr Potato Head, based on his appearance.)
Although some parts of the population had begun to agitate for the nightmare on Manus to be brought to an end, a majority of Australian voters, the ones whose lives revolved around barbecues and soccer matches, gave their complicit assent to the Liberal-National Coalition’s offshore affairs. (It was not a one-time mistake, as the same coalition was returned to office in 2016 and again in 2019.)
The political landscape in PNG, however, was different. The country’s opposition leader, a principled figure named Belden Norman Namah, had launched a challenge to the legality of offshore processing on Manus Island and brought it to PNG’s Supreme Court back in 2013. The case went largely unnoticed in Australia, despite the fact that the Morrison-Dutton immigration department had paid millions to help cover the defence fees of the government of Papua New Guinea. Which, of course, was an autonomous nation with its own immigration laws.
Back on Manus, more than 1000 men sweated over the outcome. If our detention was found to be illegal, we might be sent somewhere better, like Australia; or to another offshore gulag.
On 26 April 2016, the PNG court at last announced its ruling: the detention of refugees on Manus Island was illegal and in breach of the country’s constitution. Specifically, the arrangement that Australia had made with PNG to detain those who had committed no crime under the laws of the land was a breach of our right to personal liberty under national law.
The consequences of the ruling were clear, as spelled out by the court. Both the PNG and Australian governments were immediately ordered to move us out of detention.
For those of us affected by the decision, the news was slow to take hold. On the day of the court decision, communication across the detainment centre was shut down, with blame cast on technical difficulties. As always, these difficulties coincided with the release of possible good news. The bad news, on the other hand, played on a constant loop on our television screens.
There were by now enough cell phones tucked away around the detention centre to compensate for the media blackout. People went from one shipping container to the next, asking in low tones if someone had an update. I was stuck to the 2.5-inch screen of my Alcatel, my thumb on the refresh button.
When the headlines appeared, I was torn. As someone who had a phone and could understand English, it was my responsibility to share the news. Yet after years of disappointment, I was reluctant to spread false hope. Laws could be bent to suit political objectives, and heaven knows what dirty trick the Australian government would entertain next.
The response from Peter Dutton was telling. ‘The court decision is binding on the PNG government, but not on the Australian government, so we will work with the PNG government to look at the situation and provide what assistance we can.’
A crafty statement, suggesting Australia really had nothing to do with the current circumstances. Yet it would be there to offer help nonetheless. A supportive if uninvolved friend!
‘Those in the Manus Island processing centre found to be refugees would be able to resettle in PNG. Those found not to be refugees should return to their country of origin.’
How sensible these words must have sounded to those half-listening to their radios while turning the meat on barbecue grills across the sunburnt country. We seafaring refugees were being given a choice, and a fair one, according to this perspective. We could continue to hang out on our tropical island, tanning our shins near the sunny beach, or go home and receive a big hug from our loved ones. Maybe we could even enjoy our own celebratory barbecue when we arrived.
There were more treats coming. Two weeks after the ruling was delivered, the detention centre gates were opened.
‘There you go!’ we were essentially told. ‘The door is open, so you’re not technically being detained anymore.’
There were a few problems with this scenario. For one thing, the campaign, years in the making, to encourage the local community to view us as depraved criminals, in need of another beating. For another, to leave the centre would be to illegally trespass onto Lombrum Naval Base, which served as the outer ring of our fortified prison.
Our keepers had a solution to that too, offering to drive us just outside the fence of Lombrum, free to skip merrily through the jungle and into the arms of villagers who’d been threatening to cut our throats.
I knew the Australian government could act terribly, but its actions during this shameful episode, giving the middle finger to a Supreme Court ruling on a constitutional matter, were a new low. If there was ever any doubt about who was really in charge in PNG, we now had the answer. The court had turned the prevailing sentiments about guilt upside down. We were not ‘illegal’ – our detention was. Which meant the ruling should have changed everything.
In fact, its main practical effect was that it allowed us to use our cell phones with impunity. The result you might expect, that we would march through the gates of our prison and explore the world that had been opened to us, did not occur. By this point, we had seen enough violence to know we were safer inside, and no-one wanted to move from the shelter of our cage.
Given how much we had suffered inside detention, it was a testament to the unpleasantness of Option B and C – taking our chances with the locals in Lorengau, or going back to the death traps of home – that we chose to remain. For Option C, we just had to consider the case of Son Pham, probably the most well-loved of all the guys in the centre. He was pressured to return to Vietnam in 2017, and was stabbed to death weeks after he arrived. Men held a funeral in absentia for him in the detention centre to mark the devastating loss.
