Mehdi Ali Is Finally Free
"Tonight I am free and leaving Australia to start my life in the United States of America."
Iranian refugee and advocate Mehdi Ali has finally been released after nearly nine years in immigration detention.
“Tonight I am free and leaving Australia to start my life in the United States of America,” he said on Thursday. “Unfortunately, I cannot be happy yet. How can I be happy when my friends are still sleeping with tears and sighs, and wake up with tears and sighs?”
Ali fled his home country when he was only 15-years-old, arriving in Australia in 2013 by boat with his fellow teenage cousin to avoid persecution as an Ahwazi Arab minority.
He was first sent to Christmas Island and Nauru where he was diagnosed with PTSD, before being flown to Australia as a Medevac refugee in 2019. He spent the remaining years indefinitely held in a Brisbane immigration detention centre, before ending up in Melbourne’s infamous Park Hotel where Novak Djokovic was temporarily detained in January.
Ali spent his latest birthday in the hotel detention facility at the same time as the tennis star. “I’ve been in a cage for nine years, I turn 24 today, and all you want to talk to me about is that,” he said at the time.
Djokovic commented on Ali’s case a month later, expressing how he was sorry he didn’t get to meet him. “I come from a country which has had a lot of refugees and wars in recent times, in the last 20 to 30 years, and the whole region has suffered a lot,” said Djokovic. “So I really wish [the Park Hotel detainees] well and I will try my best, as I said. The whole thing is still so fresh and we’re trying to find a way to help them even more.”
The Coalition has had a refugee resettlement arrangement with the US since 2016, where Australia receives Central American refugees in a swap. As of January 1000 refugees have been resettled in this deal in what The Guardian describes as a “painfully slow” wait for a spot “that may never come”.
There are currently over 30 refugees still inside Park Hotel. “I won’t be happy until all my friends are…released from detention. It’s not freedom until we are all free,” said Ali.
Photo Credit: Mehdi Ali/Twitter