Behrouz Boochani

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Police personnel watch pro-refugee protesters rally outside the Park Hotel, where Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic is believed to be held while he stays, in Melbourne, Australia on Jan. 10. (Sandra Sanders/Reuters)

MundoOceanía,

Tennis star Novak Djokovic’s detention by Australian border authorities has cast a much-needed spotlight on the Australian immigration system. Djokovic was held in the Park hotel in Melbourne, alongside 32 refugees who had sought asylum in Australia and have been indefinitely detained ever since — some for up to nine years.

If you are only just hearing this story, you may be shocked. But the arbitrary and ongoing detention of people, including children, indefinitely is tolerated and normalized in Australia.

This part of the story begins in July 2013, when the Labor Party announced that anyone who came to Australia by boat seeking asylum would be sent offshore to Manus Island, Papua New Guinea or Nauru, a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.…  Seguir leyendo »

The author, Behrouz Boochani, in 2016 while at Australia’s Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea, where he was held for six years. Credit Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

MundoOceanía,

Growing up in a Kurdish family in the Ilam Province of Iran, I never expected my life to be affected by Australia’s history of white supremacy and settler colonialism. I had little awareness of Australia, a faraway country founded as a penal colony, and built on the massacres of its Indigenous people and on European migration. It was to be decades before I would hear about the White Australia policy, an official state immigration policy, in effect between 1901 and 1973, barring nonwhite people from immigrating to the country and intent on making Australia a white nation.

Yet the xenophobic legacy of the White Australia policy had a significant impact on the trajectory of my life and choked the lives of thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants who were held by Australia in offshore detention centers in its former colony Papua New Guinea and on the island of Nauru, a former protectorate.…  Seguir leyendo »

Refugee, artist and musician Farhad Bandesh has been held in immigration detention by Australia for seven years.

MundoOceanía, ,

Years ago, during one of those hot Manus Island days, a few Australian guards entered the refugee prison camp. They snatched a broken guitar from the hands of a young musician and exited with an air of invincibility and sense of victory. The young man followed them for a whole 100m stretch in the prison and begged them to return his guitar. But every time he asked one of the officers they replied in absolute terms that he should forget about his guitar. In response to the question of why the guard was taking his guitar, he received the reply: “Having a musical instrument in prison is prohibited because you might hang yourself by using the strings”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Faysal Ishak Ahmed

MundoOceanía,

“They’re trying to kill me, if they kill me take care of my son.”

These were the last words of Faysal Ishak Ahmad before his death on Christmas Eve. The Sudanese refugee uttered these words during his last visit to his friend Walid Sandal. This is not a scene from a tragic film or novel. This is the reality of the prison on Manus Island, hundreds of kilometres from Australia and in the middle of a silent ocean.

Faysal was born in Darfur, Sudan – a region associated with war, genocide and displacement. A symbol of affliction in western media. In other words, Faysal was born into war.…  Seguir leyendo »