Chronicle of a riot foretold

Trying to decipher news stories about Sunday’s riot at the Hal Far detention centre reminded me of that classic economics principle we all learnt about at school: the law of diminishing returns.

The first media reports suggested that as many as 1,000 detainees may have participated in the rioting. Later, that number was whittled down to ‘around 300’. When the police finally stormed the compound, they arrested 90 people… but when the suspects were arraigned in court, only three were identified as ‘ringleaders’; and of those three, two turned out to be a couple of drunk teenagers.

That’s quite a turnaround, you know. How on earth did we even manage to go from ‘1,000 rioters’ on Sunday… to just three juvenile delinquents by Tuesday morning?

Even the precise cause of the disturbance seems to have taken on a ‘diminishing’ aspect. First, we were told that the detainees were rebelling against the inhumane conditions of their prolonged detention; later, it turned out that the presumed ‘ringleaders’ had only been in Malta for a couple of weeks… and even then, they only caused the disturbance because one of their number was not allowed back into the compound after a drunken night on the town.

So what started out as the local equivalent of the Rodney King riots, suddenly morphed before our eyes into the equivalent of any old drunken Paceville brawl (with the small difference that ‘Paceville brawls’ don’t normally leave a trail of flaming vehicles and buildings in their wake).

Excuse me for being my usual sceptical self… but I don’t believe either of those interpretations. Clearly, there was a lot more to this incident than can be accounted for by the charges pressed against those three youngsters on Tuesday morning. Equally clearly, however, this was not the large-scale uprising it was depicted to be three days ago.

Nor does it help that all official government statements to date have been so utterly bereft of any real information. The Home Affairs Ministry’s response, for instance, was to inform us that most of the centre’s 1,200 residents did not take any active part in the mayhem at all.

To get an idea of how perfectly useless that information really is… just apply the same logic to any other crime. There was a burglary in my neighbourhood the other week, for instance; and my neighbourhood comprises… ooh, let’s say (for argument’s sake) around 3,000 households.

How would everyone react, if the Home Affairs Ministry were to issue a statement to reassure us all that…. ‘Hey, look on the bright side: it was only one home out of 3,000. This means that 2,999 households were NOT burgled…’

I hate to say it, but that is precisely the sort of nonchalant complacency – in the face of real, serious social concerns - that might conceivably spark a community riot, all by itself. In fact, it almost reminds me of Marie Antoinette’s famous ‘let them eat cake’ remark… and we all know how that went in the end.

All the same, however: in the absence of any clear picture of Sunday’s events, the above (useless) official statement is all we have to work with. So let’s see what can be gleaned from it anyway.

At a glance, the only indicative statistic is that the population of the so-called ‘tent village’ in Hal Far currently stands at around 1,200.

From previous reports - especially those compiled by the UN’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Degrading Treatment (CPT) over the past 15 years – we also know that government was supposed to phase out this type of temporary, emergency accommodation, and replace those makeshift tents with permanent structures.

This, for instance, is from the CPT report of September 2007: “The delegation was particularly concerned to see that, at Safi Barracks, a hundred or so foreign nationals had again been housed in tents or metal hangars (“Nissen” huts) since July 2004, contrary to the CPT’s express recommendation, a few months before, that these facilities never again be used to accommodate detainees, regardless of the period.

Many detainees who spoke to the delegation said that living conditions in that section of the camp were very harsh (extreme heat in the metal hangars in summer and severe cold in the tents in winter)…”

Admittedly, we are talking about a different compound here; the Safi tent village was a closed detention centre; whereas the one torched last Sunday was ‘open’… meaning its residents are supposedly free to come and go as they please.

Nonetheless, the type of accommodation remains exactly the same as the one roundly condemned by the CPT as long ago as September 2007. Only now, it is not ‘100 or so people’, but over 10 times that number who are forced (through lack of any alternative) to live in the same squalid conditions.

Effectively, this means that the government of Malta has spent over 12 years doggedly refusing to ever implement the CPT’s recommendations… which, incidentally, are also echoed by other, internal reports: such as the Depasquale inquiry into the Hal Safi riots of August 2005, which also lambasted the conditions of detention.

I suppose you will not need to be reminded that – while some things have clearly stayed the same – there have been a number of radical changes since 2007. There was a change of government in 2013, for instance; and there has also been an entire economic revolution, which has catapulted Malta into the category of ‘best performing EU countries’ when it comes to economic growth.

So, coming back to that Home Affairs Ministry statement: what I would like to know is…. why haven’t any of the problems identified in 2007 even been addressed (still less solved) by a government that has now had over six years to address them? Why are we still housing people in decrepit, substandard tents, all these years later?

These are the same questions I had originally asked of Tonio Borg, way back when he was the responsible minister (roughly 2005-2011). Not to say that his answers were any more satisfactory than Michael Farrugia’s today… but back then, the government did at least have an excuse of sorts. You can hear an echo of it from this other excerpt from the same CPT report:

“Malta simply cannot be left to struggle alone and, at the same time, expected to uphold international obligations to the letter, with its resources stretched to the limit and carrying more than a proportional share of this human tragedy…”

Significantly, the next sentence reads: “Hence, Malta’s determined insistence on the implementation of concrete burden-sharing initiatives both within the European Union as well as other international organisations actively involved in the area of irregular immigration…”

This brings us to another area where nothing has effectively changed since 2005. It was the Nationalist government’s policy to insist that the European Union simply step in, and solve all our immigration problems with a wave of its magic wand. And when Joseph Muscat’s Labour Party stormed into power in 2013, it just carried on where the PN had left off: same policy, same detention conditions, and – above all – the same old frugality when it came to staffing and equipping all the agencies responsible for running those centres.

The only difference is that, where the former administration really couldn’t afford to do any better… the present one doesn’t let a day go by without boasting to the world about how wealthy, prosperous and successful Malta has become over the last six years.

And yet, for all this economic success, we still can’t afford to build permanent, decent housing to accommodate over 1,200 people...

Come on. We all know we can afford to do a lot better than that. The simple truth is that we don’t want to. And the above quote should also spell out precisely why, too.

For what it’s worth, this is my conclusion: we are deliberately keeping those people in the same degrading conditions, in order to mount further pressure on the EU to accede to our ‘burden-sharing’ demands.

Every news article about ‘riots in detention centres’, every press photograph of burning police cars and ransacked buildings… even all the racist comments such incidents invariably invite… it all feeds into the same old perception that poor, tiny Malta is ‘overstretched’ and ‘unable to cope’.

It is, in brief, a political stratagem aimed at finally forcing the EU to acknowledge that perception as a reality, and to intervene accordingly.
And to this end, we not only subject people to what is, effectively, ‘torture and degrading treatment’… but we also expose our (deliberately understaffed) Police and Detention Services personnel to undue, unnecessary danger.

It would be a shameful, indefensible policy, even if there was a realistic chance that it might one day succeed. But we all also know that it can’t possibly succeed… because the bald truth is that the EU doesn’t give a toss about Malta’s immigration problems, and has now got bored of reminding us the whole time.

So ultimately, all we are really doing is perpetuating and exacerbating the same problem we claim we want to solve, with no actual solution insight. And under circumstances like those… well, who even needs the Kaiser Chiefs to ‘predict a riot’?