Murder on Manus
“tonight polices and G4S attack us again / Many peoples in the yard / Injure / Pease we need one to help us / May be till morning they will kill us / We are humans or animls”
Members of Refugee Rights Action Network (RRAN) sat at our Monday night meeting on 17 February while desperate messages and phone calls came in.
I had been in contact for a few days with a young man, “Sam”. Sam had asked for phone numbers for the BBC because he felt that no journalist in Australia would dare to write the truth. Make no mistake; the men interned on Manus have a keen appreciation of the political reality of their illegal and unjust incarceration. They had expressed their rights quite eloquently in a letter to the department a few weeks earlier.
They had asked about processing: which country was responsible? What was the hold-up? What will happen to them? Would the Australian government take responsibility for their mental health problems? Why were their human rights not respected?
Why indeed.
Why are these people’s freedoms, rights, mental health and lives so damned expendable? Because they are mere collateral damage in the pseudo-military operation that the right wing extremists in charge of our country have launched against asylum seekers. As with any military operation, secrecy is the modus operandi, and the lives and humanity of “the enemy” are irrelevant.
As the messages were coming in, we had but one thought: how do we keep the government from covering this up? From the danger of Mike compound, where the computers and phones are located, more messages came through from Sam, who risked his life to get this information out:
“sister please we are in bad situation. Local police here follow the clients and star hit and beat them in very harmful way, also use the white weapons like knives and the bush knives and they hurt many of them those clients start bleeding and two of them are injured at neck by knivs and they bleed a lot now …
“there are more then 50 clients hurt … police hostage many clients maybe they are 6 and the local start attack everybody inside all the compounds this lead wounded clients and G4S they are more then 55 We are making great voice for all the world who can help us we are unsafe and we are under threat attacking all of us any time … This is our story and we are in your hands.”
Suddenly the communication was cut.
At 9:20pm Perth time, my Facebook feed from Manus Island went quiet. It has been quiet ever since. A RRAN colleague’s phone rang and a terrified brother of a young man on Manus told her he had been talking with his brother on the phone. He related a similar story: the phone had gone dead and he could not call back and his brother had been injured with a rock.
Soon after, a number of staff members on the island began contacting us, describing the carnage and relating a terrifying story of people in Foxtrot and Mike compounds trying to hide under beds and in containers but being pulled out from these pitiful places of refuge and brutalised.
By morning we learnt the horrible truth. A young man was dead, murdered in the carnage.
Later, I watched Scott Morrison face the Australian public and lie in an attempt to conceal the details of a cold-blooded murder.
Reza Berati’s last moments on earth are now a matter of public record. His injuries were not inflicted outside the detention centre, as Morrison claimed. It is said his throat was slashed and his head stomped repeatedly as he lay bleeding on the ground inside the compound.
Reza’s death was entirely predictable. The government knew that the Special Police unit thugs hired to assist in “managing” perimeter security had been implicated in multiple rapes and murders. The government was well aware that the unit had beaten to death a local man on Manus in July 2013.
It understood the unpredictable security situation. That is why, at every sign of trouble, Australian staff were evacuated from the compounds and asylum seekers left to fend for themselves. Many witnesses claim that local G4S staff – hired by the Australian government – joined with police in the violent assaults.
We now know that sometime during the events, the power was cut. Perhaps that is why the computers went dead. It also means the CCTV cameras were almost certainly disabled. This makes this murder appear premeditated, a consequence of an orchestrated attack. And now G4S staff guard Reza’s body, when they could be suspects in his murder.
We at RRAN demand a full and open investigation, by impartial independent authorities, into this murder and the brutal assaults of asylum seekers who were under Australian care.
We demand those responsible be brought to justice – all of those responsible.
We further demand that all those detained on Manus be brought back to Australia to have their claims for refugee status assessed while living in the community and that compensation be provided for the suffering they have endured while under the “care” of the Australian government.
[Visit the Refugee Rights Action Network at facebook.com/rran.org.]
