Behrouz Boochani: Six years as a marooned migrant
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 538 Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2013, the Australian Government adopted a draconian anti-immigration policy, which involved sending all sea-borne would-be asylum seekers to de-facto detention camps in remote Papua New Guinea and Micronesia. Stephen Sackur interviews one of them. Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian Kurd who has written about his extraordinary six-year experience as a marooned migrant. He’s now a prize-winning author, but is his long-term fate any clearer?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:06.6 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:10.8 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today embarked on a journey fraught with danger some six and a half years ago. He became active in the |
| 0:23.1 | politics and cultural life of his Kurdish community. He helped edit a Kurdish magazine, which |
| 0:29.5 | drew the ire of the Tehran regime. After several of his colleagues were arrested in 2013, |
| 0:35.5 | he decided to flee. His destination, Australia. |
| 0:40.3 | After an epic journey and one failed sea crossing from Indonesia to Australia, he was eventually |
| 0:48.1 | picked up from a sinking vessel and placed in Australia's draconian offshore processing system for illegal migrants. In Beruze's case, |
| 0:58.6 | that meant six harrowing years on remote Manos Island in Papua New Guinea. Remarkably, he's now |
| 1:06.3 | written a book about his experiences based on text that he was able to send from his detention. |
| 1:13.1 | It's won major literary prizes in Australia, but his journey isn't over. |
| 1:18.8 | So when and where will it end? |
| 1:21.3 | Well, Beru's Buchani joins me now from Auckland, New Zealand, where he's been granted a |
| 1:27.4 | one-month travel visa. Welcome to |
| 1:30.7 | Hard Talk. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on the show, Beruze. I think we have to |
| 1:36.7 | begin with an explanation of how come you're in New Zealand after this epic, long journey difficult journey that you've been on |
| 1:47.8 | how come right now you're talking to me from Auckland I was invited by the world festival in |
| 1:55.1 | Christchurch in New Zealand then I applied to visa through my lawyer in New Zealand. |
| 2:04.6 | And then so I did it through UNHCR and then Amnesty International and Amnesty Australia. |
| 2:13.6 | The interesting thing is that the most short way to reach to New Zealand was that I |
| 2:21.2 | fly from Port Mousb, which is the capital city of Papua New Guinea, to Australia, then transit and |
| 2:31.8 | fly to New Zealand. But I was scared that if I do that, they deport me from Australia. |
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