Malaria hits PNG asylum seekers
The Age
By GREG ROBERTS
MANUS ISLAND, PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Tuesday 5 February 2002
Asylum seekers have placed signs on the camp fence with messages such as "Our children are not going to die here" and "We refuse to live here".
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Asylum seekers who Australia sent to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea have been injured trying to escape, have potentially fatal diseases and have staged hunger strikes and wrecked property in violent protests against detention.
An Iraqi man reportedly tried to kill himself. Doctors confirmed that no medication to prevent malaria was given initially to the first 216 asylum seekers sent to Manus Island after HMAS Adelaide rescued them off Ashmore Reef last October. Another 144 were flown there from Christmas Island last week. Most of those held on the island are Iraqis.
At least 15 have malaria in a region with one of the world's highest rates of the disease.
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, who visited the Manus Island facility on Sunday, has denied reports asylum seekers there have malaria.
Other boat people are suspected of having tuberculosis and typhoid fever. An X-ray machine to screen the asylum seekers for contagious diseases arrived just last Thursday - more than three months after they arrived on Manus Island - at the PNG Defence Force's Lombrum Naval Base, where the Australian-funded detention centre has been built.
In what some lawyers regard as a breach of human rights, the asylum seekers have been denied access to independent legal advice on the instructions of the Australian Government, according to PNG officials.
Several sources on Manus Island said none of the first asylum seekers were told they were going there. All were told they were going to Australia.
"It wasn't till they got here that they saw all these black faces around them and they were very, very angry," said Lucas Kuwoh, a University of PNG law student who PNG and Australian lawyers have appointed to make contact with the boat people.
Mr Kuwoh said he had been trying unsuccessfully for three months to gain access.
"The fact that they are being denied access to legal advice is contravening international human rights standards in a manner which all decent people should deplore," he said. A PNG Foreign Affairs Department official on Manus Island, Lawrence Bunbun, said the Australian Government had told Port Moresby it did not want the asylum seekers to have access to independent legal advice.
"They thought it wasn't necessary, that everything should just proceed through the normal channels," Mr Bunbun said.
Two local men, Popai David and Klopil Komet, travelled by boat to the waterside detention centre the night after the asylum seekers from HMAS Adelaide arrived.
"We saw them trying to get out, screaming that they didn't want to be there, that they were promised they were going to Australia," Mr David said.
"They tried to get over the barbed wire but they got all cut up. They had blood all over them."
Mr Komet said PNG soldiers forced the boat people to back off. "They had guns pointed at them, they were telling them they would shoot them if they didn't get down off the fences," he said.
A Manus Island policeman, who was deployed to the detention centre, said one man pulled a light bulb out and inserted two fingers into the socket.
"He was very distraught, the others told us he was trying to kill himself because it got too much for him," the policeman said.
He said that several days after they first arrived, asylum seekers rioted in the food mess hall, destroying tables and chairs and smashing windows.
"They went berserk, crazy, like they were wrecking anything they could get their hands on," he said.
In the first view of the asylum seekers by the media at the detention centre, The Age this week saw groups of mainly Middle Eastern people in units segregated for single men and families behind three-metre fences topped with barbed wire.
Private PNG security guards patrolled the fences, from which hung signs with messages such as, "Our children are not going to die here", and "We are not going to live here".
Notwithstanding Mr Ruddock's assurances, doctors at the centre and the nearby Lorengau Hospital in the island's main town confirmed that at least 15 asylum seekers have malaria.
The doctors said it is likely at least some, if not all, had contracted the disease on the island, and not in holding camps in Indonesia before they set off for Australia. The victims included several children between five and seven who were among those rescued at sea in October.
A doctor who has treated the people said it was "some time" before medication to fend off malaria was provided to the first batch of boat people.
"There was no time, there was such a big hurry to get them here," the doctor said.
These boat people created a storm in the lead-up to the November election over government claims they had deliberately thrown children into the sea in a bid to force HMAS Adelaide to rescue them.
The doctor said there were several suspected cases of tuberculosis and typhoid among the asylum seekers, but further screening was required before these could be confirmed.
The hospital at the naval base was in a "state of total disrepair" when the boat people arrived, the doctor said.
"We're only just now getting to the point where it is functioning," the doctor said.
"We have at times used the Lorengau Hospital facilities, but the direction is that this is a last resort, because everything has to be confined here."
Doctors and police said about 20 Iraqis had staged hunger strikes, and that several "ringleaders" were isolated from their compatriots.
The Federal Government has asked the PNG Government to refuse the media access to Lombrum.
Mr Ruddock said during his weekend visit this was not to save his government from embarrassment, but to "protect the interests of the asylum seekers and their families that could be prejudiced" by publicity.