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Brig. Carmel Vassallo considers himself extremely lucky to have quelled the immigrants’ uprising last Wednesday, but in his damning appraisal of detention centres he says they can escape anytime 
Imagine the scenario: Around 100 detainees escape from their detention centre in Lyster Barracks by jumping over and smashing the perimeter fence, as the five guards there do their best to keep more from escaping. The fugitives take to the streets. The first soldier to meet them on their way is none other than the Commander of the Armed Forces himself, Brigadier Carmel Vassallo, flanked by just one officer. They can do nothing but walk along with the escapees as they try to persuade them to return to the barracks. More immigrants revolt in another detention camp. Luckily, the escapees just want to protest; they give the Brigadier their word they will only hold a protest and return in detention. Luckily, they remain one group as the traffic is blocked on the Gudja main road. Luckily, they keep their word. Luckily, force and violence are averted.
Brig. Vassallo admits there was a “huge element of luck” last Wednesday. Things could have gone differently.
“We were very lucky,” he says when I meet him the day after for an interview at the army headquarters. “In January last year it was different.”
Brig. Vassallo says he was informed by 1st Regiment at around 8.15am that something was brewing in one of the two Lyster Barracks compounds.
“The soldiers there who now form part of the so-called Detention Services Unit noted some movement in the tented area, some immigrants were carrying bed sheets with writings on them, so they raised the alarm,” he said. “Upon receiving that information I called Acting Lt Colonel Brian Gatt, who is Commander of the detention service, so that he would direct them and if needs be we would go in, check things and make a search before anything develops. It seems there was communication between Gatt and 1st Regiment but it was decided that some officers would talk to them rather than search the compound. All of a sudden however the immigrants just arose, smashed the gate, tore the fence and in a matter of seconds they were out on the streets, around 100 of them.”
At the time there were five guards at the compound, who were easily overpowered by the escaping migrants.
“The DSU people tried to keep them from leaving the compound, but five unarmed guards cannot do much with those numbers,” Brig. Vassallo said.
It was at around 9.50am that he was informed the protestors were heading towards the airport’s VIP area.
“At that point I just headed there and called for reinforcements. There was already a traffic jam when I arrived. I found the person whom I believed was the ring leader, and started talking to him. He told me ‘we do not mean any wrong’. I told him ‘no, you don’t respect us’. He said ‘yes we respect you but we want to voice our protest’. I told him that if they respected us they wouldn’t do that, because we would get the flak. But they kept marching on, telling me ‘we’ll soon stop, we’ll soon stop’.”
And you weren’t in a position to stop them, right? “No, I went with an officer and my chauffeur, and then another car joined us from Luqa.”
You mean you went there on your own?
“Yes, yes, I went with an officer. I was on my own at first.”
How is it possible that the first soldier to arrive on the scene is the Brigadier?
“Let me explain what happened. I had the deputy commander assigned elsewhere, so I thought, shall I send one of my officers or shall I go myself? Some say I shouldn’t go, but I think it was God-sent that I went, not because I solved anything, far from it. After all, they escaped from our barracks, so ultimately the responsibility falls on me. Eventually even the police commissioner came when the police came to assist us.”
With the traffic blocked, the Brigadier kept trying to persuade the protestors to stop.
“Luckily they remained one group, nobody fled. After some time two men came forward and said they would represent the group. I took them on the roundabout across the road and started talking to them, while the police commissioner was speaking to others. I kept telling them ‘let’s go back to discuss at the barracks’. After some 20 minutes, they told me they had decided they would not proceed further, that they would return to the barracks. Then we walked all the way back, with a couple of commotions that erupted, until we arrived at Lyster Barracks and they smashed everything. We had barely opened the gates that they smashed and destroyed everything in there.”
What did they tell you on the roundabout?
“That they want freedom, that they don’t want to remain in detention, that there are alternatives, freedom, freedom, freedom. They said they wanted to be interviewed by the refugee commissioner, that was the most widespread complaint. But considering that Charles Buttigieg (the refugee commissioner) between August and October had to face around 1,400 immigrants, there’s a limit to how many can be interviewed at once. Some complained they have been waiting for their interview from five to seven months.”
In the meantime other immigrants had destroyed the other block at Lyster and attempted to escape, but they were blocked by the C company.
“We were quite lucky to have three whole platoons that happened to be stationed there at the time, so we could keep control of the barracks. I mean at the barracks you don’t have just the immigrants; there is the armoury, there are other important things and God forbid that they are exposed to any threat. But they managed to keep them inside without any use of force.”
In Hal Safi there was another uprising.
“Brian Gatt told me the immigrants there wanted to speak to the press and that he told them they couldn’t as it wasn’t policy. I told him let’s be practical. So we agreed he would let the journalists speak to their representatives as long as they would return to their quarters.”
Was there any specific instruction not to use force?
“Yes, but the specific instructions weren’t issued yesterday. They had instructions that if force is ever needed, they have to tell me first. But I hadn’t yet talked to the C company yesterday. If you look at the judge’s report (Depasquale) you find the C company did nothing wrong, and that’s the difference between soldiers on training and others who are assigned here and there on sentry shift. That’s a point I have raised very clearly with the ministry.”
After protracted negotiations, in the presence of refugee commissioner Charles Buttigieg and Mgr Philip Calleja, things returned to normal at the centres by around 4pm. Again, Brig. Vassallo admits it was a stroke of luck things that the situation calmed down. Alarmingly, he tells me the detainees can escape anytime.
“The fence built before winter at the tent compound as well as in other places is flimsy,” he explains. “It’s chicken wire basically. They cut it from the ground, kick it with their feet, and open it easily.”
And is this chicken wire meant to keep people detained?
