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Reactions to the Depasquale report confirm the strange outcome of the Safi inquiry – while all evidence points towards a failed detention system, the report’s conclusion still demands it is maintained and consolidated, Matthew Vella reports
If not for its feeble sociological interpretations, the Depasquale report, problematic in many respects, has indeed outlined the failure of Malta’s asylum system through its detention policy. The inquiry into the Safi incidents of 13 January 2005 arrived without press conferences from the ministers concerned, let alone Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi himself, who appointed the retired judge to conduct the inquiry. Its exhaustive documentation of the chain of events on that day, detailing the fumbling operations of the Armed Forces of Malta in a failed attempt to contain a peaceful demonstration by detained asylum seekers, exposes the failure of government’s system and the extreme right-wing’s nostalgia for brutality.
Amid the silence of government, save for TV appearances by Borg and the army’s minister Tony Abela, the most evocative of statements has been Tonio Borg’s conviction that the report “vindicates government’s detention system” when all its contents point towards the opposite direction.
Why Borg should have wanted to state such a debatable opinion on Bondiplus reveals the dilemma the Maltese government still faces. Tonio Borg claims detention is a deterrent to illegal immigration, when the only real deterrent is repealing the Geneva Convention, an impossibility for an EU member state.
On one side government talks about “vindication” and “deterrence”, then it shifts to charity-based talk on being “just” with genuine refugees (no mercy for those who are not). This is pure political fiction, not an ideological backbone for policy – these are words designed to shield us from the reality of the lack of human rights in Malta’s asylum policy, a Potemkin village for a government whose commitment to human rights is marred by a fear of the foreigner.
When the inquiry finally arrives 11 months after it was first commissioned, the report is published right in the middle of Christmas week, right in the midst of an opiate season of merriment. The timing is sublime. Gonzi has already declared he is backing army commander Carmel Vassallo despite the Depasquale report’s “findings” of instances of excessive violence on 13 January.
His parliamentary secretary Tony Abela instead tells MaltaToday the government and the AFM still have to go through over 1,000 pages of testimonies to “evaluate what action needs to be undertaken” – this is either a communication problem between two ministers in the same ministry, or a clear betrayal of Gonzi’s frail commitment to justice.
The Jesuit Refugee Society and the Emigrants’ Commission’s position paper state the events of 13 January clearly point to the explosive and ineffectual policy used by the Maltese government. Soldiers perceive the conditions under which they work as “unnecessarily harsh and unfair”, labouring under “a huge burden of frustration and discontent”, as a result generating a “negative perception” of the detainees they are responsible for.
At this point, one questions why government is adamant not to let the press into detention centres: is not the press also there to understand the conditions under which the AFM operate, to see for itself how the lack of resources of this army is contributing daily to an explosive situation at the army barracks? Why let the extreme right-wing capitalise on disgruntled army soldiers by exposing fanciful accounts of cultural conflict?
“The report confirms the stand of all those who were critical of the behaviour of some members of the army in quelling a peaceful protest,” Stephen Cachia, Alternattiva Demokratika spokesperson on immigration says. “In a democratic country the media spotlight ensures an important element of accountability. Malta’s detention centres urgently need to be kept under this media spotlight so that mistakes such as the army handling of the Safi Barracks protest are never repeated again.”
Likewise, the JRS and the Emigrants’ Commission statement on the role of the press: “the media have an important role to place in this respect, allowing for increased accountability and public scrutiny of government policy and the conditions in which immigrants are detained.”
In such an environment where asylum seekers are criminalised without any judicial decree, there is no limit to the way decisions are arbitrarily taken in army compounds: everything in the report suggests an ad hoc manner in which rules are maintained. Army soldiers are not meant to communicate with the detainees, and yet they feel they have to administer alms in order to maintain a healthy rapport. This is not control, as the government wishes to exert – this is confusion.
Both the JRS and the Church’s Emigrants Commission declared that the wisdom to implement the so-called Ruggier plan, aimed at cordoning off the ringleaders of the protest, “should be questioned” when the report itself exposed an army untrained for such operations: Depasquale instead declared the use of force as justified, feebly redeemed by finding just one soldier caught on film (recognisable for the fact his visor was up) guilty of excessive violence.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has called for appropriate action to be taken to address the systemic causes of the incidents. Together with the recommendations of the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, the Maltese government is still a long way off from implementing long-term solutions to the problematic system they keep alive.
But Tonio Borg tells MaltaToday any action, “if any” regarding the Depasquale report is the remit of the Armed Forces of Malta. No wonder the right-wing finds solace in government’s actions: it too supports indeterminate detention. Borg should not be at all surprised to hear people like Martin Degiorgio claim both the ANR’s and government’s policies on the issue are similar.
The same position paper of the JRS and the Emigrants Commission comments on the Depasquale’s report on the negative portrayal of asylum seekers in detention: the protest is referred to as “an escape” when in reality the detainees remained within the confines of the Safi barracks; the fact that the protest was planned rather than a burst of spontaneous disobedience is criticised; rejected asylum seekers are portrayed as liars, doing their utmost to frustrate government’s attempts to deport them; their refusal to move back into the compound until they met up with the government authorities is seen as a “negative attitude” (the Judge failed to understand that this could have potentially defused the situation and yet the army decided not to let either Refugee Commissioner Charles Buttigieg or UNHCR representative Manca de Nissa inside).
All of these statements reveal the paranoid bias of the retired judge’s inquiry, equally through the infantile rendition of the army soldiers, depicted by Depasquale as having been “fearful” in some instances of the “aggressiveness” of the asylum seekers as they defended themselves from the phalanx of riot breakers, and of the fact that asylum seekers had been regularly training by lifting used car batteries.
And yet, the same report contradicts its own assertions with its own scrupulous detail of what happened: the immigrants, who were unarmed, stayed within the Barracks and consistently stated they had no intention of escaping, and did to walk out despite being able to at any time due to the insecure fencing.
And where has the Labour Opposition been on this issue? Eerily silent – Labour MP Gavin Gulia will have to wet his lips a little better the next time he talks about being the first MP ever to visit a detention centre and expose the bad conditions. NGOs witness the horrible conditions of detention on a daily basis. What sort of legitimacy is Gulia after?
The rightwing Alleanza Repubblikana Nazzjonali were quicker on the draw, and predictably enough it persist in pursuing its exclusionary agenda. Its statement offers solidarity to the army, and demands the prosecution of the media for refusing to disclose the sources who informed them of the detainees’ protest. If the source who signalled the protest to the media was an AFM member, what it would it change for the ANR? By attacking the media the ANR only betrays its political ineptness. Now it attacks those “who have an interest to impose on us against out will a multicultural alien culture” – that is rich coming from Martin Degiorgio, who owns a travel agency.
There is no doubt that this report will not be acted upon, as primary reactions from government are showing. For a Nationalist government whose own political hang-ups from the 80s rest on a discourse of human rights, the failure and costliness of its detention policy is the ultimate contradiction.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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