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The Maltese are discussing an initiative to create a ‘super’ coastguard agency by pooling European resources. Is this the first step to a controlled frontier at Fortress Europe’s southern flank or will it aid the migration flow to the EU? Matthew Vella reports
The Maltese islands are once again facing an incoming diaspora of immigrants travelling from North Africa, entering Maltese waters in ramshackle vessels after having spent days tracing a Mediterranean route scribbled on a map.
Home Affairs and Justice Minister Tonio Borg has already pre-empted the burgeoning number of arrivals by warning of a portentous emergency situation – not the first time in Maltese history as only last year the island’s four detention centres and the police general headquarters had to be deployed to accommodate hundreds of incoming migrants.
With the latest number of arrivals sending the total up to 355, over 2,500 immigrants have landed on Maltese shores since 2001, the greatest number – 1,686 – arriving in 2002. Since January 2002, 77 have been granted refugee status and 563 temporary humanitarian status; 519 applicants were refused refugee status.
As the migration phenomenon becomes a more visible reality for the Maltese, questions are being asked what sort of obligations these people are owed from a small country like Malta, gripped as it is by its own economic problems. An island known for its chauvinist tendencies towards those from south of the border, the escalating rate of unemployment leaves fertile grounds for discontent. Even the ‘Left’ in Malta displays traits of xenophobia, and the foreigner remains the number one threat to workers in the political discourse of the Labour Party and the General Workers Union.
In Malta, as in the rest of Europe, employers take on cheap, foreign labour from immigrants who have no right to work or live, and so no rights for an honest wage. The exploitation tends to be most notorious in the construction industry. The employment of low-cost illegal migrants fuels popular resentment and misconceptions of ‘Maltese’ jobs being stolen by foreigners.
The appearance of an extreme right-wing force led by the Norman Lowell, who garnered 1,600 odd votes at the European Parliament elections, has given vent to pent-up feelings of hatred and displeasure towards Arabs and Africans who arrive to Malta. Only hours following her interview on a Xarabank programme dealing with racism, the house of Stephanie Abood, a Maltese Muslim who is married to a Kuwaiti, was defaced with insulting graffiti.
The latest Xarabank survey now reveals Arabs are the least welcomed nationality in Malta by 40.6 percent of the survey’s respondents, followed by Nigerians (32.5 percent), Jews, Chinese, Italians and Americans. Whilst the Chinese form the largest segment of foreign students at the University of Malta, Jews, which classify as the third least welcome nationality, are represented by just a handful of families in Malta. How they figure as a hated nationality, given that Jewish culture is practically on the margins of the greater Maltese society, reveals much of the illogical and inconsistent rationale of Maltese racism.
First-hand problem
The Xarabank survey confirms facets of Maltese society which have always lingered between the chauvinism of a borderline nation at the crossroads of civilisations and the compassion of Catholicism and conservative solidarity. The axiom generates a difficult balance: international and domestic legal obligations confirm our duty to assist asylum seekers but racial misconceptions and other stereotypes compound our fear of cultural infiltration.
Conservative approaches to migration, as those employed by the present government and also supported by the Labour Opposition, aim to present the public with a “tough” image at the way illegal immigration is handled. It’s a mix between politically-correct compassion and a law-and-order approach, averting fears that the State could be going soft on immigration, which tends to be associated with crime, drug trafficking and also terrorism. By containing ‘the problem,’ less breathing space is allowed for extreme right-wing forces to vent destructive propaganda on the issue where resentment exists. Lowell, who preaches a shoot-to-kill approach for incoming migrants, emarginates himself automatically as an eccentric extremist.
Irrespective of containment, Minister Tonio Borg expresses his concern on the return of a dreaded emergency situation, where hundreds of immigrants and asylum seekers have to be accommodated in the four detention camps manned by the AFM and the police corps.
For periods of anything between six to over twelve months, asylum seekers wait to be interviewed by the Refugee Commission, which in turn is faced with the daunting task of collecting information on applicants in order to verify if there is a genuine case to award refugee status or temporary humanitarian status: it is also a lengthy process, as communication with countries with infrastructures crippled by civil strife and poverty represents a remarkable ordeal.
