In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom - Behrooz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'. This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim. Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows:
Anybody even a little bit familiar with Australian history should find this idea at least worth exploring further. After all, British Australia was founded as a prison. Overwhelmed by a 'law and order crisis' which was actually a crisis of poverty, the British decided to send their surplus prisoners overseas - initially to North America and then, once that became impossible, to Australia. These were not gangsters, murderers and rapists - those were executed - but petty thieves, forgers and prostitutes, often committing crimes to survive. Although their actual term of imprisonment was generally limited to seven years and in practice much of this was served on 'ticket of leave' working on the farms of free settlers, their exile was intended to be permanent.
Of course once the British established themselves on the Australian continent - aided by free convict labour - they quickly realised that there was too much potential wealth here for it to remain a prison, and transportation gave way to immigration. But this didn't mean an end to the process of exile, only its transfer to a different group of people. The Australian colonies developed elaborate systems of 'protection' for the various First Nations (we ask, from whom were they being protected?). This involved the surviving members of these peoples being exiled to prison camps of their own, termed 'missions', 'reserves' or other variations of the term. Many of these were initially established as genuine places of refuge and safety in the face of colonial violence but over time they were incorporated into the system and the 'protectors' had the power to confine people to them, or send them from one to another. This system was in place until well into the second half of the 20th century, and in a sense it continues today in the excessive rates of First Nations imprisonment.
The third wave of exile began at the beginning of the 21st century with the Howard Government's 'Pacific Solution' and is still going. This is the phase Behrouz Boochani got caught up in when he arrived by boat on Christmas Island on July 23, 2013, four days after Kevin Rudd declared that no refugee who arrived by boat would be allowed to settle in Australia. He was immediately transferred to Manus Island, where he was imprisoned for six years before finally being able to seek asylum in New Zealand (we ask, from whom did he need asylum at that point?).
In order to function and retain their social licence these systems need four things - a veneer of legality; secrecy and misinformation; people to run it; and a dose of racism.
The veneer of legality seems easy to set up - you just need to pass a law. But you also need to defend this law in the courts against challenges alleging that, for instance, it conflicts with Australia's treaty requirements. If you conduct the imprisonment in another country you can get around this by washing your hands of the whole thing - unless that other country has a functioning legal system, which it turned out that PNG has as its High Court found in 2016 that the detention of refugees on Manus was illegal. But this only changed the means of imprisonment - they were now imprisoned on the island, not just within the fences of the prison compound.
Secrecy and misinformation are also easier when the prison is on a far-off island, especially if you and the host government work together to limit access to that island. The Australian Government went to great lengths to prevent information from escaping - current and former staff working on the sites could be imprisoned for saying what they saw, independent visitors were barred, and for the first few years prisoners were forbidden from owning mobile phones and only allowed extremely limited time on the camp phones. This created substantial clear air which successive Immigration Ministers - and in particular Peter Dutton - could fill with lies. They were not genuine refugees, they were murderers and rapists, they were self-harming at the instigation of health workers, and so on.
More than anyone else, Behrouz Boochani was instrumental in breaching this silence and presenting, from the ground, what was actually happening in Manus Prison (as he always pointedly referred to his place of imprisonment). He was already a journalist when he arrived, having fled Iran after his writing for Kurdish nationalist publications placed him in danger. As soon as he could get his hands on a mobile phone (initially contraband) he began sending messages in Farsi to activists in Australia, and these were translated into English by Moones Mansoubi and published in various Australian media outlets, most notably the Guardian and Saturday Paper. Initially he was merely quoted as an anonymous source, then his articles were published anonymously and finally, when he realised that revealing his name could not make things any worse for him, he began publishing under his own name.
The third thing is someone to run it. Given that the Commonwealth Government has little experience in running prisons, the prison operators were a parade of increasingly dodgy contractors. Established security and logistics companies didn't mind taking on such work at first, but as the smell around indefinite imprisonment without trial got stronger many more reputable companies elected not to extend their contracts. In the end the Australian Government contracted a company called Paladin to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars worth of services on Manus without a tender, and when the company had almost no previous existence.
Once again, Boochani casts light on this murky world. Not only does he spend time tracing the corporate connections and back-story of the various contractors, but he tells us what our millions are paying for - the neglect and cruelty of International Health and Medical Services, the appalling wages paid by Paladin to its local staff, the rampant cruelty of the guards from Wilson security (including the two Australian who were whisked out of PNG before they could be charged with the rape of a local woman), the meagre facilities provided for both prisoners and locals. He shines a bright light on what he and other writers refer to as the 'prison-industrial complex' which takes on a life of its own.
Racism hardly needs much comment. Would we treat people this way if they were white Anglos and not brown skinned Muslims? Indeed, even as Peter Dutton portrayed those on Manus and Nauru as potential or actual criminals and terrorists, he was happy to float the idea of giving urgent asylum to white South African farmers as a result of a bogus story about racially motivated murders. He was more than happy to support the 'right' kind of refugees.
But Boochani asks harder questions than this, and this is how he deploys the idea of the 'kyriarchal system'. His challenge is not only to his jailers, but even to the activists who supported the prisoners' release. Why did we portray the prisoners as victims, not as purposeful actors capable of speaking on their own behalf? Why did we demonise Manus and Nauru in the process of critiquing the prisons, instead of seeing the desecration of these beautiful islands as part of a long history of colonial exploitation? Why did we fail to make the link between these colonial actions and the dispossession of Australia's own first nations?
Behrouz Boochani has given Australians a gift which we do not deserve, and which we are more than likely to refuse. He has used his own imprisonment to shine a light on our nation and ask us hard questions. Why was it so easy for our politicians to create a steadily-escalating cycle of cruelty towards asylum seekers? Why do we continue to be wilfully blind to our colonial heritage both at home and abroad? Has the White Australia policy really been dismantled, or just adapted for new purposes?
As I write this, there are still over 200 refugees trapped on Manus and Nauru and over a thousand in limbo on Australian soil. There are thousands more who arrived before 2012 and who still have not had their status determined. We have a new government in Canberra but they are still telling the same old lies even as they release a single family to burnish their humanitarian credentials.
Australians love imprisoning and exiling people. We should be expecting, and demanding, better. As Behrouz says more than once, all along the only thing they were asking for was 'freedom, only freedom'. Surely it's not too much to ask?
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