Orwell couldn’t have made it up. Last Wednesday, some bright spark decided that Marsa was a major threat to law and order. Squads of police swooped down on the place and rounded up all those who looked like migrants and who were waiting for work on the thoroughfare. Eighty-four people were hauled off to the police headquarters, where their papers were checked. All were released a short while later.
It’s truly shocking that anyone should find this remotely acceptable. The Home Affairs Minister does. He said that the police should be conducting such raids more regularly. I haven’t so far heard anything from the Opposition, and can only assume that they too are happy with what happened. With the exception of a few NGOs, in fact, it’s smiles all round.
Wednesday’s roundup was an act of harassment, humiliation and violence by the State. That it involved a group of people singled out for their skin colour makes it all the more despicable, and consequential in the long term.
In a sense, the raid was a long time in the making. We know from the Sheehan tapes (‘ħdejn il-Madonna tas-suwed’, lit. ‘near the Madonna of the blacks’) about the disdain shown by some police officers towards black people waiting for work at Marsa. In 2015, the Prime Minister said that the place “looked like something from the Third World”.
A few days before Wednesday’s raid, it was the turn of Opposition MPs. In Parliament, Beppe Fenech Adami – shadow Home Affairs Minister, former anti-divorce crusader and values peddler generally – spoke at length about the hardships endured by people of Marsa, who had to bear “all those migrants in their midst”. For his part, Ċensu Galea reportedly said that residents of Marsaxlokk and Birżebbuġa feel “frustrated at the presence of such a large number of migrants wandering about in their communities”.
It is hard not to see the streak of prejudice that runs through all this. I drive through Marsa every day and often take a detour past the open centre. I have so far failed to feel frustrated at the presence of migrants, nor do I think the situation looks like the Third World (save for the potholes and general shabbiness, which has nothing to do with migrants).
Wednesday’s roundup was an act of harrassment, humiliation and violence by the State
Objectively, I see men walking in and out of the open centre and the building adjacent to it (the old Tiger Bar). Some hang around in small groups and chat, and one enterprising fellow has taken to selling snacks cooked on a charcoal grill. I also see people, up to several dozen at a time, waiting for work at the side of the road.
I don’t see how any of this is different to daily life outside a typical school, workplace or church. Much the same can be seen every morning outside the ST factory in Kirkop, for example. Men and women hurry to and from work. Some stop for a chat, others to buy pastizzi or mqaret from the vendors. Nothing remotely Third World or menacing about a scene Lowry would have loved to paint.
The people waiting for work at the side of the thoroughfare in Marsa are no more a threat to national security than the people waiting for buses. The only difference is that it is thought proper that bus stops should exist that offer some kind of shelter from the elements. Unlike bus passengers and karozzin horses, migrants waiting for work are thought not to be affected by sun or rain.
Human rights NGO Aditus foundation – who are based in Marsa and don’t seem to endure any particular hardships – described Wednesday’s raid as an exercise in racial profiling. As they put it, it betrayed a “racialised approach further fuelling exclusion, marginalisation and division”. Besides, “the climate intentionally created over the past months is one of intimidation, fear and insecurity”.
Spot on, on three counts. First, it is clear that the only problem with the migrants’ presence at Marsa is their skin colour. Put bluntly, to be black is to be seen as a threat to the economy, to law and order, and to much else. Even if the people at Marsa behave exactly the same way as the ST workers in Kirkop, their presence makes Marsa look like the Third World.
The racial profiling charge follows. No amount of sugar-coating and disclaimers by the minister will convince me that what happened on Wednesday wasn’t a strike on the suwed tal-Marsa. I’d love to know how the police identified migrants in the field before hauling them off to Floriana for interrogation. No prizes for guessing, but thank heavens Obama wasn’t out jogging in Marsa that morning. The diplomatic fallout would have been catastrophic.
Second, the consequences of such racial profiling are invariably tragic in the long term. Aditus mentioned exclusion, marginalisation and division, and they’re right. Absolutely nothing good will ever come out of picking on people for reasons like skin colour.
Minister Abela could do worse than look up Operation Swamp, in which police in Brixton stopped and searched more than 1,000 people in six days in 1981. In principle the idea was to cut crime, but the searches targeted black people in particular. The outcome was a series of riots that left hundreds of people injured and cost millions in damage to property. Thirty-five years on, the social scars of the Brixton riots have not quite gone away.
There’s a third reason why what happened on Wednesday was wrong. Mr Abela can quote the law and defend his henchmen all he wants, but it is simply not acceptable for the police to accost people in the street who are minding their own business. Whether or not it is lawful makes little difference – the point is that it is synonymous with a police state.
It is even less acceptable to proceed to haul them off for interrogation. Humiliation aside, it’s disruption of the first order. The people who were picked up in Marsa had lives to lead, work schedules to meet and mouths to feed. How exactly was it alright to bundle them into vans and waste hours of their time?
Maybe the Prime Minister was right after all. Third World countries did not typically enjoy outstanding human rights records.
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