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Matthew Vella
Yesterday, Zeray Okbaledet’s funeral was held in Malta. The 43-year old Eritrean, a survivor of the infamous Eritrean deportation of 2002, had fate land him back in Malta after escaping from a prison in his homeland. After five months in a Maltese detention centre, an illness and his refusal for medical assistance, the Eritrean succumbed. He had braved Eritrea’s prisons and the Mediterranean’s treacherous junket twice.
An irate Harry Vassallo, the Alternattiva Demokratika chairperson, blared the news off the microphone when he took his turn during the opening address at the National Conference on Irregular Immigration, held earlier this week in a bid to draw up a national plan on migration.
“This Eritrean was unlucky enough to come back to Malta after escaping his war-torn country a second time,” Vassallo said.
Tonio Borg, Justice and Home Affairs Minister, watched with his palm covering his mouth. His national conference had been rumbled by the uncomfortable disclosure of the death of an asylum seeker. There had been no official press release informing of the incident.
But the death of Okbaledet, exploited with all the passion that Vassallo could muster in his lambasting of the government’s detention policy, revealed the lack of information that was haunting the entire immigration debate and its speakers who, as Ranier Fsadni commented in his column in The Times, appeared to “frame the issues as a matter of balancing the demands of the heart against those of the mind, the heartstrings against the purse strings.”
With the media being prohibited from entering the detention camps, so much of what was really happening in the unfortunate twinning of the imprisoned asylum seeker and the untrained soldier, was left up to the acrimonious objections of the Armed Forces of Malta commander, Brigadier Carmel Vassallo.
Appearing annoyed at accusations by the NGOs on the behaviour of the Armed Forces with respect to detained immigrants, Vassallo countered, his umbrage clearly evident. The public will never known to what extent both the AFM and the NGOs are justified in their appraisal of what goes on in the detention camps, because the press is still refused access to the centres.
But Vassallo’s tone of resignation was more apparent in his reaction to the press on the Okbaledet death, because after all, it was not the AFM that does the rules: “What can I say?” he said about criticism from Eritrean human rights campaigner Elizabeth Chyrum that Safi’s conditions had contributed to the deterioration of Okbaledet. “The government’s policy is one of detention and we have to abide by it.”
And Tonio Borg, who faces the pressure of addressing the migration flow into Malta following the 13 January incidents at Hal-Safi which are currently under a magisterial inquiry, mused philosophically: “It is not extraordinary that one out of the 3,000 irregular immigrants who came to Malta in the past two years, has died from natural causes.”
The outcome of the national conference in fact delivered a verdict on the choice of the army and police as custodians of the detention centres, the report coming from military expert Martin Scicluna, who led one of the workshops on immigration focusing on security. The report ruled that the armed forces were neither trained nor suited to handle detainees. Many agreed, including Opposition leader Alfred Sant.
Another instance on the lack of information pertaining to the immigration debate was the fact that nowhere in the policy document published by the government on immigration was it mentioned that asylum seekers, by decree of the European Union, have to be given access to the labour market within a year of their detention, even if their application for refugee status is pending.
As speakers warned against fascism and the uncomfortable swell of racist undertones throughout Maltese society, few of them entertained the proposal, mainly that of the Jesuit Refugee Service amongst others, that the detention policy had to be removed, despite its burgeoning costs on the island’s economy.
Whilst the EU wants asylum seekers to become participants in the economy as soon as possible, unions warned against the exploitation of refugees by building contractors who were paying these workers a pittance for their services, in the process undercutting Maltese workers.
Both Tony Zarb and Gejtu Vella, of the General Workers Union and the Union Haddiema Maqghudin respectively, told MaltaToday that even with a new migrant workforce let out into the economy within a year of applying for refugee status, their fate in the labour market could be subject to exploitation.
Even Marie-Louise Colerio, the Opposition’s spokesperson on social policy, whose Labour Party has conducted surveys amongst its electorate in which it found out that the fear of immigrants ‘stealing jobs’ was apparent, alluded to the concern of the “mother whose husband and children have been unemployed for months and years and then learns that a refugee is competing with her people for work”.
Ranier Fsadni remarked in The Times that with three years until the next general elections, the Maltese immigration debate is still in time not to suffer from a “degrading” discourse the likes of which is currently happening in the UK, where elections are just round the corner and parties battle over who will be strongest on the issue.
Writing in his column, Fsadni rests his case at the feet of the middle class, who will ultimately have to accept a decrease in their standard of living to redistribute wealth to migrants, “people whose poverty has to do with us, our affluence… The politicians will only follow the cue if their core voters are prepared to take meaningful responsibility for the beautiful sentiments they mouth.”
This he tied to the proposal by Opposition’s spokesperson on home affairs Gavin Gulia for an audit on what the island’s infrastructural capacities are like to cater for the immigration influx.
Politicians, who actually dominated the conference in a long series of platitudes but also in courageous stands against racism, will be left to do much of the thinking. Whilst many talked about the costs of a detention policy, few addressed the lack of information the general public has to weigh the issue at hand, save for the meek intervention of The Malta Independent editor Stephen Calleja.
But an electorate that is not yet knowledgeable enough to rationalise the xenophobia apparent in the Maltese islands, looks like it will not change without a proper appraisal of the detention policy endorsed by government. With the opposition backing the state on its current system of managing the migration flow, a radical solution for the reception of immigrants – wanted by all, NGOs and the army – does not look to be in the offing.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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