Yesterday’s attack on Foresta 2000 park ranger Ray Vella – the fourth such attack on his person and property in less than a year – should sound alarm bells about the state of environmental protection in the country.
The crime itself is now subject to police investigation, and any further comment at this stage would be superfluous. However, there is need to discuss on a national level what this latest violent incident says about our national commitment to law enforcement in general, and nature protection in particular.
The questions we should be asking ourselves at this stage are not so much about the identity of the culprit, but rather: are the local forces of law and order well enough equipped to handle what is fast becoming an apparent surfeit of environment-related crime?
At face value, the answer appears to be a clear no. Leaving aside the repeated, predictable and preventable attacks on the same target, we have also seen in the past years an astonishing apathy on the part of the government to invest the necessary resources where they matter most.
It seems there is always an abundance of funding available for unnecessary initiatives in this country: anything from a new House of Parliament costing €80 million, to expensive Environmental Impact Assessment studies to justify wildly ambitious proposals such as deep-sea windfarms, to name but two.
But when it comes to the very barest of essentials for a country to even exist – for instance, to adequately equip our police force to handle the type of commitments its members have to face in the course of their duties – then suddenly, there never seems to be any money at all.
For instance: under pressure from the European Court of Justice, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi last month announced that the spring hunting season would not open again this year. This is excellent news in itself; but unless such statements are backed up by the allocation of resources to guarantee adequate enforcement, Dr Gonzi may as well allow spring hunting to continue unimpeded.
Needless to say, no such allocation of resources was forthcoming. Incredible as this may seem, the current number of ALE officers to patrol the islands has not increased in any meaningful way in the past decade. There are currently fewer than 30 full-time officers responsible for the surveillance of the entire archipelago: a number which tends in practice to decrease, as not all these officers will be in service at the same time.
Thirty officers, no matter how brave and determined, simply cannot be expected to police the entire countryside unaided. Their number would be insufficient to carry out this task even without the presence of hunters to monitor. When one considers that Malta is home to anywhere up to 20,000 hunters, the situation suddenly starts looking ridiculous.
Apart from the sheer mismatch in numbers, there is also the issue of equipment. Recently, a documentary about hunting in Malta revealed that if the ALE now have any scopes and binoculars at all, it is only because of individual donations by well-meaning members of the public. It is scarcely credible that an entire unit would be allocated to such a daunting task – monitoring the activities of 20,000 individuals, many of whom carry guns – without being given so much as a pair of binoculars to work with.
And yet, the same 30 ALE offers are expected to confront armed (and sometimes agitated) men, often accompanied by dogs, out in the open; while they themselves carry no weapons, and are equipped only with the same paraphernalia given to any other policeman in an urban environment.
Bearing in mind that the constraints of investigating crimes in rural areas are completely unlike those of urban crimes – and that what we are dealing with is a specialised new area of law enforcement, which has its own unique requirements – the individual members of the ALE themselves deserve nothing but the highest commendation for their extraordinary efforts.
But the situation is untenable. In view of these repeated, cowardly attacks – carried out with apparent impunity by people who are evidently unafraid of any consequences – the government can no longer shirk its responsibilities to seriously beef up the Administrative Law Enforcement agency once and for all... or better still, to create a entirely new unit geared specifically to the task of environmental protection and the investigation of rural crimes.
The way things appear to be going, however, it seems another spring migration season will have come and gone without any increase in resources for the ALE: which in turn means we can expect a repeat performance of this year’s excesses in 2010, just as we have already seen a repeat of last year’s in 2009.
This is clearly not a serious way to go about environment protection: still less when the Prime Minister himself assumed full responsibility for the environment over a year ago.
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