Humanitarian crisis

Day by day, it is becoming clear that our 'traditional' generosity and charitable nature is skin-deep. Scratch our surface and green oozes out. I am not putting myself above everybody else; I am certainly nowhere as generous or charitable as I should be.

But I am aware of it, and at least I do not envy others, not even when they are much better off, and especially when they are worse off!

Some of the reasons I have been hearing from people about the illegal immigration crisis are: "We have to work to buy clothes and mobile phones, 'these people' are getting all this for free!"

Now if you had to imply to any of the people making these comments that they accept charity, they would probably jump down your throat and say they "do not need it, thank you very much!" So why resent those who do?

What does being charitable actually mean? Do we know? Is it just picking up a phone at Christmas and donating money?

On the one hand the complainers moan that 'these people' are taking their jobs, i.e., they should not be working, yet they also complain if NGOs give them clothing and shelter. I am not sure whether they are actually given mobile phones.

How can you fend for yourself if you are denied work? "They are jumping the housing and hospital queues" is another complaint.

It is untrue that they are jumping housing queues. First of all, according to the Minister for Social Solidarity, Dolores Cristina (the most popular minister, according to last Sunday's MaltaToday survey) only people with refugee status (i.e. legal) can apply for housing.

Secondly, they have to have lived here for a year and fulfil the necessary requirements. Thirdly, only few refugees have applied. Most of the applications are from those married to Maltese citizens.

I got the same response from Marisa Micallef at the Housing Authority.

As to the hospital, of course it is frustrating to be waiting and see people not having to wait. But it is not the immigrants who are doing the queue-jumping; it is the army and police officers accompanying them. The reason is that having an army or police officer waiting costs all of us money.

The only alternative is to deny the immigrants health care. Now if that is what those who are proclaiming they are not racists and are Christian want, then I am afraid their words are worse than shallow, they are empty.

We donate money to people in Africa but we do not like Africans, some of us actually hate them. So why all the hypocrisy?

Last week I mentioned that the philosophies being expounded whereby human rights are sidetracked to "protect national interests" filled me with dread, because that kind of thinking led to apartheid in South Africa and Nazism in Germany.

It did not take long for my point to be proved. Twenty-five-year-old Rita Spiteri told The Times, after the ANR demonstration, in which she participated on Monday: "I don't like travelling on the same bus with these people".

And Maria Borg, 56, said: "I hate them and I feel scared of them". Then we had Salvu Sammut, the president of the GWU, no less, justifying his speech at the GWU conference on Wednesday - where he said Malta may be "forced to take measures which were not necessarily just and humane to solve the immigration crisis" - by stating that in previous articles he had written that "the economic situation and political disillusionment in Malta today resembled that of Germany in the 1920s when Hitler's rightist ideology became increasingly popular".

Actually Hitler gained popularity in the 1930s, and one cannot compare the economic and political situation in Germany in the Twenties and Thirties with Malta today. There was a lot more happening in the Weimar Republic. And unemployment stood at around four million in Germany in the 1930s.

Besides, Hitler was no sophist. He was upfront with his racist philosophy. He promoted the superiority of the Aryan race and anti-Semitism, which appealed to a deeply rooted anti-Semitism common to all Christian countries in Europe at the time.

The Jews were not taking the Germans' jobs - they were businessmen, entrepreneurs, professionals and bankers. Of course there were also working class Jews, but really the venom was originally directed at the successful and the intellectual.

As I read the papers on Tuesday I still could not fathom what exactly was the point of the demonstration, in Valletta on Monday. The organisers might have said the intentions were not racist, but certainly the comments heard from people who attended, and Normal Lowell's attendance and seal of approval, had all the racist ingredients. So is the comment "We don't want a multicultural society".

According to The Malta Independent, ANR national secretary Philip Beattie "had words of praise for the government, which had taken various measures to tackle the problem". So why demonstrate? To scare the immigrants?

As I wrote last week, the ANR thinking is confused, and the boys behind it are giving out conflicting messages.

Now Martin De Giorgio has the cheek to complain in a letter to The Times on Thusday that "ANR is being denied the coverage they deserve". I would have thought they have got more coverage then they deserve.

Last Sunday, Philip Beattie got three columns of The Sunday Times editorial page (the most important page in the paper) with a continuation on another page. Also on Sunday, his photo was on MaltaToday's front page and another photo of him took up nearly half a page of a double page spread interview.

Employers who are exploiting the situation seem to be on Beattie's hit list. He got that one right. But then would it not make more sense to picket outside these employers' businesses, or lobby the Employers Association.

On Monday, the day of their demonstration, Martin De Giorgio's photo graced The Times front page to advertise a full-page interview with him again on a prominent page.

On Tuesday the ANR demonstration got The Times middle spread with photos of De Giorgio, Beattie and Paul Salomone. I would have thought that for 'Johnny-come-lately' and his mates that is pretty good coverage.

And it overshadowed by far the column spaces in letters to the editor criticising the ANR.

"We don't want to become the toilet of the Mediterranean", was Beattie's pièce de résistance, apparently greeted with "deafening applause". If that is not a racist comment, inciting hatred, I don't know what is. It also showed the intellectual level of the ANR.

Besides, the illegal immigrant crisis is not just hitting Malta. Despite what some of us think, the world does not revolve around us. Spain and Italy are also coping with the influx and are putting pressure on Europe for action to be taken.

It is recognised that the way to deal with the problem is to go to the root and deal with the poverty, tyranny and corruption the illegal immigrants are running away from, and clamp down on human trafficking.

But until that problem is dealt with, the police and the armed forces are at the cutting edge of the issue. Although I had criticised the way the army had dealt with a demonstration at the Safi Barracks almost a year ago, and they did behave badly, I had also commented that they are under tremendous pressure, and that whoever ordered their intervention should have been held responsible.

The soldiers are trained for combat and the police for crowd control, neither bodies are trained in social work, especially refugee social work, which is specialised. So that alone is waiting for a bomb to go off.

We do not even have enough social workers to deal with our own needs, so it is not surprising that some of the detainees crack and also behave badly. These are traumatised people.

Our NGOs mean well, but again they do not have the proper training and expertise to be able to make the illegal immigrants understand that venting their spleen on the men looking after them is counter productive.

Especially, since these same soldiers have had to give up their own sleeping quarters and beds to the detainees and are also having to endure hardship.

An army barracks is certainly not the right venue for detainees. I believe that we are getting funds from Europe to help with this.

And certainly organisations like the Red Cross should send over experienced volunteers to train our own volunteers on how to deal with the problem.

Our NGOs do offer clothing and sympathy, but I doubt that any of them have had direct experience of dealing with refugees cooped up in an alien environment, until now.

If that is what John McNulty meant when he asked the international NGOs to get involved, I agree.

phansen@timesofmalta.com