It was one depressing prospect after another, with no relief in sight. I still held out hope for a legal solution, despite seeing that even PNG’s Supreme Court could not stand up to the forces of the country’s realpolitik. It was a struggle to get back to the hard work of securing my freedom, part of which involved appealing to the mercy of the same legal system that had been used to betray us.
And yet, what other option did I have? The smart and smartly dressed Nina and I discussed the possibilities. On her recommendation, I requested PNG immigration to send me the files listing the rationale for their decision to declare me a negative, or non-refugee. If I had to make a choice between rolling the dice with a life (and possible death) in PNG or in Burma, at least I wanted a place at the table in my own refugee process.
A few weeks later, I received a twelve-page document that was sloppy and full of holes. They got my name, birthday, and nearly every detail of my story wrong.
We wrote back, arguing that in light of the errors in the rationale document, my case should be reopened, and the interview rescheduled. That never happened. After more than three years in immigration detention, I never got to speak face-to-face with an immigration officer about my asylum claim.
Instead, I was told the only person with the power to review the decision was the man who had signed it, Rimbink Pato, PNG’s minister for immigration and foreign affairs.
We wrote to him too, and asked for a ministerial review.
He said no.
A few of those desperate enough to swallow their fears for a brief taste of freedom began making trips into Lorengau on a Wilson Security bus. These were sorry excursions to a poor seaside village, where we weren’t welcome or wanted: hardly a triumph of liberation.
There was a strict daily quota of twenty people out of a population of roughly 1300. If you were lucky enough to be on the list and your number called, you were scanned with a metal detector and subjected to a full-body search before being put on a bus at 9 am for a half-hour drive to the market in Lorengau.
There we could hang around for a few hours and maybe sample some tropical fruit before being loaded back onto the prison bus and returned to detention. Nothing from the market was allowed back in the detention centre, and nothing from the centre could go out. Even cigarettes, as our only currency, were limited to one packet per person. We had to leave at the exact time we were told, and return by the next designated deadline, our hands empty at both ends of the journey.
Upon our arrival back at detention, we were searched, scanned, addressed as numbers and methodically stripped of whatever dignity and joy we might have recovered during our brief foray into the civilian world.
The gates were opened but we were as confined as ever.
With my mind set on building any leverage possible, I continued to trade cigarettes on the black market for ten to fifteen kina per packet (three to four Australian dollars). On one trip to Lorengau, I’d saved up enough to buy myself a soft-bristled toothbrush, plus proper toothpaste, some probiotics for my wrecked gut, and soap from a shop called City Pharmacy.
For me, the only other aspect of life that changed after the gates were opened was that now I had access to the post office in Lorengau. That was to prove more valuable than I may have guessed.
On one trip to Lorengau, I visited a local wharf, next to a market, with a friend from detention, to get some fresh air. After a while, a local guy came over and spoke to us. ‘Papu!’ he said urgently, using the term Manusians gave to foreigners as well as to themselves. ‘Papu, can you make me a bomb please?’
‘What? A bomb?’ I was confused.
‘Yes, Papu, a bomb. Please! I want to catch fish.’
The villager explained how he wanted to detonate an explosive charge underwater. ‘The fish die and then float to the top,’ he said, wiggling the fingers of his outstretched hands. ‘Please, Papu, make me a bomb. Just one. Please, Papu!’
It was such a weird request I had no idea what to say. My friend and I looked at each other vacantly until the penny dropped. ‘Ahh,’ I said as the explanation dawned on me. ‘This guy thinks we’re terrorists.’
To this day, I have still yet to set off a firework.
While the opening of the gates of the detention centre left us exposed, there were some welcome visitors. There was one local, in particular, who became a regular guest, and later a well-loved member of our besieged community.
We had seen Tiger when he was a puppy, sniffing around with the other dogs that scouted out the sandy area that separated the prison from the ocean. The strays congregated in anticipation of finding a morsel of food tossed over the fence by the detainees. The detainees, in turn, fed the dogs in the hope of making an emotional connection.
As a scrawny puppy, Tiger had been able to squeeze through a depression in the hard dirt under the main fence. He would breach the perimeter, visit with us for a few hours, and then leave by the same route to rejoin the pack. We raised him on milk until he was old enough to share our semi-solid meals. His cheeky forays into the prison lasted longer and longer, until he was too big to squeeze through the fence, or too attached to us – as we were to him – to want to leave.
