“No crime to seek asylum, we are in manus jail.”
He’s been there for 18 months and now finds himself witness to a mass hunger strike by as many as 700 fellow asylum seekers or transferees, as they’re called.
He said he hasn’t joined them because he fears that the respect he has in the compound means he could be singled out as a troublemaker, and that if he was taken to the medical center, he wouldn’t be allowed back.
He has asked not to be named.
Photos sent from the mobile phone he keeps hidden from guards show dozens of hunger strikers lying bare-chested on the concrete floor of the detention compound.
“Many people fall,” he wrote, sending an image of man lying outside on the gravel with the message: “no power in his body.”
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From his contraband phone, the transferee sends more images of signs, the words written neatly in capital letters on sheets hung in the compound.
“TO AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT. STOP TORTURING US. IF YOU THINK WE DON’T DESERVE AUS. THEN HAND OVER ALL OF US TO THE UN. WE DON’T WANT YOUR HELP!”
The Australian government has said the Manus Island transferees are free to return to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, or wherever they came from. If they ask, they’ll receive government assistance to go back.
However, Senator Hanson-Young said that option is not being taken up by desperate people who once fled in fear of their lives.
“Anyone who is still left here now is because they’ve got no other choice.”
Asked why he doesn’t volunteer to leave, the transferee texts: “I will die if I go back.”
