A light that never goes out

The Jesuit Order has been targeted for its support of asylum seekers in detention in a clear case of racist backlash. Fr Paul Pace, the head of the Jesuit Refugee Service, says there is both concern and a resolve to move ahead.

It has been over three weeks since the Jesuit community suffered an arson attack on seven of its vehicles, just after its publication of a report on racism and xenophobia. It followed a string of similar arson attacks – one back in November on another motor vehicle belonging to a Jesuit priest, and the other at the doorstep of a writer following the publication of a poetry book again with indictments against racism. The latest attack has been the torching of the car of the Jesuit Refugee Service’s lawyer Katrine Camilleri, which spread to her home’s front door while her family was sleeping in the early hours of the night. It has become a frightful ordeal to have such a clear backlash of racist reaction mar the discourse on immigration and asylum in Malta, but the victims have no intention of backing down from their mission.
The attacks have been baffling. This week three other cars were burnt: one right in the street where Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi lives, belonging to a maintenance worker at the Jesuit college of St Aloysius. The attack occurred just four doors away from the PM’s residence. The other two were burnt within the space of an hour in two separate locations, apparently unconnected to the other attacks.
Fr Paul Pace heads the Jesuit Refugee Service, one of the NGOs at the forefront of the protection of the rights of refugees. In the last three years, Malta has experienced an unprecedented rise in the arrival of asylum seekers leaving the North African coast. It is a relatively new phenomenon for a small island where the discourse on asylum and immigration has been clearly garbled. A strict administrative detention policy, once touted as serving to deter more arrivals, has failed to quell the endless flow of fleeing migrants from war-torn African nations. The policy has attracted worldwide criticism, but the defence is that government cannot act alone on the issue. The Malta Labour Party, desperately in search of any socialist principle that can redeem its pinkish pallor, concurs with the detention policy.
In turn, the violent, racist backlash is the latest form of response to Malta’s immigration reality, and the agenda is clearly that of instilling fear in those who are actively upholding the rights of refugees.
“There’s concern. Great concern,” Fr Paul Pace, the head of the Jesuit Refugee Service says, as he contemplates the attacks on the Jesuit Order and the JRS legal counsel. And yet it strengthens one’s resolve not to back down from a mission which is clearly all about upholding rights and guaranteeing basic human rights standards for asylum seekers.
“These are new events which have never happened before. They go against every sense of democracy and they are dangerous. It goes against the right for everyone to have an opinion and express themselves freely. It is also violence, a violence that tries to silence opinion. There is such a connection between events in which opinions were imparted and the attacks themselves, that the clear message is that it is better to remain silent. It is a warning, an intimidating tactic that is undemocratic and can look attractive enough for anyone who does not agree with you to use violence. There is both worry and a resolve to forge ahead. We have seen a great deal of solidarity which really shows that our work is indeed appreciated.”
Pace makes sense of what can only be just another corollary of the Europe-wide far right movement which in recent years has experienced both success at the polls and influenced the discourse on immigration and growing ethnic diversity in Europe’s multicultural family.
“I think it is a phenomenon that is all around Europe. This week I read about a survey held in Britain that a quarter of its youth feels attracted to the far right. They are indeed ideas which can be attractive in a world which is full of uncertainties, where these ideas suddenly promote values which were once more clear-cut than they are today. Where people can’t see where this world is going to, such ideas can turn out to be attractive.”
Great misconceptions still plague the migration debate. Between 2002 and 2004, the rate of arrivals averaged at 3.04 asylum seekers per 1,000 Maltese. Those given either refugee status or temporary humanitarian protection whittles down the average to 2.8 protected and legally resident migrants for every 1,000 Maltese. Between 2002 and 2005, the number of asylum seekers awarded protection were 4.25 migrants for every 1,000 Maltese (1,701). Of that number, the ones given refugee status between 2002 and 2005 were 158 – 0.39 refugees per 1,000 Maltese.
“Exactly, the figures are not enormous. A recent UNHCR publication stated that there were four times more migrants to Cyprus per capita. I think what happened in Malta was that the events here unfolded in a quick manner. When we were commissioned to carry out the RAXEN survey on racism and xenophobia, we questioned whether there was really a problem of racism in Malta. This was just two years ago.
“However there must be other factors which inform this backlash. We are after all an island which welcomes over 1.2 million tourists, and we are looking forward to increase tourists. So are we really scared of foreigners? We have also had other refugees before these recent arrivals. At the start of the 90s during the first Gulf War, we had around a 1,000 Iraqis at one point. We also had hundreds from Bosnia, almost at the same time. The difference was that they would get here legally, and then apply for asylum once here.”
