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  • An Interview with Behrouz Boochani
  • Tom Toremans (bio) and Behrouz Boochani

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BEHROUZ BOOCHANI

© Ehsan Hazaveh

In May 2013, Kurdish Iranian writer, journalist, and human rights activist Behrouz Boochani fled Iran after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had raided the offices of the Kurdish-language political magazine Werya three months earlier. Werya was based in Ilam, the third largest Kurdish city in Iran. Situated near the border with Iraq, Ilam is the city where Boochani was born and lived until he went to study political science, political geography, and geopolitics in Tehran. An advocate of Kurdish autonomy and co-founder of Werya, Boochani was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 2011 and had been under surveillance since. When the Werya offices were raided, eleven of Boochani’s colleagues were arrested and imprisoned. After Boochani, who was in Tehran at the time, published the news of their arrest online, it spread globally and his colleagues were gradually released from prison. Boochani went into hiding and eventually fled Iran. In July 2013, he attempted a second crossing over sea from Indonesia to Australia. The boat was intercepted by the Australian Navy and sixty asylum seekers were transported to Christmas Island under the regulations of the “Pacific Solution,” the Australian policy that was initially implemented from 2001 to 2007 with bipartisan support by the Labor and Coalition parties. Under this policy, migrants arriving by sea were refused entry into Australia and detained in offshore detention centers on the Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. After the offshore centers were closed by the Labor government under Kevin Rudd in 2008, they were reopened under Julia Gillard’s Labor government in 2012 and on July 19 of the [End Page 451] following year, just a few days before Boochani was intercepted, the second Rudd government reopened and expanded the detention center at Manus under the “PNG Solution” (short for “The Regional Resettlement Arrangement between Australia and Papua New Guinea”). Under this policy asylum seekers arriving by boat, even if they were acknowledged as legitimate refugees, were denied settlement in Australia and detained on Manus Island while being “processed.” If they were granted refugee status, they would be settled in Papua New Guinea. If they were refused this status, three options remained: repatriation, asylum in a third country (other than Australia or PNG), or indefinite detention. This policy was further expanded into “Operation Sovereign Borders” under the Coalition government led by Tony Abbott and has remained in place under Scott Morrison’s and Anthony Albanese’s prime ministerships.

In April 2016 the Manus detention center was declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea, leading to its eventual closure in October 2017 and the relocation by force of the remaining refugees to new centers in and near Lorengau, and later to Port Moresby (50 of them incarcerated in the “Bomana Immigration Center,” an annex to the notorious Bomana Prison). According to the most recent reports, there are 105 people still on PNG and 111 on Nauru, of a total of more than 4000 asylum seekers who were incarcerated on both islands (www.refugeecouncil.org.au/operation-sovereign-borders-offshore-detention-statistics/2/). Some were granted asylum in the US; others were transported to mainland Australia under the “Medevac Bill” allowing refugees to enter Australia for medical treatment. Not all refugees survived the brutal regime at Manus. Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains closes with the announcement of the killing of Reza Barati, “The Gentle Giant” who was murdered during the riots in Manus prison on February 17, 2014. In August of the same year, Hamid Kehazaei died after being denied urgent medical treatment. In 2016, Sudanese refugee Faysal Ishak Ahmed died after suffering a seizure. The following year saw the deaths of Hamed Shamshiripour and Rajeev Rajendran in Lorengau. The former was denied medical treatment for mental illness; the latter was suspected to have taken his own life. In October 2019, thirty-two-year-old Afghan doctor Sayed Mirwais Rohani, who had been detained on Manus and was [End Page 452] transported to Australia under the Medevac bill in 2017, committed suicide in...

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