February 21-2014
Two nights of violence at Australia’s immigration detention center on Manus Island have left one Iranian dead and 96 people of various nationalities injured.
Iranians were the largest bloc of people seeking to enter Australia illegally by boat last year.
Manus Island is a remote island that is part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), a Pacific Ocean country. Australia has been sending boat people there and to the nearby independent country of Nauru in an effort to discourage further people from trying to sneak into Australia by boat.
News reports said the trouble began on Manus Sunday after an official at the camp told the refugees they stood no chance of ever being settled in Australia, even if they were found to qualify as refugees.
Camp residents then rioted and some reportedly broke down fences and escaped from the camp.
That appears to have incensed the local population. Refugee advocate groups said islanders and PNG police jointly attacked the refugee center with machetes, knives, rocks and other weapons and went from one building to another attacking refugees randomly.
Thirteen of the injured were said to have suffered serious injuries with some being flown to Australia for treatment.
Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC), “Gangs of armed police and locals actually went from compound to compound, you know, hunting down asylum seekers and inflicting very serious injuries on people that they got their hands on.”
The Sydney Morning Herald Tuesday quoted Ghulam Murtaza, whose brother is currently in the detention center, as saying his brother had called him in Australia during the violence crying, saying locals and police wanted to throw them out of the center and attacked them with rocks and other weapons.
The government of PNG said the dead refugee was an Iranian, but his name has not yet been released.
In Iran, the state news agency reported that the Foreign Ministry had summoned the Australian ambassador to hear an official protest over the death. Until that protest, the Islamic Republic had just ignored the plight of Iranians seeking to flee Iran and win refugee status in Australia.
The detention center was built in 2001 as part of Australia’s Pacific Solution—a policy of transporting asylum seekers to detention centers on island nations in the Pacific Ocean, in an effort to discourage people from sailing to Australia.
According to a statement by the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC), since January 25 there have been daily protests on the island involving hundreds of asylum seekers. Those protests have enraged many of the islanders.
There are currently around 1,300 asylum seekers on the island. The Australian government has not given a breakdown by nationality. But Crowdvoice, an open source online service, says that in the past five years 33 percent of maritime arrivals to Australia came from Afghanistan, 21 percent were from Sri Lanka, 20 percent from Iran, 9 percent were stateless, 6 percent were Iraqi, 6 percent were from Pakistan and 5 percent were classified as “other.” The government has said that the proportion of Iranians soared last year and constituted the largest bloc seeking to enter Australia by boat that year.