Undeniably, the controlled circumstances of migration before the arrival of the boat people phenomenon never seemed to trouble the Maltese. Today, the changing imagery offers a more disconcerting picture. There is steadfast opinion that refugees and asylum seekers are an economic threat. Members from the league of fanatic letter writers claim Malta faces a cultural threat when it has been open to European tourists for over 40 years.
“What we find is that people seem concerned of this endless influx of boats, because there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually stop such an influx. Because usually the general call is not to let these boats arrive to Malta, but nobody says how: of course, nobody advocates violence, except for some fanatic, so all they just say is that they should not be accepted into Malta.”
Of course, the influx is unstoppable. Arriving migrants are towed into Malta if search and rescue authorities deem the vessel to be in distress, although that principle appears to have been eroded as well following MaltaToday’s exclusive exposure of an army log book instructing its officials to stay away from a vessel carrying 200 migrants in force 6 winds last November.
“I’m no psychologist, but maybe it’s the irregularity of the arrivals, and the image that anyone coming in from the sea is about to invade us, that informs such a fear. It tends to be quite historical for Malta,” Pace says.
Malta’s latest indictment on its detention policy comes from the European Parliament, some weeks after MEPs from its civil liberties committee came to witness a disastrous human rights scenario “not fit for 2006”. Pace says government has registered considerable progress this year: “A year ago I wrote that we still looked upon this phenomenon as a one-off emergency. I think government has now shown it understands that this is something that will still be with us, at least in the medium term. In 2004, arrivals had decreased but they then increased greatly in 2005. I think government has made a big step in taking up this issue as a matter of foreign policy, and a lot of work has been done by various ministers to put this issue on Malta’s agenda as a member of the European Union.”
MEPs have noted there has not yet been a full transposition of Directive 2003/9, the minimum standards directive which instructs governments to allow access to the labour market to migrants within a year of their detention, as well as other important standards of reception conditions. “Certainly there is no transposition yet,” Pace says. “When one sees the recent resolution by European Parliament, one not only notes an appeal for Malta to be allowed to derogate from the Dublin II Convention, but it also states from the outset that the government has to reduce the length of detention, improve the conditions of detention, and carry out a full transposition of the minimum standards directive. The visits to Malta on the detention centres started with the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner in 2003 in which there was serious criticism, and this was again followed the by the report from the Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture, which again was highly critical of the situation in the detention centres.”
The Maltese still complain that it is not able to take on its international obligations at welcoming asylum seekers (the Geneva Convention prohibits the return of anybody who has applied for asylum until the application is refused) without any international assistance. And yet the Maltese are a generous people: during the tsunami which thrashed south-east Asia, the Maltese sent a million liri to Sri Lanka after witnessing the horror of the tsunami on TV. The tragedy right on Malta’s doorstep, seems to go unnoticed. Instead, there is a clear sense of open racism towards the human rights tragedy of refugees fleeing their homes.
“The contradiction I see is that these people are still released after 18 months, according to government policy. If the case was that these people are repatriated after 18 months, then the matter would indeed be different. But in Malta these people are transferred to the open centres after a period of time. I understand that there may be a case in which one of these people may be involved in some violent activity, but I don’t think the proportion is any way bigger than that of Maltese offenders – I mean, the majority of people in the courts are Maltese. Asylum seekers have been released since 2003. We understand the need for a certain period in which government has to carry out certain controls, but it is hard to understand why there is such a long detention period when they are still eventually released.”
Pace says the government sees detention as important for national security and control. “It once used to be argued as serving as a means of deterrence, but government has now realised it is not a deterrent. In other countries the situation is the reverse: you apply for asylum, there is a system where you can register just as in the case of anybody who may be criminally indicted but is given bail. Even those who are accused of trafficking these people, are given bail. And that’s how it should be because we are a civilised country.”
Pace points over to Europe, still lacking a common asylum and immigration policy. While the trend is becoming increasingly common for asylum seekers who enter countries irregularly to be detained, Europe talks of a policy for legal migration. In Italy millions of permits started to be issued to regularise illegal workers, similarly to France and Belgium, but Pace says there are too many contradictions.
“I would never say immigration is not a problem. But we feel it is a problem because it seems we cannot ever get to grips with the situation, so the response is always one which is even more emotional. We tend to talk about this problem as if we will never be able to manage the situation unless somebody else helps us,” Pace says.
“Last year’s conference on immigration delved into the need not to look at immigration from an emotional point of view. And yet what we read in the papers every day is full of emotional outburst: a policy for a democratic country with respect for human rights demands that we keep the discourse level-headed. I see the reactions of the political parties as being more positive than the usual rhetoric. They recognised that we, the Jesuits, do significant work. Naturally the politician is always pitted into certain dilemmas with this issue – they are in constant contact with public opinion and that is where the choice comes in. But I think we need to go beyond that.”