A violent brawl among dozens of people in Ħamrun has prompted the local council and members of the Syrian community to reach an agreement on working together to avoid similar incidents.

Taleb Zaidan, president of the NGO Syrian Solidarity in Malta, met with Ħamrun mayor Christian Sammut on Friday to discuss how they can collaborate.

During the meeting, Zaidan informed him that the NGO had called in those involved in the August 18 fight to warn them that their behaviour had reflected badly on the whole Syrian community currently in Malta.

Ħamrun mayor Christian Sammut.

And members of the Syrian community have volunteered to carry out regeneration works in the town – such as plastering, painting and tree planting – as a sign of solidarity with the people.

Speaking afterwards, both Zaidan and Sammut stressed that people should not judge an entire community due to the bad behaviour of a handful of people.

“We all need to respect each other. Most Syrians are good people,” Sammut said.

“Just because a few were in a fight, we can’t generalise... this also applies to our locality. We have been working hard to regenerate Ħamrun and such incidents shed a bad light on our locality,” he noted, adding that fights happen in many other towns and villages across the country.

Days after the brawl, which started with an argument between two Syrian men and grew into a fight involving some 25 people, there were calls led by the PN’s Joe Giglio and Alex Borg to immediately deport foreigners convicted of breaking the law.

However, both PN leader Bernard Grech and Prime Minister Robert Abela have since appealed for people to avoid pitting foreigners against Maltese when discussing law and order issues.

Brawlers told off by community

During the meeting, Zaidan, who was accompanied by other members of the NGO Syrian Solidarity in Malta, assured Sammut that he was doing all he could to ensure that those people involved in the fight understood that this was not acceptable.

“We called them in for a meeting. We explained to them that this is not how they should be behaving and that their actions shed a bad light on the Syrian community in Malta,” Zaidan said.

Syrian community leader Taleb Zaidan: 'Just because one Syrian did something wrong, it does not make us all bad'.

The community now planned to hold regular meetings with its members to drill in the message and provide them with support, he added.

Mayor meets with prime minister

Meanwhile Sammut said that, in a recent meeting with the prime minister, he discussed issues that impacted Ħamrun as well as other localities.

These included the need for all-round enforcement, such as to control unlicensed shops and to have more police patrols.

The Syrian community has been fighting the stigma.

In an interview with Times of Malta in July, Zaidan spoke about how Syrian workers experienced unjustified prejudice by employers who refuse to work with them out of fear they may “cause trouble”.

“Whenever a Syrian person is charged in court, some sections of the media immediately splash the label ‘Syrian’ in the headline,” he had said.

“That word causes a lot of problems for our community even though the person is innocent until proven guilty.

“Just because one Syrian did something wrong, it does not make us all bad.”

Zaidan said that, since the war broke out in his country,  the number of Syrians here increased from a few hundreds to about 6,500.

Syria has been engulfed in a civil conflict since 2011, generating the forced displacement of millions of people, the majority of whom remain in neighbouring countries.