You can tell something’s wrong with your country when a tourist from Somaliland starts complaining about human rights.

That’s right, folks: Somaliland. For those of you who slept during their geography lessons at school (provided you had either schools or geography lessons to sleep in – not all of us took these things for granted) Somaliland is a self-proclaimed, independent enclave at the precise tip of the Horn of Africa, sandwiched between Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia and the Gulf of Aden.
Or at least, that’s as far as the tribal elders who form the Qabil government of Somaliland are concerned. To the rest of the world – including those obscure institutions, the United Nations and the African Union – Somaliland does not actually exist at all. It is a figment of its tribal leaders’ imagination: in reality, the entire territory is nothing more and nothing less than a district of Somalia.

(Quick digression: why does Malta recognise Kosovo’s independence, but not Somaliland’s? Is it by any chance... cos they is black? End of digression...)

Now as one can well imagine, people from the independent and unrecognised republic of Somaliland – especially those who do not exactly see eye to eye with aforementioned tribal elders, or who happen to belong to a different tribe – tend to find life rather difficult there at the best of times: even without the occasional famine and drought to contend with. For these and other reasons, many residents of this region (and pretty much all its neighbouring countries) occasionally decide that enough is enough... so off they go to “invade Europe”.
This is more or less what happened to 23-year-old Somaliland native Aweys Maani Khayre in 2000; and in case you all think this is yet another sob-story article about irregular immigrants landing in Malta by the rickety boatload... well, it isn’t.

It just so happens that Aweys chose an entirely different route, bypassing Malta altogether and somehow making it all the way to the United Kingdom, where he was awarded Refugee Status and has been living and working for the past eight years. In that time he also raised a family, and now has four young children – the oldest is six, and the youngest but nine months old.
So all in all, you could say that things were going swimmingly for Aweys... until he made the tragic mistake of assuming that Malta – being an EU member state, and all that bull – was a safe country for a young, black man to visit as a tourist destination.

Huh? What on earth was he thinking? Isn’t there MTA office somewhere in London, to inform prospective British tourists that they are all more than welcome... provided, of course, that they are WHITE?
Evidently not: Aweys is now languishing in the Corradino prison on trumped-up drug importation charges – yes, “trumped up”: you can read all about on page 7 if you like – and unless our law courts operate with a tiny bit more seriousness than the police, he is likely to stay there for years.

Before proceeding to the very serious aspects of this case, a word or two about the enormous irony staring us all in the face.
OK, let me try and work this one out. There are about a million letters a week in the papers, mostly by people like Major Stanley Clews, and all complaining about the ongoing “invasion” of illegal immigrants. General gist? We don’t want them here, they’re a strain on our resources, our army could be better employed elsewhere, Malta is too small to cope, etc., etc.
(Oh, and please note: I’m not accusing anyone of racism here. Not yet, anyway. And when I do, it certainly won’t be Stanley Clews. He reminds me too much of that other Major in Fawlty Towers...)
But then: along comes an African national, travelling (for a change) by plane with a round-trip airline ticket, checking in at Passport Control and producing perfectly legal travel documents... and what do you know? Suddenly, we want him to stay so badly that we even cook up criminal charges, just for the pleasure of being able to detain him in prison.... where, of course, he will be just as much of a strain on our resources as any single asylum seeker at the Hal Safi detention centre.
I don’t know. Is there something I’m missing here?

But ironies aside: four months after his arrest, Aweys Maani Khayre wrote a letter to the President of the Republic pointing out a number of questionable aspects to his entire detention experience. Last week, I dealt with the legality of the substance for which he was arrested. This week, it’s something else. Here is another quote from his letter (to which, by the way, he has not received any acknowledgement or reply):

“Though I had a regular UK travel document, I was taken by the immigration police for interrogation. They wanted to know how much money I possessed. I was not explained the reason for such interest. Since I was to stay with a cousin of mine, I did not need as much money as they expected. So they called the police, and I was taken to a bank outlet and forced to access my bank account so that they could check the balance. At first I suspected that this was being done for some racist reason, as only dark-skinned travellers were taken apart for questioning...”

Please note: this happened before the suspicious plant (khat) was actually discovered in his suitcase. But it goes on:
“Notwithstanding the legal status of Khat in Malta, I was taken to the Police Headquarters and interrogated without being given the possibility of contacting a lawyer or of having a lawyer present during the interrogation...” (his emphasis) “... what is more, the courts and the prosecution (which, incidentally, is made up of the very same police inspectors who arrested and interrogated me) seem to be oblivious to the indisputable fact of Khat’s legal status in Malta...” (his emphasis again).

Well, what can I say? It seems that a young man who fled his homeland at the age of 23 – his homeland being (no offence or anything) a war-ravaged, drought-stricken, famine-ridden, unrecognised tribal enclave, itself part of a larger, even more troubled country which has lacked a functional government for at least 10 of the past 20 years – possesses enough civic sense to be concerned at a state of affairs which most Maltese people don't even recognise as a problem... i.e., the lack of access to legal representation while under arrest; and the non-existence of an independent and autonomous prosecution office, which acts independently of the police.

But then again, this is Malta... and I suppose it’s kind of touching that a country which joined the European Union in 2004, evidently still believes that “detainee rights” exist only in Hollywood movies. And of course, it’s perfectly fine that the same people who extract your signed statement under interrogation at the Floriana Police Headquarters – without any lawyer present to explain the legal repercussions of what you’re actually signing, or to inform you that you have a right not to say anything at all, if what you say might incriminate you – then suddenly turn around, swap hats, and hey presto! Next thing you know, they’re the selfsame people presenting their own “evidence” against you in court.
Now what on earth could be wrong with that?

Nothing. Nothing at all... provided, of course, that the administration propping up this entire charade happens to be Nationalist. When it was a Labour administration doing precisely the same thing, well, things were slightly different. As I recall, people used to actually protest about injustices back in the 1980s. They wrote one-line letters to the papers, saying things like: “I believe that so-and-so is innocent...” And above all, there were certain idiotic people (myself included) who genuinely believed that the Nationalist Party would one day take over the helm after 16 years of the MLP... and then, all the important reforms we had awaited so long would finally be put into place.
Starting, I would have thought, with the most sorely-needed: a long-overdue reform of police interrogation procedure... which had after all cost a couple of lives, way back in the days when injustices still mattered.

Well, I guess the point has been made and I can stop right here... BUT: a few of you might have been born in the 1980s – some of you even in the 1990s – and, well, perhaps you could be forgiven for not knowing what happened next.
So here it is, the glorious history of the 1987-2008 Nationalist administration, in one, single sentence:

"Once the objective was duly achieved – and now it was the PN wielding the instruments of power instead of the MLP – it suddenly became convenient for the government to be able to secure the occasional conviction every now and then... so the reforms were duly forgotten, and the status quo was duly maintained, and so on, and so forth, and so fifth..."

Did I say Somaliland was tribal? My sincere and humble apologies...