Policing Displacement and Asylum: Giving Voice to Refugees

Author(s) : Roger Bromley,

Source : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73596-8_3

“Waiting and immobility, together with detainment, form the most common experience for most refugees when, or if, they manage to reach a place where they can be considered for asylum. This chapter focuses, initially, on two films—one a feature (Escape to Paradise, 2001), the other a documentary (La Forteresse, 2008)—both set in Switzerland in the first part of this century. Delay, obstruction and a culture of disbelief characterise their experience of seeking asylum in a convoluted and hostile system. The second half of the chapter concentrates upon an even greater culture of endless waiting, disbelief and hostility, this time in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, Papua New Guinea, which is, effectively, an Australian offshore prison for the warehousing of refugees. This experience is recorded in the remarkable ‘auto-ethnography’ of Behrouz Boochani: No Friend but the Mountains (2019).”