Refugees on Manus face outbreak of diseases: Local police official
The asylum seekers abandoned by Australia on Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s Manus Island face deteriorating hygiene conditions and disease outbreaks, a local police official says.
Australian authorities abandoned the asylum seekers inside a detention center on the Pacific island on October 31, citing a PNG court ruling that the prison camp was illegal. Food, water, medicine, and power services were then cut.
Later reports emerged that PNG immigration officers had emptied waste into the refugees’ makeshift water supplies, contaminating the water with harmful bacteria and microbes.
The Guardian on Monday quoted a PNG police official as sounding the alarm about the imminent threat of an outbreak of diseases at the camp.
“The center is unhygienic, it is subject to illness such as typhoid, cholera and dysentery,” said David Yapu, the police commander on Manus Island.
He warned that a widespread outbreak of potentially fatal disease was very real and needed to be addressed immediately.
One asylum seeker at the site described the situation as “critical.”
“We are thirsty and have been waiting for rain in the past few days. We have some water we’re rationing but it’s not enough in tropical heat. Immigration destroyed the water we’d collected from tropical rain,” he said.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that her government had made progress in convincing Australia to allow her country to take in some of the asylum seekers amid the reports of worsening health conditions at the Manus refugee center.
“To be clear, we have not started that process,” she told Radio New Zealand. “But I think that certainly we’re a bit further along than we have been before.”
Arden has on several occasions offered to accept 150 of the refugees holding out in PNG. Australia has rejected those offers.
The United Nations, which has repeatedly warned Australia of a “looming humanitarian crisis” at the Manus center, has urged Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to accept New Zealand’s offer.
So far, Turnbull has insisted that the priority is an existing refugee swap deal negotiated last year with former US president Barack Obama. Back then, Obama had agreed to swap Latino asylum seekers arriving in the US with a number of refugees landing in Australia.
President Donald Trump, however, has cancelled the Obama-era deal.
Australia’s controversial “Sovereign Borders” immigration policy does not allow asylum seekers arriving by boat to settle in the country.
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