Novak Djokovic made international headlines this month with his deportation from Australia over his vaccination status. The episode has become yet another polarising debate on vaccines, with everyone encouraged to have an opinion on the “Djokovic situation.” But behind all the noise of the world number one’s visa denial a much darker threat to human rights has surfaced.
Mehdi Ali has been in detention for almost nine years in Australia. He currently lives at Melbourne’s Park Hotel, where Djokovic was also detained for several days as he waited for the outcome of his first visa appeal.
Mehdi is from Ahwaz, a town in the southwest of Iran. It is part of a large region that is home to many of Iran’s Ahwazi Arabs, like Mehdi himself, who are said to suffer oppression and persecution at the hands of the Islamic State of Iran. The indigenous minority has repeatedly appealed to the United Nations for the right to self-determination, but so far these efforts have failed.
Mehdi, worried about such state persecution, decided to flee Iran by boat in 2013 when he was 15 years old. He is now 24 and has been detained in offshore and onshore detention centres ever since he set foot on Australian soil. He describes his journey to get here as “horrible” and has since had second thoughts about coming. “The way this country has treated me these last nine years, sometimes I wish I never reached Australia,” he told me.
When Mehdi first arrived in Australia he was sent to Christmas Island, the home of one of Australia’s offshore detention centres for unauthorised arrivals and asylum seekers. There he was treated like a prisoner and robbed of his identity. “They took our names away and gave us numbers, and that was our identity. Nine years later, I still have no name… I’m a number and not a person to them. I’m not a human being. When I’m moved around a facility, they won’t say ‘Mehdi’s going here,’ they say ‘detainee X coming, detainee X going.’ When they write about my case, they write a number. They won’t write Mehdi.”
After being detained for years in offshore detention centres, where he was often kept in cells covered in blood and faeces, Mehdi was brought to an onshore facility in Brisbane. There he was hospitalised and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One year later he was moved to a detention centre in the state of Victoria and then finally, towards the end of 2021, he came to Melbourne’s Park Hotel.
Mehdi describes the conditions of the hotel, which Djokovic made internationally infamous, as “terrible.” He told me he can see people from his window “having their lives” while he “doesn’t get to have one.” The hotel is located in the centre of Melbourne’s affluent suburbs, where passers-by go about their daily lives, enjoying the January sun in the park, commuting to work or making their way to the nearby Melbourne Cricket Ground. Mehdi watches them while he is imprisoned in his room.
“I’m only allowed to leave the hotel for [doctor] appointments. In those rare cases, I’m surrounded by four security guards who hold onto my arm the entire time and frisk-search me. They put gloves on and touch my whole body.”
Mehdi has not been given any clarification as to when or if he will ever be released. He told me no one answers any of his questions, and he is stuck in a nightmarish limbo. When I asked him if he could apply for a visa, he said: “what’s the point? When you apply, you have to wait for the minister to reply to you. I’ve been waiting for the minister to reply to me for two years. He doesn’t care, and he has the ability to keep me here as long as he wants.” Mehdi has been given no details as to why his case has taken so long, or any indication of when he will ever be released.
I asked Mehdi if he felt claustrophobic, but he didn’t know what that word meant. When I explained it to him, likening it to being stuck in a cave, he answered: “that’s exactly how I feel.”
On 17th January, the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was criticised after he implied that the detainees at Melbourne’s Park Hotel had not been recognised as refugees, but were simply people who did not want to return to their home countries. Elaine Pearson, the director of the Humans Rights Watch in Australia, told the Guardian that it’s an “outright lie” to say that the detainees are not refugees, when “most of them have had their refugee status formally recognised for years.”
Mehdi’s status as a refugee was recognised a few years after his arrival to Australia, due to the persecution of his ethnicity group in the country he fled from. But Mehdi’s refugee status hasn’t made a difference to immigration minister Alex Hawke or the Australian government. They continue to follow the country’s historically strict position on border control, one which Amnesty International has called “a deliberate system of abuse for thousands of adults and children” and which the Human Rights Watch has described as causing “immeasurable suffering for thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers.” It is a position that gives the so-called “lucky country” a contradictory image for those not lucky enough to be born here.
While Morrison’s conservative government is harshest in its stance, in the past the opposition Labor Party hasn’t been much better. Towards the end of his run as prime minister, fighting against a conservative government who accused Labor of being too soft on its border policy, Kevin Rudd mandated that anyone arriving by boat—including recognised refugees—would not be able to settle in the country. Labor’s stance today is that anyone recognised as a genuine refugee should be released from detention until their case is heard. Although that still doesn’t guarantee settlement, it is a more positive position than the inhumane laws currently in place.
Mehdi told me that he doesn’t get involved in politics. He said he felt nothing negative towards Djokovic and wished him all the best with his future. What the tennis player experienced for a few days was what he had experienced for nearly a decade, and he hopes he will use his platform to spread greater awareness about Australia’s indefinite detention of refugees and asylum seekers.
