Asylum nightmare

Fr Pierre Grech Marguerat, from the Jesuit Refugee Society, says the Hal-Safi incidents clearly show how fragile government’s detention policy is

They say that Jesus was the first refugee. It is a well-known story, an ideal starter to put all those Christian sentiments on guard when talking about immigration. Sure enough, Friday’s Xarabank edition on the Hal-Safi incidents starts off with this premise. Despite all the Catholic credentials of this insignificant piece of rock, there was little to suggest in the last week that much of it has paid off in the form of that unmistakable of ad hoc commandments, the ‘love thy neighbour’ maxim. It’s been a good week for bigots and jingoists all round – the actions of the Armed Forces of Malta, borne out of the military erudition of Brigadier Carmel Vassallo, seemed to have brought enjoyment to those whose latent racism had been caught up inside. At the time of writing, Norman Lowell is expected to have held a demonstration to show solidarity with the AFM. Still no condemnation from the political parties for the violence that occurred. It seems that Maltese provinciality is having its day.
So where does all the racism come from? Unabashed xenophobia in the 21 century - forget its strangely anachronistic appeal (if there’s any) - is an acceptable attitude in Malta. Here is a case of extreme force by the most under-used riot squad of the century (the longest game of rummy ever had to be stopped when the infantry had to be called in to contain a group of immigrants armed with nothing but loud clothes and baseball caps), and a good part of the population chooses to treat them as heroes:
“I think it is quite shocking to hear comments like these,” Fr Pierre Grech Marguerat, the coordinator for the Jesuit Refugee Society, says. “Part of the reason is because people do not know anything about these people, from where they are coming, why they have fled their country and why they are here, and what their situation is. Few Maltese have understood what it means to be a refugee and the responsibilities we have as a country towards these people. This causes a lot of a confusion in people’s minds.
“Another factor is that when someone is put in prison or in detention, in our minds we think it is because someone has done something wrong. On a legal level, somebody who enters the country without documents is not a criminal and should not be penalised in this manner, and nobody should be kept in detention simply because they have entered the country without documents, as both the UNHCR and the EU have indeed said. This is not a criminal act.
“However following September 11, certain ideas have infiltrated people’s minds, especially due to other global problems. There are those who say they fear terrorists will come in disguise as asylum seekers. I say that when we had terrorists in Malta, they entered Malta, killed and left before we could have known anything,” Grech Margeurat says, referring to the murder of Islamic Jihad figurehead Fathi Shqaqi by Mossad agents in November 1996. “I don’t think terrorists will enter Malta as asylum seekers. This is a very risky way of coming to Malta. A study by Le Monde Diplomatique shows that 600 people a year die in the Mediterranean Sea crossing over from Africa. This misconception is however quite commonplace.
“Without any doubt, these people had to pay criminals to leave their countries and cross over to Europe. It doesn’t mean that everyone has the right to refugee status, but there are those who do have this right, and who cannot be taken back to their country because of war, and are given temporary humanitarian protection by our country.”
Surprisingly, condemnation of the violence came from few quarters. Lawrence Gonzi decided to launch an inquiry (yet another one), but no condemnation. The Labour Party, despite all its socialist pomp, decided it too would contain its outrage. Alternattiva Demokratika called for the resignation of the AFM commander. But it seemed altogether clear, that the two main parties were comfortably in bed with an electorate that was in the great part, unmoved by the scenes of beatings at Hal-Safi, so reminiscent of those Korean-trained SMU outings back in the eighties. The Nationalists must have had a crisis of revisionism.
“From the reports witnessed by journalists, and the accounts of asylum seekers, it looks like there was no form of provocation from the part of the protestors, who held a peaceful protest. It was worrying that after such an incident like that there was no condemnation of the violence from virtually any side, probably because both government and opposition agree with the detention policy,” Grech Marguerat says, who adds that both JRS and the Commission for Justice and Peace condemned the violence, ergo the Maltese Church.
But all is not good neither within the echelons of the Curia. Only last week, Grech Marguerat could be heard phoning RTK during a programme dealing with the issue to ‘complain’ about the bent of the programme which may have not taken kindly to the plight of immigrants in Malta.
“The problem of not being informed is partly also because there are those who choose not to be informed. It is true that there is a degree of xenophobia, much of it being irrational and based on a lack of information.
“There are fears that these people are coming to take away our jobs. Many times these people are doing jobs which the Maltese don’t want to do, such as in the construction industry, which involves physical hardship, or refuse collection, and other jobs which the Maltese are not ready to do anymore but are essential to our lives. The Construction industry is one of those industries that generates a lot of money.” Italy, Grech Marguerat says, needs some extra 240,000 workers a year to sustain its pensions system and its standard of living, according to its central bank director, a factor that reinforces the need for economic migration to sustain the greying population that is Europe.
