贝鲁鲁斯·博卡尼

Behrouz Boochani (Kurdish: بێێڕوز بووچانی; born 23 July 1983) is an Iranian Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer living in New Zealand. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one-month visa to New Zealand expired and he remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020, at which time he became a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.

Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian government on Manus Island, and has won several awards.

His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.

After the November 2022 publication of his second collection of writings, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani, Boochani visited Australia for the first time to promote the book in December 2022.

Life

In Iran

Boochani was born in Ilam, Iran in 1983. He has described himself as "a child of war", referring to the 1980s war between the Iraqi Ba'athists and "Iranian zealots" fought largely in his Kurdish homeland in western Iran. He graduated from Tarbiat Modares University and the Tarbiat Moallem University (now named Kharazmi University), both in Tehran, with a master's degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics.

He began his journalistic career writing for the student newspaper at Tarbiat Modares University, before working as a freelance journalist for several Iranian newspapers such as Kasbokar Weekly, Qanoon, and Tehran

-based Etemaad as well as the Iranian Sports Agency. He wrote articles on Middle East politics, minority rights and the survival of Kurdish culture. In secret, he taught children and adults a particular Kurdish dialect from the region of Ilam, regarded as their mother tongue. He co-founded and produced the Kurdish magazine Werya (also spelt Varia), which he regarded as his most important work, and which attracted the attention of the Iranian authorities because of its political and social content. The magazine promoted Kurdish culture and politics; Boochani felt it very important for the Kurdish city of Ilam to retain its Kurdish identity, language and culture. As a member of the Kurdish Democratic party, outlawed in Iran, and the National Union of Kurdish Students, he was watched closely.

In February 2013, the offices of Werya were raided by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was founded after the 1979 revolution to protect the country's Islamic Republic system and to quell uprisings of "deviant movements", and had previously threatened Boochani with detention. Boochani was not in the office that day, but 11 of Boochani's colleagues were arrested, several of whom were subsequently imprisoned. After publishing news of the arrests online and the news spreading globally, Boochani went into hiding for three months and on 23 May 2013, fled Iran and made his way to Indonesia via Southeast Asia.

In detention

In July 2013, on his second attempt to make a crossing from Indonesia to Australia in a boat carrying 60 asylum seekers, the boat was intercepted by the Royal Australian Navy. Boochani and his fellow asylum seekers were detained first on Christmas Island and after one month transferred to the Manus Island detention centre in August 2013, as part of Australia's Pacific Solution II. Manus is where the Australian government detains single male refugees, whose maritime arrivals are six times more numerous than that of women.

Boochani started making contact with journalists and human rights defenders outside the camp. He gathered information about human rights abuses within the camp and sent them via a secret mobile phone to news organisations and advocacy groups such as The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Refugee Action Collective, and the United Nations. In September 2015, PEN International (the Melbourne and Norwegian branches of which Boochani is now an honorary member) and a coalition of human rights groups launched an international campaign on Boochani's behalf, urging the Australian government to abide by its obligations to the principle of non-refoulement, as defined by Article 33 of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Several campaigns have urged individuals to write to Peter Dutton, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, the Australian Prime Minister and high commissioners. Reporters without Borders warned that dissent was not tolerated by Iran's theocratic regime, and that Boochani's "freedom would be in great danger if he were forced to return to Iran". Boochani has asked repeatedly to be handed to the UN.

He also became a spokesperson for the men in his compound, Foxtrot, meeting with PNG immigration and other officials as well as Amnesty International and the UNHCR representatives. He was moved to Chauka, the solitary confinement block constructed of shipping containers, for three days. He was also jailed during the 2015 hunger strike that was put down by force; he spent eight days inside Lorengau prison and was then released without charge after being asked to stop reporting.