Safi - inhuman and degrading treatment

Ever since my trip to Safi Barracks, the cold I detest has taken on a new meaning. Every passing minute since I have been there the cold has been a reminder that there are hundreds of people only minutes away from me who have been standing in the cold, for months. Day and night they have been out in the open.

The accommodation provided is a number of tents of which at least one is ripped open from top to bottom and a huge Nissen hut designed to house stores or possibly an aircraft. Its "windows" are gaping great holes in the roof meekly obstructed by sheets of cardboard. The floor is damp mud. In both cases the shelter provided would not be deemed adequate for the housing of animals.

The giant Nissen dormitory has a very long row of bunk beds curiously draped in sheets and blankets so that the lower bunk has a quaint four-poster arrangement. It is the only privacy accorded to the women in the immense human pen housing both sexes and a wide variety of cultures and ethnic groups.

It took an extraordinary effort to listen to the various pleas and complaints of the immigrants without turning on the officers who had accompanied me there. This was not a matter of failing to have one's buttons properly polished on parade. My feelings would have started a riot. I listened and suppressed my internal riot.

Only minutes before I had visited a vastly overcrowded building draped in chain-link fencing. I had found that first visit appalling. Curiously the army officers enquired whether I wanted to go inside. Did they imagine that I had visited a zoo? It occurred to me that the idea of speaking to the detainees was novel for a visitor to Safi Barracks.

The crowd of men packed in the narrow corridor had no advance warning of my visit yet within minutes a reception committee was formed. They invited me into one of the dormitories and I was asked to sit on the remains of a tube frame chair. We talked and talked. In French, in English they told me their stories, of their needs, of their craving for information, for justice, for the most basic decency.

They wanted to know what was happening to them. Many had been rescued from sinking boats to be left for months in the overcrowded prison without being interviewed let alone informed of their fate. When interviews did take place months after their arrival, it took further months to discover what the outcome had been. Sometimes they received notice that they were to be shipped back to the hell they had escaped from with no reason attached to the order. They had come from some of the world's least noticed wars in the Congo and in West Africa only to slide back there in a gargantuan game of snakes and ladders across Africa and the Mediterranean in very slow motion.

I had sat for 30 minutes with them when it sank in that the crutches and the sling that two of my interlocutors had were the result of the January 13 incidents. They had wanted to contact the outside world. And now they were speaking to it. They had concentrated on describing their situation rather than on recriminations about broken bones and the violation of their rights to freedom of expression. It was what they had intended to do on January 13.

It was something of a struggle for me to make my own inquiry because they had other things to say and did not know when they would get another chance to tell them to anyone. I insisted. They had broken no gate. They had disobeyed an order to return to barracks but had not made any resistance. They had asked to speak to the press, to the UNHCR, to NGOs and had come to terms with an army officer to leave a delegation of five men by the chain-link fence when the outside world arrived to speak to them. It took some time to decide which five men would remain. The people they wanted to speak to had not yet arrived when the army charged and beat them into stretcher cases.

I visited the man whose jaw was broken. He was in a Safi Barracks box-room when I saw him. He was the last man I expected to meet there. His face was swollen and he could not speak. He claims to be Palestinian. The army expects that he is Egyptian. For me he is a human being and he should not be at Safi, not even in first class Safi accommodation. Is he still there now?

At that point I thought that I had seen enough yet within minutes I was made to realise that the men packed like sardines in the chain-link cage were in luxury compared to others. The outdoor "accommodation" was nothing short of shocking. The toilet arrangements have to be seen and smelt to be believed. Hundreds of people have nothing but three stone stalls and four toilets between them. The state of them beggars belief. Hot water is provided by a pathetic row of electric water heaters. To provide their womenfolk with some warmth the detainees have improvised hot water bottles made of mineral water bottles which are filled from a jerry can heated by leading two wires directly from a mains switch.

What if someone was electrocuted? How would his or her passing from this world be noted?

