Monday, November 27, 2017



The refugees were right all along

For the past month, Australia officially closed its Manus Island concentration camp. However, the refugees there refused to move, because the new concentration camps they were supposed to move to were both unfinished and dangerous. On Friday, PNG police stormed the camp, beating refugees and loading them into buses for a forcible transfer. And after all the violence and brutality, the refugees were right all along:

A Manus Island refugee says there is not enough space in new facilities for the men forcibly removed from the decommissioned detention centre.

[...]

Sudanese refugee Abdul Aziz Adam is one of about 25 men unable to find a bed in the new facilities that pictures show are still under construction, despite Australian government claims to the contrary.

"For myself its been 48 hours I couldn't find a place to sleep," Mr Adam said on Sunday.

"There are about 25 men still living in a classroom. We spoke to the authority but they say the prison camp is not ready and they're doing their best to make it ready maybe in the next couple of weeks," he said.

Mr Adam said more than 350 men had been crammed into the East Lorengau Transit Centre, which he said only had room for 290.


Meanwhile, the refugees are being denied even basic medical care, because the Australian government wants to prevent people from seeing how bad conditions are. But officially, They Are Not Being Detained. They're simply being kept somewhere against their will and prevented from leaving or communicating at the behest of the Australian government. Which I guess shows how much respect the PNG government has for the rulings of its courts: none whatsoever.

This is just the same Australian torture in a different place. New Zealand should not tolerate it. Instead, we should give all of these refugees a home here. And if Australia doesn't like it, fuck 'em.