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During Djokovic’s five-day detention, his family compared his
treatment to that of a prisoner, stating: “He is not a criminal
but an athlete.”
Djokovic’s visa debacle and short stay in the Park hotel is a
stark contrast to the plight of the 30-plus asylum seekers also
detained there. Journalists flocked to the hotel to cover the
story of the detained tennis player, but paid little attention
to Djokovic’s neighbours, some of whom have been there for more
than two years.
Whether in Melbourne or the country’s notorious offshore centres,
immigration detention, for many, is indefinite. The Park hotel
and the experience of its “residents” are just one example of
how states use time and space to reinforce their borders.
Time is a key tool in cementing borders. When states make
refugees wait, whether through delayed processing or spatial
isolation, refugees no longer control their own time or
movement. They must wait on someone else for permission: to move
freely, to work, to study to plan ahead. In the UK, asylum
seekers wait an average of one to three years for a response to
their asylum claim. In the meantime, they cannot legally work.
Keeping refugees waiting indefinitely (often in the name of
care) is how many states have managed to avoid legal obligations
to protect refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Through
unending bureaucracy and unexplained detentions, European states
are well versed in quietly wasting refugees’ time, sometimes by
housing them in centres with humanitarian or otherwise friendly
facades – not unlike a hotel that doubles as a detention centre.
This is the case in Jordan, where a Syrian refugee camp
approaches its eighth birthday. Azraq camp has been lauded as
the model refugee camp, featuring neat rows of caravans that
depict order and stability but disguise the fact that refugees
are under constant watch. Some “residents” of Azraq’s
high-security section, Village 5, have been confined to this
corner of the camp since 2016.
In 2018, Village 5 refugee Aya told me her wait felt like a
“lifetime”. At the time, processing the almost 10,000 refugees
in Village 5 was predicted to take another two years. Four years
later – two lifetimes – Aya is still there.
Every day, Aya has two choices: to continue to wait or to
request repatriation to Syria. While she fills each day with
cash-for-work activities in her neighbourhood NGO centre, the
years slip away, and her future career plans along with them.
Many of her neighbours have stopped indulging in future plans.
The camp has not only claimed their mobility but also stolen
their time.
For refugees who made it to the UK, which has increasingly taken
inspiration from Australia’s hostile immigration policies, the
wait is similarly precarious. Bayan Almasri, a Syrian master’s
student at King’s College London, arrived in the UK after a nine
month journey from Jordan, which involved months of waiting in
Germany and France.
But he says the wait to receive asylum only really began the
minute he set foot on British soil in June 2016:
Some people waited two years … so I had no idea how long the
wait would be. Every day when you wake up, you just think, “When
will I have the right to stay here?” It’s an everyday question.
For refugees, time is a painfully invisible border.
While Djokovic may have briefly shared with them an experience
in detention, it was just that: brief. His visa was processed
and revoked twice in a span of 10 days. And he could be sure
from day one that his future would remain intact regardless of
the government’s ruling.
This fast-tracked processing is a luxury not afforded to asylum
seekers. And indeed, most visa applicants may wait weeks,
months, or even years for someone to decide what their future
will look like. Such applications are seldom treated with the
urgency of Djokovic’s tennis match.
Djokovic’s wait is over, even though he could not play in the
Australian Open. For refugees around the world, the waiting game
– one they never signed up for – continues.
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