Malta’s detention camps have been widely criticised for the crammed conditions in which detainees are housed, which has led to riots by protesting detainees and also to the internment of asylum seekers in Mt Carmel Hospital to be treated for mental illness.
Labour MP Gavin Gulia’s first visit to the camps confirmed earlier faultfinding by Ombudsman Joe Sammut, the most notorious being the SAG’s Ta’ Kandja centre – reports of asylum seekers sojourned in crammed conditions.
Reports on the lack of privacy, recreational time, reading material, and unsatisfactory amenities were later confirmed during the visit by Council of Europe commissioner for refugees Alvaro Gil-Robles, whose outright judgement on the camps was that they were “totally inadequate.” Sammut’s own judgement back in 2002, was that the compound failed to provide the standards recommended and expected by the European Convention for Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and “should be closed down at the first opportunity.”
The lengthy process to process applications for refugee status and the dire conditions at the detention camps have done little to assuage the problems which occur from time to time. As overcrowding, boredom and frustration lead to riots, popular empathy for asylum seekers starts dissipating as violent reactions are misinterpreted as gestures of “ingratitude” towards their host country.
Despite criticism levelled towards the shortcomings of the system, the Gil-Robles report met a cool reception by Minister Tonio Borg, who stuck to his guns on the detention policy in an interview with MaltaToday following the publication of the report.
“If I had to say we were going to invest Lm2 million to refurbish the detention centres, I would be fooling you. The principal problem is overcrowding, and this is what we are tackling,” Borg, who believes detention is an instrument of deterrence which works, said.
Or does it? Whilst the desire to control immigration has grown, the ability to control it is decreasing. As circumstances beyond Borg’s control still present the problem of an emergency situation cropping up. Where does the contingency handling begin?
“We have to create structures which will help us deal with emergencies,” Fr Pierre Grech Marguerat, coordinator for the Jesuit Refugee Service, says. “Since the arrival of the first large boatload in November 2002, we have not created anything particularly new. We need trained people to be responsible for these camps, more staff for the refugee commission, the employment of social workers, and better living conditions. We have to create an organised way of doing things.”
New world disorder
Circumstances – historical, political and economic – are in fact the sole determining force beyond the control of the Maltese authorities. The NGOs, and also Labour MP Gavin Gulia, have called for the detention camps to come up to humane standards. A better system allows at minimum a more humane detention for immigrants, which would translate in a better management of the asylum seekers at hand.
However, Malta remains the first landing spot for hundreds of immigrants intercepted by Italian and Maltese forces at sea. It would seem that the phenomenon cannot be averted, irrespective of the deterrent of detention: “There is always the risk that these people are fleeing persecution. But there is the problem that the gap between the rich world and the poor world is an abyss,” Grech-Marguerat notes.
“There are many misconceptions on the numbers of refugees arriving into Europe. Only 10 per cent of refugees try to get into Europe; the vast majority of refugees seek shelter from one poor country to another. In the Darfur region, one million people at risk are escaping to Chad, another very poor nation,” Grech-Marguerat says.
Global poverty, at the heart of a worsening picture of the entire African continent, is still one of the number one factors informing migration towards Europe. Since the age of decolonisation, the African continent has grappled with the erratic distribution of power in the hands of tribal warlords, militias and dictators.
Its economic relations with the impenetrable Western world and the Soviet Union were most fruitful when Africa was buying scud missiles, fighter jets, and AK47s at the expense of its nation’s more pressing needs. In the 1970s however, the US started overspending and resorted to printing more dollars, resulting in a sharp fall in the value of the dollar all over the world.
Since oil was priced in dollars, the oil-producing countries reacted by raising the price of oil in 1973. As the billions from the price increase were stashed in western banks, interest rates crashed. Banks started lending money to Third World countries that wanted to maintain development and meet the rising cost of oil at the same time – the result today is the impossibly irrevocable global debt of USD65 billion in Africa alone.
Migration traditionally traces the route in search for high food-supply areas; today that is translated into the search for a better living where there is none, and in Africa that has been earmarked by poverty, the lack of access to potable water, and civil strife. It follows that the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor is only endemic to greater migration from poor regions to the rich regions like Europe.
As a new report on setting up a super Mediterranean coastguard concedes, more migrants will be attracted into Europe to “sustain the latter’s economies,” as Europe’s population decreases and those in Africa and Asia increase, expectedly by over 25 per cent by 2015, according to the World Bank; a further 40 per cent of the world’s population will not have access to potable water.
