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Karl Schembri
While the ANR was defending the country against immigrants by marching down Republic Street in Valletta Thursday evening, Karmenu Manicaro was as usual selling vegetables and shampoos (and a bit of everything) in Marsa.
Nenu, as he is affectionately called by his loyal customers, had his van parked just outside the immigrants’ open centre in the building that was once a government school, in the notorious area of Albert Town.
Opposite his colourful van lies the decrepit Marsa port and ship repair yards exuding scents and sights of rusty steel and contaminated water, industrial blankness and social degeneration.
“We love Nenu,” Omar, a Palestinian immigrant, tells me. “When I’m short of money he tells me I can pay him later, which I always do. But it’s so nice of him.”
“I can leave my van here a whole day on its own,” Nenu tells me as a Somali immigrant waits to pay for their goods just picked up from his van. “I trust them like brothers. They always pay for everything.”
He comes here everyday, just in the midst of the centre of evil as described by ANR front man Martin Degiorgio.
“Go to Marsa at night and see for yourselves why the Maltese are scared to go out,” he said Thursday, amidst generic references to rapes and violence happening just since the centre for immigrants was opened last year.
Another ANR front man holding the main banner told me before the march: “I don’t know if you’re married but would you leave your wife alone in Marsa at night? It’s no longer safe.”
But really, was it ever? Since when has Marsa ceased to be a favourite family night spot?
Taking Degiorgio’s cue, I went with the photographer to “see for ourselves” what is happening there.
About a half dozen Maltese prostitutes loitering, with their pimps, also Maltese, stationed in their cars, greet you along the way to the open centre, confirming the area’s good old reputation.
Long before the centre opened towards the end of last summer, Albert Town was the meeting point of cheap prostitutes, drug dealers and shady criminals operating in the dark alleys of this soulless part of Marsa.
The school itself was abandoned and deemed unusable, situated in the middle of the permanent, pervasive stench of open sewers.
The decision to house immigrants precisely in this depressed area had raised eyebrows but the centre’s director, Terry Gosden of Fondazzjoni Suret il-Bniedem, was optimistic last August.
“I believe we can transform this area into something positive, a place where peace, tolerance and diversity can blossom,” he had told me.
Back then it housed 233 immigrants. Now the centre is stretched to its limit, with nearly 800 immigrants housed there in crammed dormitories and, since a few weeks ago, even makeshift tents.
Inside the centre, immigrants mainly from Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia coming after long months of detention, run their own modest restaurants, cafeterias, and an internet café, although the electricity is clearly in short supply as the lights go out three times in a couple of hours.
A classroom that still bears a mural of the Maltese flag and the national anthem of Dun Karm has been turned into a mosque – perhaps a sight that would make the flag-bearing ANR activists cringe.
But the people who are most afraid to come out are precisely the immigrants, as since they have been living here the place has also attracted fascists who leave leaflets carrying death threats to immigrants and recently a case of hit and run against an immigrant just outside the centre.
“I don’t like to go out in the evenings, I’m afraid,” said soft-spoken Abdiwali Ahmad Ali from Somalia. “The way people look at us hurts me most. It’s alright when I’m at work with my colleagues, they treat me very well, but when I’m walking down a street or going on a bus I feel threatened.”
“I wake up at 5am, go to work, return, and sleep by 9pm,” said another one who works at the Mater Dei Hospital construction site – yet another centre of evil for ANR as it employs immigrants.
“I pay taxes, national insurance, everything,” he tells me. “Believe me, if you gave us a passport we would all leave.”
Omar Abu Grar, from Palestine, says that whenever he calls for an ambulance in cases of emergency there are never any medics on board.
“There’s only the driver, always the same thing, even when we had one who was in risk of dying,” he said.
Ahmed, an Iraqi, said he understood Malta’s problems of size.
“We know Malta is doing all it can do for us, we’re aware and grateful for that,” he said. “I understand the Maltese who are concerned about the situation; we’re all victims of this problem. I haven’t seen my family in four years. I’m a klandestin, wherever I go I’ll be an immigrant, but at home I’m Ahmed. Do you think people just fell from their home for nothing?”
And yet, ANR claims it is protecting “faith, the nation and the family” from what it calls “an invasion” which it likens to the Great Siege.
Paul Salomone proclaimed himself father of the Maltese people from the ANR’s podium: “You’re my family, the Maltese people… I’ll take care of you.”
Nenu laughs as I tell him about the speeches made at the ANR protest. He clearly doesn’t see any threat here.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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