Adding to suffering: reducing food

By Shamindan Kanapathi  

On Manus Island there are three camps that are run by PNG immigration and Australian Border Force. East Lorengau Transit Centre and West Lorengau Transit Centre are for people recognised as refugees through the flawed PNG/Australian refugee assessment process. The third is called Hillside camp. It is where those who have been deemed non-refugees, for various reasons, are held.

East Lorengau Transit Centre is fully contracted to a company called Paladin which provides security, maintenance and food. West Lorengau Transit Centre and Hillside camps have different service providers. Paladin provides security and a local company called NKW Holdings, provides food.

Those transferees who live within the East and West Transit Centres are provided with raw food and have self-catering kitchens to cook themselves. Those deemed non refugees who live in Hillside camp are served cooked food by NKW.

Asylum seekers in Hillside camp on Manus are seriously suffering with hopelessness and desperation. Management is now adding more stress and weakening them by reducing the amount of food they receive. Most of the men go to bed hungry because they have not been given enough to eat. This is further crushing on top of all of us being treated like criminals, our very basic human rights actively ignored.

We ask: What is our fault or what was our crime? Why are we being treated like this?

When the guys ask for an extra piece of meat or one cup of rice the guys are being humiliated and refused.

The contractors care only about money. They put all the funds that are given to spend for refugees in their own pockets. After almost six years refugees here are still made to suffer unbearably. This is really, really ridiculous and a cruel crime.

The man who killed 50 people in New Zealand complains about his lack of rights. But here we are having committed no crime and yet we are treated like the worst criminals.

All decent Australian should raise their voices against this injustice that is being done in your name, paid for with your taxes, which are wasted, spent to torture innocent vulnerable people who came to your country to seek protection.

Please speak up for us now. Please make our voices heard. Please use your voices to support ours. Speak now or you may be the next to suffer. What is done to us will be done to you next. Wake up, Australia.

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