SYDNEY: Papua New Guinea police raided a shuttered Australian detention camp on Thursday, removing dozens of refugees in an effort to end a stand-off that has drawn global attention to Canberra’s tough asylum-seeker policies.

Hundreds of men sent to the remote camp on PNG’s Manus Island have refused to leave the site for new, PNG-run centres since Australia closed it on Oct 31.

The detainees said they were fearful of hostility from locals outside the camp, and said the new centres were not fully operational, with a lack of security, sufficient water or electricity.

Over the past three weeks only around 200 out of approximately 600 men held in Manus have agreed to leave voluntarily for three nearby transition centres, with the others insisting they should be resettled in third countries.

Rights group Amnesty International said the refugees’ safety fears were “well-founded”, adding that some had previously been “attacked and seriously injured” by locals “who have made clear they do not want the men on Manus”.

On Thursday, police moved in and took 50 men to alternative camps, PNG Police Commissioner Gari Baki said.

“We are doing the best we can and the refugees cannot continue to be stubborn and defiant,” Baki said in a statement.

“The fact is that we are not moving them into the jungle. They are being relocated to two centres where there is water, electricity, food and medical services.”

Australia’s Immigration Minister Peter Dutton indicated the police operation would continue, saying “there is a lot of work that is ongoing”.

“A number of people... have been moved and we would expect the number, which up until this morning had been about 370 people within that centre, would drop obviously well below that now,” he told Sky News.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2017