On 14 November 2019, quietly and without fanfare, a small group made up of human rights activists, literary folk, and just two journalists came together at Auckland Airport to welcome Behrouz Boochani to freedom. For more than six years, the Iranian Kurdish journalist and author had been the voice of asylum seekers imprisoned on Manus Island, becoming the persistent conscience of us all as we learned of the atrocities committed by the Australian Government on its remote Pacific island prisons.
We waited a tense, giddy, agonising hour after his flight had landed until he finally walked into the arrivals lounge. Throughout the wait, we held back tears and spontaneously held each other. None of us had met Behrouz in the flesh before then, but we were all deeply connected with his plight. He was our ally, as we were his. So intertwined are the struggles for equality, for peace, for inclusion in global politics today that we knew Behrouz’s fight for freedom was essential to our own.
That night, as we finally met our exhausted, elated friend, the world felt a little freer, a little fairer, and a little more hopeful. Once again, Aotearoa New Zealand got to stand as a counterpoint to the politics of hate and division on the rise elsewhere in the world.
What made the wait at Auckland Airport exceptional for me was the memory of my own walk through that arrival hall as a child with my asylum-seeker parents. My own deeply political, Kurdish mother, and my socialist dad. We had arrived in a nation that recognised our humanity and afforded us a legal process where we could prove our persecution. We were treated as equals, because inherent in the right to claim asylum is the acknowledgement that no one deserves to live with the risk of torture or violence. For all the hurt of growing up alien, some of which drives my life’s work for equality, at least I got to grow up free. I was free from that arrival onward from the oppression that Iranians of my generation lived and breathed daily, the oppression they resisted. I escaped that world, while Behrouz grew up in it. He paid a high price for holding on to his humanity under a brutal regime.
‘They call us “the scorched generation”; did you know that?’ Behrouz told me as we swapped notes about our childhood in that first decade of the Islamic Republic, sitting in the uncanny calm of a sunny courtyard in Christchurch, New Zealand. ‘We are the first Iranian generation with no living memory of freedom.’ I had never heard that before.
A few days later, my friend Tayyaba Khan told me a Wellington taxi driver had asked her if she was a Member of Parliament. Tayyaba, a community leader and rights campaigner, had emerged as one of the unwavering Muslim voices setting the narrative in the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks. When she asked the driver why he thought she was an MP, he showed her my card. He had given me a ride recently, so he thought she could also be one of those ‘young Green MPs’. Tayyaba beams as she retells this anecdote. ‘We are normalising diversity. Age, colour, sexuality.’
I realise this must be a warm feeling of triumph felt by women MPs as they put our gender slowly into a different perspective with their mere presence.
There is another anecdote Tayyaba recounts when we talk through the dark side of being a ‘first’. This one was passed on to her by an older Pākehā feminist. As Tayyaba tells it, ‘Apparently there was controversy in their movement about how hard and how fast some leaders wanted to push for change in the 1970s. At one heated meeting, a nun suddenly stood up and said, ‘But some will have to run, so others can walk.”’
For us, as outsiders, it proves what we have always known: that by becoming visible in public life, we shape the picture of who looks like a leader, not only within our communities but in broader society and the world.
More than that, we bring our stories, together with our faces, into focus. So, eventually the change is in the humanity with which the world treats minorities and marginalised peoples.
That is the enduring value of voices like that of Behrouz Boochani, who fought long and hard to bring humanity to the way we portray refugee stories. Only then might we all stop and challenge the way governments, our allies, are allowed to treat people fleeing oppression or violence. We need to see refugees as they are: individuals with values, hopes, and dreams, like our own. People fleeing war and persecution have also had birthday parties, created works of art, protested as student unionists, authored award-winning books, like Behrouz. They — we — are complex and diverse. We are all capable of life beyond victimhood.
Before Behrouz took up the task of speaking truth to infinitely brutal power, before his striking image and extraordinary writing brought to light the suffering of detained ‘boat people’, he was an avid journalist fighting for Kurdish rights under the watchful eye of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As the risk of torture and disappearance became too much, he fled for safety. He was twenty-eight years old.
That backstory may now seem like a footnote, as most refugee and asylum-seeker stories seem to become once we are perceived through the reductive prism of our displacement. We are seen as faceless hoards, victims, or ‘queue jumpers’.
How poignant that Christchurch, the city he describes as ‘teaching the world kindness’ in the wake of a terror attack in part driven by hatred of refugees, is the place to give Behrouz Boochani his freedom. And how perfect that he used the first opportunity to speak with that newfound freedom to remind us that hundreds still languish in Australia’s inhumane detention camps. He called upon us to use our freedom to end their torture too.
He said it was the first time he could think of himself as a ‘survivor’ of Manus Island. During the 2269 days of unlawful detention, in conditions described by the United Nations and Amnesty International as amounting to torture, he knew he may not make it. He began to write his accounts of the prison camp early, but didn’t feel safe enough to identify himself as the author until he had established support networks outside of the island. It was the journalists, civil society organisers, and ordinary people connecting with his stories, who used their freedom to give him his voice. That movement made it safe enough for him to speak as himself. It is that movement that we will keep building.
My politics will always be more about securing both nature and human rights from the greed and wanton growth of our broken economic system. Real democracy itself is dependent on that. As a legislator and Member of our House of Representatives, I will keep drawing from my work in justice institutions, from constitutional and human rights law practice, from all those hours writing reports and submissions to hold governments to account. My politics will not be limited to fighting for refugees and migrants, nor even to race equality. But I know now the value of active, substantive representation when it comes to speaking on any crucial issue.
That means now, more than ever, is the time for activism.
So, I look to Ilhan Omar. I look to the climate movement pounding forward with endless fervour, knowing that indigenous voices were its inception, to the unwavering resistance at Ihumātao. I look to the breathtaking courage of democracy movements in places like Hong Kong, Chile, and those still ever staunch throughout the Middle East. It is a privilege to speak to newer or younger activists today, to new and different kinds of outsider politicians. I see history being made there far more clearly than I see it in Donald Trump’s win or Scott Morrison’s devastating cruelty. The dirty politics that win elections through xenophobia and fear will rise again in New Zealand too — they are tropes, lacking in inspiration as much as integrity. Those are only signs that we can’t get comfortable in formal democracy alone. What is important is that we are jolted into participation, that we forge paths.
For now, I sit in the New Zealand Parliament. I bring my expertise, but I also bring my story, my perspective, my face. That means very different things to different people. It brings with it hate and discomfort, as well as unity and hope. In fact, whether I made it in or not, running still mattered. It brought me, and people like me, a little further toward the forefront of public life, where we should be.