YAREN – Child refugees living on Nauru have described bullying and neglect at school because of their foreign status.

In a video appealing to the Australian government a group of about 35 children sit grouped together and address the camera in English.

“Did you hear our voice?” asks an older girl. “Australian government uses us for hostage, for stopping the boat. We are children, not policy matters.

“You cannot use us for stopping the boats. Are we not children? What’s the difference between us and the children going to Australia?”

The clip was released by OPC Voice, a website put together by anonymous refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru with assistance from supporters.

The website has published news articles, videos and audio describing their lives in the Pacific island nation.

“When I go to the school the Nauruans say to me, ‘Excuse me, refugee,’” one young girl says. “They tell to me, go to your country, here is our country.’ All of the time they fight to us, they are rude to us, they punch us. We go to our principal, and principal says to us, ‘I don’t care, it’s our country, I don’t have to do nothing for you guys’.”

Another child says: “We want a real home, a real home where we can gather everybody. Not some room so little. We want a real home and a real school. We want to go to Australia.”

The school operating inside the regional processing centre was closed in the middle of last year and all students were moved to local schools.

Schooling in Nauru is compulsory until the age of 15 but truancy rates are as high as 60 per cent and the standard of education and the facilities themselves is low.

The education system is yet to fully recover from near-collapse between 2000 and 2005, when there was a mass exodus of teachers.

One of the refugees involved with OPC Voice denied the children had been coached in their messages.

“After 30 months they have become politicians,” he told Guardian Australia. “They know everything about the refugee process, and about all news in Australia that is about them, because their parents are always talking about this matter.

“The children are always asking their families, ‘when can we go to Australia’, or ‘do you have news?’ They know many things above their ages.”

A website search for OPC Voice led to a message saying the website is no longer available.

A Facebook search for OPC Voice this week led to a basic page with little content. A further Facebook search led to this message from Australian Richard Hughes:

“For 16 days there was a website called www.opcvoice.com that ran from Nauru, that jewel of governance and democracy. OPC stands in this case for Offshore Processing Centre.

“The website gave the unfortunate inmates of our camp there a way to share their experiences with the outside world, for whatever that was worth.

“But, today, that website is not accessible any more. The people running it don’t know why, and neither does anybody else, save the guilty parties. Just thought I’d mark its passing.”

- PNC sources