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Tonio Borg has finally decided to let journalists visit parts of the immigrants’ detention centres for the first time on a staged media tour, a day before a European Parliament delegation inspection. For Karl Schembri, it was a glimpse at brooding insanity
As we descended from our coach, the black hands and desperate eyes behind the iron bars became more visible.
With the cameras filming and tape recorders switched on, the troupe of journalists watched silently as more and more of the 90 immigrants crammed in the building called Block B, built by the British at the Safi Barracks, came out of their rooms to face us.
A couple of feet away, separated by rusty gates and fences and with somewhat ambivalent instructions from the army “to talk but not to interview” them, some of the men on the other side started banging on the iron rods.
“We need to speak to you,” one of them started shouting with others soon joining in. “We’re going crazy in here.”
“Can we talk to them?” one journalist asked Lt. Col. Brian Gatt, the commander in charge of the Detention Services Unit.
“Yes,” he said, as we started scribbling feverishly on our notebooks the brief bursts of angry soundbites coming from the other side of the fence, although we were supposed not to take pictures “of individuals” despite their obvious eager craving to voice their outrage.
Less ambivalent was the instruction to remain outside the compounds. According to Lt. Col. Gatt access inside the quarters where they eat, sleep and wash was denied to us “for security reasons … so that it does not lead to direct, face-to-face contact with the immigrants”.
The only remaining instruction he ought to have given us was not to feed them, as they put up in zoos, and the scenario would have been complete.
According to Police Commissioner John Rizzo, these detention centres are “neither prisons nor places one can get out of at will”, but hard to capture in words, staring us were all the symptoms of a human zoo, of deprived liberty with no signs of hope to allay their frustrations.
Drenched in the overpowering cesspit stench, the ugly walls bare graffiti of boredom and anxiety. Blank empty eyes of desolate men clinging to the bars stood next to high-strung bodies of restless agitators. A patched chunk of iron rods marks the escape point that ended with these people and others from other compounds taking to the streets of Gudja on 22 February.
Some of the banners carried on that day are still there hanging on the caged balconies and windows which make the whole building one big prison cell.
Just as the shouting starts to get louder and the “talking” a bit more in depth beyond the “where are you from?” and “how is it in there?” questions, Lt. Col. Gatt and his officers ask us to move on.
“We’re running out of time,” they said as we boarded the coach to continue the tour to the so-called Warehouse 1 and Warehouse 2 in the same Safi barracks, which were in fact originally built to be used as army warehouses but turned overnight into immigrants’ detention centres last year as boatload after boatload of immigrants landed on Maltese shores with nowhere to lock them up.
Along the way, we pass through a cluster of abandoned Nissan huts made of corrugated iron, where migrants were detained in the scorching summer heat and cold winters before they were moved to the converted warehouses.
Outside the warehouses, South Africans and Arabs kept pacing nervously along what looks like a kennel run.
One of them tells me he is from Iraq and claims to have been detained for 19 months. He says he has no documents.
Others from Ethiopia say they have all the documents but are still awaiting the refugee commissioner’s decision on their application for refugee status.
Even here, our frantic questions are soon brought to an end, as we head towards Lyster Barracks where immigrants are kept in tents surrounded by shoddy fences and chicken wire.
The fences were torn down last January with the few soldiers manning the area unable to stop the protesting migrants.
Upon seeing us approaching them, the immigrants flock towards the fence, with some of them insisting that we somehow go inside to witness the misery they lived in.
“Why do you talk to us from behind a fence,” they kept asking. “Do you think we’re animals? Why don’t you come inside and eat with us.”
Much as we tried to explain it was not our decision, most of them kept insisting.
“This is what we get most of the day,” one of the officers told me, as the commotion grew even louder.
For the staff working with the detained migrants, the situation is equally oppressive. Morale is low despite their commander’s attempts to put on a brave face, and AFM Commander Brig. Carmel Vassallo is clearly frustrated by the burden of the whole immigration problem dumped on the army.
Of the 120 soldiers and four officers working with the detention services unit, 32 have contracted the latent form of Tubercolosis, including Lt. Col. Gatt.
“In a way, working here is the opposite of what we were trained to do as soldiers,” a member of the armed forces told me. “We do our best to communicate with them, we see them everyday, but we’re also the only ones they can face and insult when they’re outraged at the government or the refugee commissioner.”
Lt. Col. Gatt said the immigrants detained in the tent compound were shown a new compound just built in the Safi Barracks where they could move to, but they refused.
“They told me that for them, the next step is freedom,” he said.
“We don’t want to go to another detention centre,” one of the migrants confirmed to me. “We want freedom, not to be locked like animals.”
As we are slowly moved away by the soldiers, some immigrants grab a telephone booth set up within their fenced yard and topple it.
“We put a telephone there but they prefer to get out in small groups for a few minutes to make their phone calls,” a soldier told me.
The new compound back in Safi should house 224 immigrants. It is still empty, the bunk beds brand new and the silver barbed wire shining under the sun.
“It won’t take long till we fill it up,” Lt. Col. Gatt said, as the clement spring weather promises new arrivals of immigrants ending up on our shores as they try to cross the Mediterranean.
According to the government advisor on immigration, Martin Scicluna, two other places have been earmarked as new detention centres to cope with massive influxes that are expected to hit the islands, but he could only mention one in Ta’ Kandja, which sources say is really a quarry and that everything is still “on paper”.
The other detention centres manned by the police in Ta’ Kandja and at the police headquarters did not feature in our tour. Incidentally, the police depot was the site from where more than 70 immigrants escaped the following day, Friday, while Ta’ Kandja witnessed a commotion in which detained immigrants broke up most of the windows and toilets.
They are incidents destined to repeat themselves. Scicluna said the detention policy is there to stay – it would be “impolitic and impractical to change it” – and so is the strict control of the media.
New regulations may mean that immigrants will be released after 12 months if their application for refugee status or appeal is not yet decided, but immigrants deemed “uncooperative” can be detained indefinitely.
Scicluna said a new national immigration plan “upon which everyone will agree” will soon be published. Perhaps everyone on this side of the fence, and even that is in itself disturbing.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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