His favourite area was where the men from Sri Lanka lived – Tamil refugees in flight from that country’s civil war. There was Shamindan, who had once been a vet-in-training, and whose care of the dog had a professional feel. And Ramsiyar, who had lost half his family to war before nearly dying himself. With their loved ones far away, or perished, these guys yearned for companionship, and their adoption of Tiger, who embodied pure joy and affection, filled a deep need.
I became a regular visitor as well, mostly to see Tiger, until I got to know the guys better as well. The mutt, who grew up to be a handsome creature, with a tan and black coat and intelligent brown eyes, became a pet to hundreds of men, loved by each and exclusive to none. He brought us closer together, providing a common focus and outlet for our devotion – for an outpouring of love that had nowhere else to go.
He was not the first pet of Manus. A year or so earlier, a wild, multi-coloured parrot with an injured left wing had fallen from the sky and into our midst. He stayed first in Foxtrot, splitting his time between a broken piece of roof and two small palms that had taken root in the compound’s main yard. Someone called him Jafar and the name stuck.
He was fed and fussed over, until he was tame enough to sit on our shoulders. Soon he was making the rounds of the other compounds too, passed from one hand to the next. Because he was a parrot, there were efforts made to teach him how to talk, but with twenty-two nationalities vying for his attention, the poor bird had little hope of mimicking human speech.
Something else happened during these ill-fated language lessons. Men who had fallen out of touch with their families back home, or who had stopped telling their real stories, for fear of causing hurt, instead opened their hearts to Jafar. He was an ideal friend, who could take in any confession, no matter how sad or dark, with good humour and a lack of judgement or reproach.
Over time he recovered enough to make short test flights around the compound. These in turn became longer excursions to fences and nearby trees. His jungle home was calling him, and we were sad to see him go. Some men even spoke of clipping his wings to keep him from departing, but that debate did not last long. One man asked, ‘How do you like being locked in a cage?’ and that ended it.
A few months after he first visited, Jafar flew away and never returned. Tiger made his departure a few years after that, dying before his time, and was buried with honours, wrapped in a shawl and covered in flowers. Both of these dear friends left an aching absence in the lives of those they left behind.
By this point, seeing the reports of horrors back in Burma (a child being clubbed on the beach, his legs broken by the same laughing tormentors who shot and shared the video, was circulating on Facebook: don’t search it), I decided that life among the hostile residents of PNG was almost manageable, in light of my new hope to stay alive.
With Nina and Winiaka advising, I put in hundreds of hours over many months to plead with PNG immigration and its minister to look at my case. Yet like everything else in Manus, the legal process was slow, and the levers of justice were hard to reach. If I wished to print a document and the internet was down, I’d have to wait two weeks for another chance. If I needed to speak to a PNG immigration staffer, a guard could refuse to let me through, especially if he happened to be having a bad day. If immigration were due to meet with detainees at a shopfront in Mike and it was raining, the meeting would likely be cancelled – because who likes to get wet? – turning the two weeks of wait time into a month.
Nina and Winiaka were as frustrated as I was that the authorities refused to hear my case, or address the mistakes they had made. In early 2017, on the advice of Winiaka, I filed for a judicial review in the National Court of Justice in Port Moresby. Winiaka had lectured in law at the University of Papua New Guinea – one of the many milestones of her career – and was confident that my negative review would be overturned if reviewed by a judge.
It was an ambitious plan that faced two obstacles. Launching it would be expensive, and finding a law firm to take it on would be near-impossible. The biggest client of nearly every legal practice in PNG was the national government. A law firm that took on my case would be shooting itself in the foot.
Given my experience of the past few years, I was prepared not to bother, but Winiaka had a galloping optimism that might have long vanished in a gentler soul. She disagreed with Australia’s immigration policy, and came to the centre because she believed she could make the best impact from inside the system. Drawing strength from her Christian faith and her pride in her PNG culture, she was principled, forthright, single-minded and unwilling to let go. She launched a GoFundMe page from her personal account to raise money for the application, and spent months searching for a firm who’d be willing to fight by our side.
Eventually, a legal practice in Port Moresby agreed to take on my case. Using the post office in Lorengau, I painstakingly collected and sent the paperwork necessary to present in the High Court. In the end, I was informed it would take at least six to eight months before we would secure a hearing date. It was time I didn’t have. By then, the government would have put me on a plane to Burma or into a cell in Bomana.
Good thing I’d started planning my escape.