Behrouz Boochani granted refugee status in New Zealand World news

Behrouz Boochani, the Iranian Kurdish exile and journalist who became the voice of those imprisoned on Manus Island, has recognized his officially recognized refugee status from New Zealand, and granted him a visa to live there.

He said he finally felt confident knowing I had a future.

I am very happy to have a certainty about my future, I feel liberated and confident at last, he told the Guardian from Christchurch.

But at the same time, I can not fully celebrate this because so many people who were imprisoned with me are still struggling to get freedom, still in PNG, in Naure, in detention in Australia. And, even if they are issued, Australian politics still exists.

Boochani was officially notified by the New Zealand government that his asylum application was accepted on Thursday, exactly seven years to a day after his arrival in Australia in 2013.

July 23rd is also Boochanis birthday. He turned 37 years old.

During the six years held within the Australian offshore processing regime in Papua New Guinea, Boochani emerged as the voice of Manus Island detention center and a tireless campaign for the rights of Australian detainees.

He has written extensively for Guardian for Life in Detention and has won Australia’s richest literary award for his book, Not a Friend but the Mountains, which is being made into a movie.

He secured a temporary visa to fly to New Zealand in November last year as a guest at a writers festival and filed for protection when he arrived.

Boochani is now provided with a one-year work visa and can apply for permanent residence in New Zealand, a way out for citizenship. He has lived in Christchurch since leaving Papua New Guinea.

He says that while some New Zealand politicians have sought to politicize his asylum application in the context of an election there this year his reception in his new homeland has been very welcome.

At the height of the pandemic, people left gifts and flowers at Boochanis’s door. People care about each other in New Zealand. They withdrew when some politicians tried to demonize me, they said we do not accept that hate speech, he said.

He is stopped on the street regularly by people who know him, and want to talk.

And Christchurch, he told the Guardian, appropriate. He rides his bike around town where I feel free to ride my bike and walk the hills around town.

This city is still traumatized, Boochani said, referring to the filming of mosques last March, but this city is building itself, people are bringing life to this city, day by day, and there is a very peaceful community here.

Boochani is still working: collaborating with the universities of Canterbury, Melbourne and New South Wales on projects around climate change and relocation, and writing another book, a collection of short stories.

He said he speaks, and continues to defend, of those who were imprisoned with those who remain in custody. I have a responsibility to those people, and for that six years of my life. That’s why I still have to work. I can not forget about those people, or ignore that time, it would be immoral.

A Kurdish investigative journalist in his native Iran, Boochani, was persecuted for reporting and supporting Kurdish rights, and fled to Australia in 2013.

He arrived by boat on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, on July 23, the first place he arrived where he could seek asylum.

He was forcibly transferred to Manus Island a little over a month later, to a detention facility that was later discovered to be illegal. He would spend 2,269 days held by the Australian offshore processing regime.

Following a lengthy court case, he and nearly 2,000 others were compensated for their illegal detention.

During the six years he was held on Manus Island and in Port Moresby, Boochani witnessed friends being shot, stabbed and killed by guards on Manus Island, watched as others died of medical negligence and watched others descend into mental anxiety and suicide.

He was tortured twice for several days in the infamous Chauka isolation block, in the Manus detention center. He was jailed for eight days for reporting on a hunger strike in the center, which was forcibly thrown by PNG police.

But throughout he held a role as a working journalist on the island, most prominent and initially, the only voice testifying from within the secret regime.

I’m still a journalist in this country, he told the Guardian Australia in 2015. That’s my job, my job.