“We must make their lives as arduous as possible.”

(Norman Lowell, Ħal Safi meeting, 2005)

As you read this, the Moviment Patrijotti Maltin will be getting ready to protest in Marsa against lawless misbehaviour by migrants. They’ve spent the last couple of weeks rabble-rousing locals and telling them that their town is on course to social collapse. There are no prizes for guessing which colour of migrant displeases the patriots and their allies the most.

That’s the easy bit. Last Tuesday, police officers in black bully-boy uniforms descended on Marsa by the squad. The point of the operation seems to have been a general public harassment. Many people were stopped and ordered to produce their papers. The paperless were rounded up. Vendors and other undesirables were cleared off the streets.

And still that’s the easy bit. The part that ought to have shocked anyone who can spell ‘civilisation’ is that the police operation targeted anyone who was doing anything, as long as they were black. There is no way around it – the newspaper and television reports clearly showed police officers harassing black people and black people alone.

The main argument against Turkey joining the EU has always been that civil rights in that country happen to be a mess. I wonder what the EU plans to do with a member state that practises brazen institutional racism at the highest level.

Hyperbole? Let’s leave aside the thuggish, ignorant, uneducated and inarticulate racists and xenophobes who populate the Moviment Patrijotti Maltin. Like all citizens, they have a right to protest about anything them deem unacceptable. If the sight of black skin riles them, so be it.

Institutional racism by government and its agents is another matter altogether. Assuming for the sake of argument that Marsa has become a hotbed of crime, the proper government response would be to increase the presence of police on the streets. They would wear uniforms that didn’t make them look like squadristi, and they would go about seeing to those who broke the law, irrespective of the colour of their skin.

What happened last Tuesday was different. There are two reasons why it was an act of outright racism. The first is the more obvious: the police specifically targeted black people. None were committing a crime when they were accosted, nor did they look suspicious. Or rather they did, simply because they were black. The crime of those who were asked to produce papers was one of presence.

The British writer Benjamin Zephaniah has described first hand exactly the same situation in the Birmingham of his youth. In the 1970s, young men of colour would be harassed by the police for no reason other than their presence on the streets. That pigheaded approach led to widespread and serious riots in 1981.

The police specifically targeted black people. None were committing a crime when they were accosted, nor did they look suspicious

Anyone in Britain who has their screws in place will admit that, looking back, the kind of policing described by Zephaniah was outrageously racist and a recipe for disaster. Our Police Commissioner could do worse than make some space at headquarters for a library.

Second, timing. A first-year undergraduate in criminology will tell you that community policing works best when it is nonintrusive, fair and sustained. Raids, on the other hand, are properly the stuff of emergency situations. I wouldn’t classify a handful of people on a pavement roasting kebabs and chatting as a major and imminent threat to the national security. So much for the men in black and their Land Rovers, sunglasses, dogs and weapons.

It’s hard not to conclude that the timing of the raid was directly linked to today’s protest. The mayor of Marsa has told a newspaper that the two had nothing whatsoever to do with one other, and that the timing was a coincidence. Thing is, how would he know? Is he privy to police decisions on operations?

The president of the Local Councils Association, Mario Fava, is worth quoting in full: “We found out residents were organising a protest on Sunday and our fear, which was reciprocated by the government, was that extreme elements were going to ride the waves of residents’ genuine concerns so as to push forward their agenda.”

Fava, then, thinks that the raid had everything to do with the protest. He should know, because he attended the meeting between government and residents’ associations that took place directly before the raid.

I wish I could bring myself to laugh at the logic of government pre-empting a racist protest by means of a racist police operation. Timing is of the essence here. A raid that is timed to coincide with a patrijotti xenophobic and racist protest is xenophobic and racist by association, especially when it targets black people.

Tragically, it also ends up producing more of the same. Black people living in Malta are marginalised enough as is. The last thing they need is media images that associate them with crime (because the police do not normally accost people for no reason) and the waves of online invective they spawn.

Besides, such clueless policing effectively legitimates the ‘concerns’ of xenophobes and racists, especially when it is timed to coincide with a patrijotti protest. I don’t blame those who, presented with the sight of an army in Marsa, begin to wonder if the racists might have a point after all.

The only thing these pogroms achieve is to make the lives of black people miserable for a while at a time. (Readers will recall another raid in Marsa a couple of months ago.) They’re a textbook case of how governments pander to the basest sentiments by getting strongest with the weakest.

mafalzon@hotmail.com