Between the saying and the doing
The heading reads better in its original Italian, than in English: “Dal dire al fare C’e’ un gran bel mare” ‘Between the saying and the doing there’s a big wide sea’
ngrima@independent.com.mt
Iwas reminded of this on Friday when I watched a part of Xarabank and saw Minister Carmelo Abela’s evident discomfiture. Let me give a sort of potted history. One remembers Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s rash declaration about ‘push backs’ and the order to prepare a plane to take back some migrants. That was at the beginning of his term when he thought he could implement a sub-text that was not present, but then never completely absent, in the Labour manifesto.
All hell broke loose and the ‘push back’ attempt was aborted. But it never disappeared from the collective memory or a section of the population. I wouldn’t say it is being brought out of mothballs by the approaching general election, though that is not far from my mind, but at the same time there have been, of course, developments in Europe.
The EU has never given up completely on the idea of trying to curb the immigrant wave by coming to an agreement with some African countries that cannot be said to be in a state of war or at least civic unrest by paying them to take back migrants from their country.
That was and remains one of the suggestions made in Brussels to try and reduce the number of migrants, the other being the equally improbable idea of creating holding centres in third countries, such as Libya (Imagine!)
In fact, some repatriation has begun in Europe. Germany and Austria have carried out some repatriations and Italy was reported to have done so but did things, if a report is to be believed, in a ham-fisted manner:
From EBL News last September: “Italy has started a ‘Nazistyle’ policy of mass migrant repatriations to Sudan based on a secret police cooperation deal, in flagrant breach of international law, human rights groups said on Tuesday.
“Last month, Italian police stopped about 50 irregular migrants from Sudan at Ventimiglia, a town on the border with France. They were put in a European Union-funded hotspot detention centre and 48 of them were flown back to Khartoum within a matter of days.
“We are returning people to genocidal governments,” the director of Amnesty International’s Italian branch, Gianni Rufini, said in Rome. “It’s a bit like having about 50 German Jews in 1943 and sending them back to Germany,” he added.
Rufini spoke at a press conference in the Italian Senate in Rome organized by Tavolo Nazionale Asilo, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that deal with migration issues and criticise restrictive border policies.
Filippo Miraglia from ARCI, another speaker at the event, qualified Italian authorities’ actions as “Nazi-style”.
Rufini and others said Sudan cannot be considered a safe country for migrant returns because its president, Omar alBashir, is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which had him indicted on genocide charges.
At the press conference, the NGOs publicized the story of a man from Darfur who, along with six others, fortuitously avoided repatriation because the plane from Italy did not have enough seats. He was then approached by a lawyer who helped him obtain refugee protection.
According to the man, whose name was not released, he and his peers were made to travel for days on a bus to southern Italy, made to sleep in tents in Taranto, driven back to Milan for identification by a Sudanese embassy official, and then taken to Turin airport.
“I understand the protests, but we have to repatriate irregulars,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said earlier this month, defending the legitimacy of the expulsions and promising to “go even harder” on them.
The Italy-Sudan police agreement that allowed the migrants’ return was signed in early August. Salvatore Fachile, a migration rights lawyer, dismissed it as “totally illegitimate” and called on the government to lift confidentiality clauses on them.
Fachile also said he would try to challenge the repatriations before the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2012 already condemned Italy for illegally returning to Libya migrants intercepted in high seas.”
Malta had already tried repatriation once, with disastrous results, under the PN government, repatriating people to an area it was told was safe, only to learn later that the returnees were immediately thrown into prison, some tortured and some even killed.
About a month ago, a group of migrants from Mali were rounded up and detained in Hal Far. Controversies erupted: there were children among them who were born in Malta. No, Minister Abela said, there were no children among the twenty-something who had been detained. Others claimed there were women in the group but again the minister denied this.
Mali is a country at peace yet Xarabank produced a man from Mali who has been in Malta 14 years, speaks passable Maltese, who argued his life would still be in danger if he were repatriated back to his own country. This man is not among the detainees.
Mr Abela’s discomfiture was clear: at first he even seemed to avoid eye-contact with the man. Even greater was the discomfiture of George the Gram man, who recently spoke at a Patrijotti meeting in Msida, but who, faced by this migrant, spoke in favour of repatriation but excluded the man in front of him.
‘Between the saying and the doing there’s a big wide sea’
It is clear the repatriation effort must be honed further and made perfectly legal, but it is also clear that the pressure of migrants on European countries is growing. The way it is being done, by country of origin, seems the right way to sift economic migrants from asylum seekers who left their country to escape war or persecution. There could be, I suggest, other ways of doing things, maybe based on assimilation, adapting to the adopted country, becoming law-observing citizens and contributing to the country’s economic growth.
But I am all for the repatriation/pushback option for those who deal in drugs, who do not work, and who show no sign of wanting to become good citizens.