Cops: Refugees cleared from Australia camp

Sydney, November 24

The Papua New Guinea police have emptied a shuttered Australian detention camp where hundreds of refugees were holed up in, the police said today, ending a three-week-old standoff.

The police operation, which started yesterday and saw 50 men removed from the closed, Australia-run centre, resumed this morning with a fresh push to take the remaining 320 detainees to new, PNG-run transit centres.

“Between 9 and 10 am (2300-0000 GMT), they had all been moved,” PNG police spokesman Chief Superintendent Dominic Kakas said, adding that the men were moved to two of the three transition facilities.

“It’s empty. The military have taken back their base,” he added of the Manus camp, which is located on a PNG naval base.

Video and photos posted by the refugees on the social media showed uniformed police swinging and poking long metal poles at detainees and dragging them from their rooms towards buses bound for the transition centres elsewhere on Manus.

The police, engaged in an operation they dubbed “Helpim Friends”, had vowed not to use force against the refugees, who have been refusing to leave the camp since Australia declared it closed on October 31.

Food, electricity and water supplies were shut off in a bid to get the detainees to move to the new facilities. — AFP