“The fact that no media is allowed access to the camps shows a clear shortcoming in a democratic society. Despite that, there are clear declarations from official sources, apart from NGOs like ours, such as Alvaro Gil-Robles, the Commission for Human Rights for the Council of Europe, who surely needs no credentials to prove what he says.”
The Gil-Robles report was undoubtedly clear in its verdict – it documented all the shortcomings of the detention policy, but ultimately it was laced with those adjectives that render Malta a human rights nightmare (well, look what the eighties taught us!): compared to our prisons, Gil-Robles said, the detention camps were shocking.
And yet, Tonio Borg, Home Affairs Minister, is impulsive, bold and foolhardy in his pursuit of a detention policy he believes to be a ‘deterrent’ (fine words which, when pronounced, often seem to bring with them yet another boatful of asylum seekers):
“We think that detention is doing more damage to the immigrants and the people who are taking care of them, the soldiers,” Grech Marguerat says.
“We have to pay attention that this is not an issue between soldiers and immigrants. The soldiers are carrying out their work and they are paid for it, but they are not trained for this work. They themselves know it, and still they are doing a job they are not prepared for. This is like getting a mechanic to cook for you, and then scolding him for not cooking well. I think we have to say that this is not a conflict between soldiers and immigrants. This is not a cowboy movie. We have to pay attention to the fact the conditions in which the immigrants are kept and the soldiers work, but mostly the immigrants – although the soldiers are doing their job and it is sometimes true that there are those who treat them badly – who as the UNHCR representative said, live in bad conditions: lack of facilities to clean themselves, overcrowding, lack of privacy, men and women under the same tent, even pregnant women in detention.”
Grech Marguerat talks about the relationship between asylum seekers and the AFM. He believes that accusations of unruliness in the camps are not the rule: “I was a teacher – in a school you are always going to have four out of 400 children who are naughty. In these cases there could be some who disrespect the soldiers, but we cannot say all immigrants are like that. I have seen immigrants verbally abusing soldiers, but also soldiers doing the same. Such conflicts will always happen, and it is soldiers who are facing these people, and in very bad conditions. The soldiers are experiencing the same conditions as the immigrants, guarding the compound for long hours.”
Grech Marguerat says the costs of hosting immigrants is directly connected to the detention policy: “Detention is the most expensive way of containing the situation because these people are just there, and you need to guard them and feed them, and in the process you are killing off their initiative. Nobody is calculating the psychological damage to these people, and how many of them had to be taken to Mount Carmel, and how much a bed costs every day at Mount Carmel – few know that a hospital bed a day costs Lm105 a day every time we send one of these people, who arrived in Malta in good health, and were now reduced to this state.”
Committed against the detention system, Grech Marguerat says the alternative is to put into place systems where people are outside detention but can be ‘followed’, such as having them sign in every week or every day at a police station. “This happens with the help of NGOs in countries like England. But there is no discussion right now on alternatives that are respectful of their human rights. We hope this will be discussed in the coming conference on migration.”
He also disagrees with ideas for North African camps which would host asylum seekers in Libya: “I think it is hard to operate such a camp because it is hard to find people to go to Libya to do that kind of work. Amnesty International’s report on Libya also shows that there are doubts whether Libya could administer such camps. Libya does not present a possibility that can ensure that justice will be done with these people.
“Europe has to take responsibility for these people because we are part of this world. We cannot say the contrary in a globalised world – we have benefited from everything else but we say that we don’t want a part of this reality. We have to take on part of the responsibility, even Malta – we may have never an had imperial force which took all it could from Africa without helping it develop – but there are problems of democracy, exploitation and hunger in Africa, and we do have a responsibility towards these people. This is from where the ideas that enshrined the 1951 Geneva Convention came from.”
In the end, with the general rule being that immigrants never choose to come to Malta in the first place, it is hard to agree with the deterrent theory. Asylum seekers are usually brought in to Malta because of bad weather, but many of them do not even want to come to Malta – they want to go to mainland Europe – some of them don’t even know where Malta is.
According to Grech Marguerat’s calculations, Malta has one asylum seeker for every three hundred people. It is less than the Austrian intake, but more than the British. “We have to remember that refugees are our country’s responsibility and enjoy our same rights. Those who are given temporary humanitarian protection, because although they cannot prove their case cannot be sent back to countries such as Somalia where there is war and does not have a government, tend to be very insecure. Temporary status is given only for a year and is later renewed, but in many cases right now, the status is not being renewed. So we have many immigrants who leave Malta because their status is not renewed. Many of them leave Malta, either legally or illegally. The larger part of them want to leave Malta, partly informed by the fact that the message they have received is that there is no place for them in Malta.”