More than 600 migrants, intercepted at sea and held in Papua New Guinea after trying to seek asylum in Australia, have resisted efforts to relocate them.
SYDNEY, Australia — Australia moved forward with plans to close its Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea on Tuesday, cutting off access to food, water and electricity as more than 600 refugees and asylum seekers resisted relocation to a nearby city, where they said they would be attacked.
“We are extremely frightened and anxious at the moment,” said Imran Mohammad, 23, a Rohingya migrant from Myanmar, who was detained on Manus after trying to reach Australia by boat. “We are not safe and not welcomed into the local community. If we stay at the center we are at risk, and if we leave, we will be in danger.”
Tensions over the fate of the refugees on Manus have grown since the governments of Australia and Papua New Guinea agreed in April to close the site by Oct. 31.
As the camp was set to close, the migrants — some of whom have waited four years to be resettled — said they were safer at the detention center than they would be in Lorengau, a city close by on the island.
“We are begging for our freedom in a safe nation after more than four years of imprisonment, waiting, feeling lost and drifting in this concentration camp,” said Mr. Mohammad, one of several English speakers in the group. “The message we are trying to send to Australia and the world is our lives have been used like products for more than four years now in this inhumane environment.”
By law, Australia will not resettle any migrants who approach the country by boat, a policy intended to discourage dangerous ocean crossings and human smuggling. Since 2013, Australia has paid Papua New Guinea to house hundreds of migrants caught at sea trying to reach the continent.
The latest attempt to shutter the Manus camp, which sits on a local naval base, has revived the controversy over Australia’s offshore detention policy, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and intensifying a political conflict between Australia and its nearest neighbor, Papua New Guinea.
Papua New Guinea has said that resettling the migrants, all of whom are men, is the exclusive responsibility of Australia, and that it would not force the detainees to settle on the island. Officials, however, told the men they had to vacate the camp on Tuesday.
The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, however, disputed that assessment. Australia has financed three alternative facilities in and around Lorengau and has pledged to provide food and other services to the migrants. How the men are moved to the new facilities is Papua New Guinea’s responsibility, the department said.
The closure of the camp and “the management of refugees and those found not to be refugees are matters for P. N. G.,” the department said Tuesday in an emailed statement.
Photographs posted online on Tuesday showed the detainees barricading the center with wire, in part to secure themselves from locals, who they claim are looting the camp.
The men also took legal action on Tuesday, claiming through their lawyer that being denied water, food and electricity violated their human rights.
Many of the men at the camp have actually had their asylum claims approved by the United States but are waiting for placement, according to two American officials with knowledge of the process. They said dozens if not hundreds of refugees from Manus and Nauru, the location of a second offshore facility, will be accepted in the coming weeks and months — adding to the about 50 men who have already moved to the United States under a deal brokered by former President Barack Obama.
Mr. Mohammad, who has gone through the vetting process, said it was not clear who would go, or when. And neither American nor Australian officials have provided a timeline.
Elaine Pearson, the Australia director at Human Rights Watch, said that even with the expected departures, many migrants would remain in Papua New Guinea for the foreseeable future.
“We know there is between 167 and 200 who are failed asylum seekers who definitely will not be going — and there are others, too,” she said.
Senator Nick McKim, of the Australian Greens party, who visited the island on Tuesday, called the standoff over the migrants a “humanitarian emergency.” He accused the Australian government of shirking its responsibility.
Mr. McKim posted photos from the camp online, showing the men sitting peacefully in the hot tropical sun.
They are stuck in legal and physical limbo, said David Manne, executive director of Refugee Legal, a group of Australian lawyers providing free legal assistance to asylum seekers.
“The future fate of all of these men remains completely uncertain,” he said. “Australia holds the key to this and any solution.”
“It is a highly volatile situation,” he added. “It could get dramatically worse very quickly.”
This year, a dispute between refugees and the local authorities over a soccer field at the facility resulted in shots being fired. One asylum seeker was injured.
Control of the detention facility will officially revert to the Papua New Guinea military on Wednesday.
“It looks as though they will remove us from the center at some point,” said Mr. Mohammad, adding that he had seen around 30 military and police vehicles driving around the area. “We are powerless and hopeless.”
