To Australia Behrouz Boochani has never made it. Nevertheless, the refugee from Iran, has won the highest endowed literary prize in the country. However, the 125’000 Australian Dollar (90’000 Swiss francs) for the Victorian Prize for Literature is not likely to take the 35-Year-old on Thursday in person. Since Boochani 2013 with 60 other migrants in a holey boat on the Indian ocean, was picked up, he lives in a refugee camp, he must not leave, initially on Christmas island, now on the island of Manus, which belongs to Papua new Guinea.
Boochanis autobiographical Text “No Friend but the Mountains” (No friend except mountains) describes his escape from Iran via Indonesia, and the brutal everyday life that he shares with hundreds of other refugees . Since 2013, both the left and conservative governments in Australia have held to the “politics of exile”, as Boochani called the System: In co-operation with Papua new Guinea and the island state of Nauru, the refugees are herded far away from the continent to the Islands. Asylum in Australia, you will be denied, even if you have to claim.
Boochani would have to claim he is a recognized refugee. The Kurd from the North of Iran had worked after his studies of geopolitics in Tehran as a Journalist of Kurdish Newspapers, up to his office was closed by the Iranian revolutionary guards. After three months in the underground, he fled in mid-2013, Iran.
“I never felt safe from the access of the guards and the authorities.”Behrouz Boochani in the “Guardian”
His work as a Journalist Boochani in captivity, wrote for the Australian edition of the British newspaper “the Guardian”, gave Interviews and turned secretly to a mobile phone Videos in the refugee camp. Assembled from short phone sequences of the Film “Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time”, was shown at several film festivals in Australia and the UK.
also Boochanis book: Thousands of Whatsapp messages and the PDF was collected patched files, for five years, and by the Translators Omid Tofighian, and Moones Mansoubi. “I never felt safe from the access of the guards and the authorities”, – told Boochani the “Guardian”. Twice, his phone was seized, on several occasions of his possessions disappeared, such as in the case of uprisings in the camps or during forced Relocation. “I would have kept everything on paper, it would be lost now.”
No interest in Australia
As a Journalist, he said, to the Situation of the refugees is not accurate enough to grasp, he says. Therefore, he had decided in the book to a mixture of lyric, narrative and fictional elements. “The people in Australia and around the world to understand in depth how this System innocent people for almost six years and systematically tortured.”
As a refugee Boochani has no interest in Australia. New Zealand has offered the people of the island. And a few Hundred were able to go to the USA. “But,” says the author, “has spoken with me yet no one.”
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 31.01.2019, 18:43 PM
