mis à jour le Mardi 5 février 2019 à 19h12
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Sergiy Maidukov
Nytimes.com | By The Editorial Board
An Iranian Kurdish writer, detained for six years on a remote island for seeking asylum in Australia, proves that words are more powerful than fences.
Behrouz Boochani could not be in Melbourne to receive Australia’s most prestigious literary award on Thursday. He was on a small Pacific island 2,500 miles away, near the Equator, where he, along with hundreds of other refugees and asylum seekers, has been locked up by Australia for nearly six years now.
“I have been in a cage for years but throughout this time my mind has always been producing words, and these words have taken me across borders, taken me overseas and to unknown places,” he said in his acceptance speech, delivered by video. “I truly believe words are more powerful than the fences of this place, this prison. This is not just a basic slogan. I am not an idealist. I am not expressing the views of an idealist here. These words are from a person who has been held captive on this island for almost six years.”
Mr. Boochani’s words are indisputably powerful. An Iranian Kurd who was a journalist and filmmaker, he said he was compelled to flee after the police arrested several of his colleagues and raided his office. But his efforts to reach Australia by boat were stymied by the Australian Navy, and he was shunted off to a detention center for refugees on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
Mr. Boochani continued to write on Manus, now mostly through WhatsApp messages to his translator so the words would be preserved, despite regular searches by guards who often seized phones. In addition to articles for local and international outlets, he shot a documentary and worked on a book about his detention. That book, “No Friend but the Mountains,” won this year’s Victorian Prize for Literature and the 125,000 Australian dollars (about $90,000) that come with it.
The guidelines for the Victorian Prize stipulate that the writer must be a citizen or permanent resident of Australia, but the Wheeler Center, which administers the literature awards, made an exception for him. The judges described Mr. Boochani’s book as “a stunning work of art and critical theory which evades simple description.”
But it was not enough to secure passage to Australia. Under the country’s hard-line policy in force since 2013, all refugees who arrive by boat are refused settlement in Australia and are sent off to Manus or the tiny island-state of Nauru. The government has justified the policy as a way to prevent refugees from attempting a dangerous and potentially deadly crossing by sea, often at the hands of criminal gangs. But the offshore detention, often lasting years, has been described by refugees and human-rights organizations as a hellish and indefinite limbo in equatorial heat that drives many refugees, even children, to despair and suicide.
A pair of class-action lawsuits filed in December by a human rights group on behalf of about 1,200 migrants detained on the islands claims the asylum seekers have been subjected to torture and “crimes against humanity.”
Under the Obama administration, the United States agreed to resettle up to 1,250 of the refugees in America in exchange for Australian assistance with refugees elsewhere. The deal was the subject of the infamous phone call on Jan. 28, 2017, in which the newly inaugurated President Trump first heard of it from the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. “This is going to kill me,” declared a horrified Mr. Trump. Amazingly, the deal survived, and a few refugees continue to reach the U.S.
It would be far better to end the offshore detention altogether. One hopes Mr. Boochani’s voice will prove more powerful than the misguided logic of successive Australian prime ministers who have rejected all criticism of their draconian policy and continue to detain hundreds of men, women and children on isolated Pacific islands.
“I dwell among a sea of people with faces stained and shaped by anger, faces scarred with hostility,” Mr. Boochani wrote in “No Friends but the Mountains.” “Every week, one or two planes land in the island’s wreck of an airport and throngs of people disembark. Hours later, they are tossed into the prison among the deafening ruckus of displaced people, like sheep to a slaughterhouse.”
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