The army provided me with figures of the detainees held in the different blocks and the Commissioner of Police noted that this was departmental information which had not been supplied to Gavin Gulia. Was he afraid that Dr Gulia would complain that he had been ill-treated? My concern was that the lists held no names, only ciphers. The detainees had said they had been unable to contact their families since they had arrived. They had already vanished off the face of the earth.

We had treated our prisoners-of-war much better. The Nazis and the Fascists who had bombed the living daylights out of this country were allowed Red Cross packages, mail and had the comfort of knowing that their families knew of their survival. The people in Safi are in the condition of kidnap victims, worse than convicted criminals, worse than our wartime enemies.

The day after my visit to Safi, Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg issued a press statement recording his visit to this place of shame and promising improvements. It is not enough. The present state of affairs must be documented. The Maltese people must know now what is being done in their name and they must know now what these improvements are. Are there still hundreds of people going from black to blue in the Safi freeze camp? What has he really done other than attempt to cover his backside with words?

In the past few days I have been glad to note that a number of politicians have spoken up against racism: Dolores Cristina, Michael Asciak, Edwin Vassallo and Joe Abela. I am very, very glad that they have found their voices too. They have taken the initiative from their silent colleagues. Are mute politicians afraid of losing an army vote, a racist's vote, of a party reprimand?

It has been left to the Nationalist Party to pose as upright anti-racists in the media. They have invited the outraged to award them hero status for facing the insults of racists. What nonsense. They have allowed racism to take hold by doing nothing at all for months and months. Our own racist scum have spoken and written, our politicians in office have been responsible for the camps. They have acted, they have done the deeds or omitted to do them. They will not allow them to be documented by the press because they would become political pariahs across Europe. They have shamed us as a nation.

In the past months we have had the government complaining about the cost of detention. We have heard government spokesmen challenge the Jesuit Refugee Service and the Church to take over responsibility for accommodating the detainees. The government has provided fuel to the racists. In the minds of the ignorant every detainee has come to cost the country Lm80 per week, significantly more than the minimum wage. It simply cannot be true.

If it were true somebody should be sacked for providing inhuman and degrading treatment at an exorbitant price. How much could it possibly cost to feed anyone the diet of chicken and rice which detainees at Safi have had for months on end? The accommodation is worthless and is a leftover from the British forces. The electricity and water is insignificant. The costs are incurred in guarding and deporting prisoners, administrative costs, perhaps the judicial costs. The government salaries are paid anyway. They are not an additional cost. It is a loss of manpower which could be utilised otherwise, an opportunity cost, maybe. We should have been very wary of inflating it all in people's minds. It is a major cause of the racism.

The costs of deportation are very significant. What has been done to reduce them through collaboration on an EU level? Malta is on the flight path of every plane heading from Europe to repatriation destinations for those who do not qualify for legal protection. Are we blaming every immigrant, also those who qualify for asylum according to our laws, for the cost of our inefficiency? What have we done to pressure the EU to make repatriation safe?

If instead of being tortured by the enforced inactivity, detainees were allowed to earn their keep, the public burden would be far less. They want to work and they are not picky. The cost of guarding them would also be eliminated. There would be a danger of racist incidents and of the further strengthening of ex-Malta human trafficking, dangers in the balance against the reality of inhuman and degrading treatment.

The cold still gets to my bones. What has the government done since last week? Is the man with the broken face still moaning at Safi? Can we see the pictures? When will the press have access to detention centres? What mechanisms of independent oversight do we have in place? Have we decided that we will stop blaming the Church for failing to do the government's duty?

Who will accept political responsibility for the disaster so far? Is this yet another example of the absolute lack of political accountability in this country? The inquiry should not be just about the beatings but about the revolting conditions of detention. If it is not within Judge Franco Depasquale's remit he has been set up as a political whitewasher. He should have the power to document the situation and shock us out of our lethargy. He should provide us with an audiovisual record to persuade us never again to permit the establishment of anything like a mini-Auschwitz on our soil.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt