Papua New Guinean police have cleared the remaining asylum-seekers from a closed Australian-run detention centre, ending a three-week protest that started with more than 600 people surviving on rain water and smuggled supplies.
Australia closed the Manus Island detention centre on 31 October, after it was declared illegal by a Papua New Guinea court, but the asylum seekers refused to leave to transit centres saying they feared for their safety.
Despite the unsanitary conditions and lack of adequate food and fresh water, around 300 remained when Papua New Guinea police started removing people yesterday.
"The refugees are leaving the prison camp," Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani told Reuters.
"We did our best to send out our voice but the government does not care."
Australia's Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement that all of the asylum seekers had now departed for alternative accommodation.
"Advocates should now desist from holding out false hope to these men that they will ever be brought to Australia," he said.
The fate of the asylum seekers, some of whom have been detained for years and come mostly from Afghanistan, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Syria, remains unclear.
Australia refuses to allow them entry under its strict "sovereign borders" policy and the asylum seekers have refused to resettle in Papua New Guinea.
The country also previously turned down an offer from New Zealand to resettle some of them.
Australia and Papua New Guinea both say the asylum seekers are now the other's responsibility, although the Australian government has said it has spent $10 million on the transit facility and it wanted the men to move there.
Under Australia's "sovereign borders" policy, asylum seekers trying to reach its shores by boat are intercepted and detained in either Papua New Guinea or Nauru in the South Pacific.
The United Nations and human rights groups have criticised Australia's policy for years, citing human rights abuses in the offshore detention centres and called for their closure.
Papua New Guinea intensified efforts to clear the Manus facility yesterday by bringing in buses to start moving the men and cutting off routes previously used to deliver smuggled supplies.
Pictures sent to Reuters by an asylum-seeker showed Papua New Guinean officials wearing army fatigues inside the camp, and a video distributed by advocacy group Get Up showed police armed with sticks pulling an asylum seeker to his feet.
"Buses are waiting for you, trucks are waiting for you...you will get on to them and you will move to your new location, you will not stay here," a man who identified himself as a police commander told the asylum seekers in a video by a Sudanese refugee.