Malta steps in
The heart of the matter is that the migration question is an EU-wide problem that has to be tackled by all 25 Member States. Strict immigration regulations push migrants to put themselves in the hands of criminal organisations who will smuggle them into a country for the price of USD1,000 per head.
The Mediterranean today has become a burial ground for those migrants who are smuggled by sea and then thrown overboard by the smugglers who fear they will be caught by police authorities. Sometimes they are crammed into a smaller boat and left to drift in the middle of the sea.
Malta has to assess its role in the light of its geopolitical position in the centre of the Mediterranean and provide for a better management of the migration flow to the country. So what about the larger picture?
International relations analyst Dr Stephen C Calleya believes the answer lies in establishing a Mediterranean coastguard that would tackle, amongst other things, migration control:
“Since 1995, the Barcelona Euromed process has achieved few tangible results, but an EU Coast Guard Agency could be one of them. Malta should be advocating this as an EU member, and it is about time someone starts lobbying for such a setup. There is a necessity to monitor illegal migration, as well as drug trafficking,” Calleya says, referring to the proposal he has drafted along with Major M Cauchi-Inglott on the establishment of a coastguard agency that would monitor traffic, pollution and migration at the EU’s southern flank.
Calleya says “the big news” is that Malta is being targeted as a destination for asylum now that it has become an EU member, not least due to being part of the Schengen zone: “We have seen this on the basis of the appearance of smaller boats, more concentrated arrivals, many finishing without fuel, and all this seems to indicate this increasing trend.”
It would seem apparent that the EUCG would ultimately be Malta’s alternative to the EU Border Agency, an initiative first unveiled back in 2003, for which Malta also applied to host. It is expected the EU will favour Poland or Hungary, whose borders lie on the outermost of the bloc’s Eastern flank, concentrating mainly on land migration. The EUR6 million-funded agency will group experts from all 25 member states to coordinate national controls and intensify the fight against illegal immigration, overseeing surveillance measures, coordinate coastline controls to intercept and restrain vessels carrying illegal immigrants, and organise holding centres for illegal immigrants at vessels’ places of departure.
European civil liberties and justice network Statewatch has accused the EU of trying to create an EU border police at the union’s outermost frontiers, acting as an expulsions agency.
“Without any doubt, there is a movement in the EU to have a ‘Fortress Europe’ and some of the asylum policies being suggested are very restrictive in comparison to our own refugee law, which was created in the first place since this was a request in the EU’s acquis communautaire,” Fr Pierre Grech-Marguerat says.
The EU has so far considered, amongst other plans, Tony Blair’s “safe havens” – UN “protection areas” erected in countries next to states which generate human traffic. “To envisage such a plan is to imagine ghettoes created by the world’s most peaceful and richest countries in some of the world’s poorest and most unstable regions,” wrote The Guardian’s Raekha Prasad in 2003.
In fact, it is one way of actually ‘exporting’ popular resentment towards immigrants, if that is in any way possible. Blair hopes to have would-be asylum seekers apply for asylum in third countries at the borders of Europe, before being allowed inside the country of asylum: a direct incompatibility with the fundamental right to seek and enjoy asylum enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The Calleya and Cauchi-Inglott proposal for an EU coastguard is currently under discussion amongst the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee. The scope of the project would be to host a coastguard agency in Malta in a bid to give the island more influence and a leading role in manning the EU’s maritime frontier and the traffic that traverses the basin.
Calleya underlines the scope of controlling migration through the EUCG would be to act as a ‘clearing house’ to coordinate the migratory flow. “It’s not a question of policing. Instead of having Malta coping with the steady increase, this is a burden-sharing initiative. It’s the only way forward. The trend is increasing, and we need a more sophisticated management system.”
It is in fact, a challenge that has to be met by both Malta and the EU, both in the provision of suitable detention centres that will accommodate asylum seekers, and to address global poverty, the world debt, and the political problems of the Third World. The European continent built empires out of the riches it prised away from the Third World; today migrants are pointing towards the North to escape from the poverty of the Third World - also left behind by the developed world. A historical equalisation is at work and this is the challenge which even a small island like Malta, has to face.
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