“This is our problem. If these people are meant to be kept inside, then they need a fence which they cannot jump over, otherwise we will keep exposing our soldiers to unnecessary danger all the time. The problem was that there weren’t enough funds so we erected the simplest fence possible. Yesterday they even climbed the Hal Safi fence, which we have just erected there.”
And what about the security?
“Any time they want to, at the Hal Far compound, they can smash down the fence and escape. In one night last week there were five escapes. They start untangling the fence slowly, from the ground. Once you unearth the fence from the ground you can rip it open all the way up.”
So in this case it was sheer luck they didn’t decide to escape, only to protest…
“We have a lot of attempted escapes and most of the time we realise later that some two or three escaped. All they need is to jump a fence.”
As head of the army, do you sleep comfortably about the security of these detention centres?
“No. At the Hal Safi warehouses originally built for us and taken over for immigrants we have installed a better fence, but it’s still not enough. We’ve used expanded metal, but the pipes we’ve used are not strong enough. If you get a rush of some 20 or 30 people they’ll smash it. The fence at the other block is made of chicken wire. One person can do the job (of smashing it) on his own.”
Since last Summer’s immigration crisis, a special task force was meant to come up with new places to serve as detention centres. What happened since then?
“We’ve set up another detention area in Lyster Barracks, which was previously a training area for the C company,” he says with a tone of resentment at the army’s constantly shrinking space, men and funds as government keeps shifting the immigration burden onto the AFM without providing much of a support. “I had planned to set up a pistol range there, and special quarters for close quarter fighting. The building was ready, but we had to abandon the plans to turn them into immigrants’ showers and toilets. We’ve also given up warehouses to serve as immigrants’ detention centres. In October we had 1,470 immigrants in our barracks, 100 less than the total number of soldiers we have in the army. Now they’re around 1,050. The police have around 100 kept at the depot and some 80 others at Ta’ Kandja. It’s difficult, extremely difficult for us.”
Brig. Vassallo’s army has been further incapacitated by the secondment of 118 of his soldiers and five officers with the detention services unit, though the responsibility still falls on him whenever a crisis crops up on the immigration front.
“Ultimately, with or without the detention services unit, whenever a problem occurs it falls either on me or on the police commissioner, depending in whose barracks it happens. I’ve ended up with barely enough soldiers to assign on parade. There aren’t parade uniforms for everyone, because they’re expensive, and all of a sudden the base of people I can choose from is around 120 soldiers. Anyway.”
As we speak, Brig. Vassallo explains the main source of his frustration: this is no longer an emergency; it has turned into the army’s day-to-day responsibility.
“Armies all over the world are expected to come in whenever there is an emergency. That also means, and this is particularly important for people in authority, that to have the army prepared you have to sustain it along the years. But this is not an emergency, this has turned into your everyday duty. It’s no longer an emergency now. We can’t keep calling it an emergency. An emergency is when boatloads arrive and we have no place to put them in. But the emergency should stop there because there are detention centres which we should be detached from. Soldiers shouldn’t be manning detention centres. They are expected to be care workers, administrators, guards… if an emergency erupts like Wednesday’s the soldier who always works with them suddenly finds himself in a completely different scenario. It is a humanly distressing situation. We didn’t panic, and thank God the immigrants cooperated. We were very lucky.
“As Commander AFM, my duty is to keep these immigrants in detention. Now for how long, as a country, will we tolerate a situation in which they can escape any time they want to? Yesterday they stopped in Hal Luqa. Today, tomorrow, whenever, a group can decide to keep marching on till Valletta. What will we do then when they reach City Gate? Castille? The Palace? Someone will point a finger at me and say ‘why did you let them out? What are you doing about it?’ I won’t use force unnecessarily, it’s not in me, but there’s a point where you have to draw the line. Where will we stop otherwise?”
I ask him if he gets a hearing on the inter-ministerial committee meetings on immigration, which he attends with the police commissioner.
“It’s usually more efficient to work directly with other entities. Ministers do not go into the nitty gritty of it, that’s up to us to solve.”
But details can mean having immigrants escaping and taking to the street.
“That’s not a detail… it’s not a detail… I think it’s a question of what we want to tolerate. Yesterday we tolerated their march till that point. What will we do when they reach Marsa? Blata l-Bajda? Valletta?”
You seem certain they are bound to escape again.
“The situation now is that you have a small number of soldiers which you can count on one hand, maybe two, with 1,000 immigrants. So I really believe there was an element of luck, because things could have escalated, and that’s where you have to decide what you are going to tolerate.”
Thing is, one can oppose the detention policy or aspects of it, but would still expect a place of detention to be a place of detention. Tonio Borg always says immigrants’ detention centres are de facto prisons – hence the media ban.
“If they were real prisons the inmates wouldn’t escape so easily,” the Brigadier frankly replies.
There are some grave shortcomings, aren’t there?
“A lot of them. If instead of four or five guards I had the possibility of having 20, it would still be the same, because what can 20 totally unarmed guards do with 400 people? Imagine the situation with four guards. When they want to they can just go out, full stop. You need a special building, not tents, which is compartmentalised into smaller units, with real security fences. If we want to avoid this you need better structures. We have to erect a fence, otherwise we risk getting a repeat of this.”
And erecting a fence suitable for a detention centre boils down to funds and manpower, two commodities the army is continuously struggling for while the home affairs minister simply expects immigrants to remain in detention behind flimsy fences – a bit like expecting prisoners not to escape from shoddy prisons simply because they should observe the law. He said the protest was unacceptable, but only said casually that “it was easy for the immigrants to get out of the detention centres: they just pushed at the netting and forced it open” as if nobody in authority was responsible for the netting.
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